Conjured

Laying there with the monkey and with my own thoughts and memories, I thought about Zach too. Zach had told the truth, as always: who I was wasn’t who I’d become. And now that the trial was over, I didn’t have to stay this way anymore.

If I was going to die, I wanted at least to die as myself, not as who I was made to be.

Closing my eyes, I pictured myself as the girl that I’d become, the one that Zach knew. I let the magic run through me, shaping me, transforming me. I chose my face, my hair, and my green eyes. And then I lay on the bed and let the vision sweep over me.

* * *

The Storyteller and the Magician sit on either side of me. Each holds one of my cloth hands. There are stars spread over the sky, and a pale-gray cloud covers half the moon. The Ferris wheel is silhouetted against the sky. It’s motionless.

“I feel old,” the Magician says.

The Storyteller kneads my cotton knuckles with her gnarled fingers. I think it calms her. “Do you want to stop?” she asks him.

He sighs. “Some days, yes.”

“The audience threw roses,” the Storyteller says. “You changed them into birds. Rose birds whose perfume smell wafted through the tent every time they flapped their wings.”

The Magician smiles. “That was lovely.”

“It was,” she says.

They fall silent.

I think it would be nice to talk. Straining, I stretch my mouth. The threads that tie my mouth strain. I press my fabric lips together, and the threads lie limp. I try to open my mouth again.

“You add beauty to the world,” the Storyteller says. “People need that. They come into your tent expecting a trick, half wanting to see a fraud and half wanting to believe. You show them magic, and they leave full of wonder.”

“Sometimes I feel that it’s not enough.”

The Storyteller drops my hand and rises. She holds out her hand to him. “Make me something beautiful.” He leans toward me, breathes in, and then takes her hand. As he rises, green sprouts burst out of the ground. They shoot upward and wrap around the tent poles. Buds blossom and then open into burgundy roses. A trickle of water falls over the side of the wagon, forming a pool with water lilies.

Holding each other close, the Magician and the Storyteller dance.

I want to dance too. I want to tell them so. I push my lips together and wiggle them side to side, loosening the threads.

As they sway and spin to the sound of crickets and the night breeze, the Storyteller says, “Once upon a time, there was an empty boy, and the emptiness ate him inside until one day, he met a girl who knew how to fill him …”

I stretch my mouth again, and the threads snap one after another.

Hearing the snaps, the Storyteller and the Magician stop and look at me. They study my cloth face and button eyes. “Some would see her as an abomination,” the Magician says.

“Is that what you see?” the Storyteller asks.