The New Magic
-1-
The Revelation of Jonah McAllisterah
Copyright © 2021 by Landon Wark
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.
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Children at Play
The classroom was alive. Within its confines the industry of childhood churned out finger paintings, building block structures and Plasticine sculptures, perhaps not efficiently, but with innovation that would make any Capitalist blush. In the corner an in-room sandbox, surrounded by a skirt of thick sheet plastic, was dominated by the loudest and the strongest children, their hollers echoing off the concrete walls.
An exhausted teacher slumped in her desk, her thin mouth upturned. A travel mug stood in for the imaginary bottle clutched in her right hand. Her thin fingers rubbed her eyebrows and the faintest sigh escaped from her lips as a screaming gaggle ran past her desk. With a shuddering, begging voice she tried to catch their attention.
“Children, play nice. Children, play nice.”
The boy sat near the sandbox, along the very edge of the plastic sheet. Within the borders the yelling cacophony of his peers were shouting at each other, arguing over the correct structure of the tower they were building with blocks perched upon a foundation of sand. The boy's face furrowed around his brow as he looked over what they had built. Part of it was leaning precariously, threatening to topple the whole thing over. Even the most generous of block structure architects would have called it a design flaw. It glared out at him accusingly, a gaping wound in the fragile order of the classroom. If nothing was done about it the whole structure would collapse into the sand.
A brief mutter, words of nonsense that had survived his infanthood escaped his lips as the boy looked around at the other children.
For the most part they had left him alone with whatever toy he had managed to get his hands on. Another boy was rolling a tiny car around near him, but they could hardly be said to be playing together. He scanned the floor for a few stray bricks that might hold the section of the leaning tower of blocks in place.
The boy stood up and started moving over the outer edge of the plastic. His hands closed over the three nearest blocks as he stooped over. With steps as quiet as the transparent sheet would allow he approached the tower. At the same time he eyed the larger children who seemed distracted by a ball and a collection of sticks from a game he didn't quite understand. He bit on his lip. They were completely ignoring the teetering tower and their backs were turned.
The mutter continued.
The boy lowered himself into a crouch and began inching forward to the edge of the tower. He was aware of every sound that was produced by his feet on the plastic and of every sound of the shouting kids in the room. His heart beat wildly in his chest as he closed in on the edge of the box. Sweat began to form on the rim of his brow as he pieced together the three bricks he had liberated from the floor. He braced himself on the moist sand with his hand. With a lick of his lips he reached over and tried to lift the toppling section of the chaotic tower. He clenched his teeth and pressed in the comfortably smooth edges of his solution to the impending collapse.
“Hey!”
A strange force grabbed him by the fabric of his shirt and pulled him forward, placing him face first into the gritty wet sand that clung all over his new clothes. His mom would be pretty mad. He tried to pull himself up, his heart pounding with fear. Almost instantly a dark shape was standing over top of him like a great and terrible vulture.
“That’s mine,” a voice snarled as the foot of another first grader was planted on the boy’s back and forced him, face first, into the granular mud before moving up to the back of his skull and pushing him further into the loose earth.
He fought desperately to get free, twisting and turning under the oppressive boot. The sand parted as if opening its arms into an embrace that pulled him down farther. He couldn’t breathe. Already he could feel tears begin to form in his closed eyes, nurturing the gritty mud around him.
“That’s mine,” came the voice again.
By then there were cries of surprise, awe and joy from the others in the area. Though no louder than the cries that usually ran through the classroom there was a certain edge to them that seemed to lacerate.
The exhausted teacher looked up for a mere instant and then back down again, unable to see the source for an island counter in the way.
The boy tried to yell out, both from the physical and mental torture they were putting him through. Embarrassment and hatred ran through his mind like a pair of animals chasing each other. His hands slipped in the grit around him as they tried to push him back up. He battled to pull some sort of oxygen from the dark air. His hand clenched tightly around the softness of the bricks in his hand.
“You don’t touch my stuff!”
There was something else down there in the sand with him. It was not a person, nor was it one of the monsters he imagined lived in the terrible places of the world. It was less of another physical presence and more of a feeling that was down there. It had waited for him. It had waited for this exact moment. It was something that forgot the very reason he was there, that
