Whispered Magics Read Free Page A

Alisha sat down neatly on the floor next to me,
cross-legged, and leaned against my arm, just as she had when she was a
toddler. “We didn’t tell you because we knew you’d say no. Not to be mean. But
out of grownup worry.”
    “We just want to keep you safe,” I said.
    She turned her face to look up at me, her eyes the color of
Rick’s eyes, their shape so like my mother’s. “And we wanted to keep you safe.”
    “Ignorance is not real safety,” I pointed out. “It’s the mere
illusion of safety.”
    Alisha gave me an unrepentant grin. “How many times have you
said about us, they’re safer not knowing ?”
she retorted, and then she added,” That’s why we always go at midnight, and
we’re only gone a couple of hours. We can do that because the time there
doesn’t work like here.”
    “But another world .
How can we set safety rules? We don’t know what happens.” I held her tightly
against me.
    “You send us to school,” Alisha said, pulling away just a
little, so she could look at me again. “You don’t know what happens there. Not
really.”
    I thought back to my own school days, and then thought of
recent media orgies, and felt my heart squeeze. “True. But we’re used to it.
And habit and custom are probably the strongest rules we know. Can we go with
you to the other world? Just to see it?” I asked.
    Alisha shook her head. “There’s a big spell. Prevents
grownups, because of this big war in the past. Only kids can cross over—not
even teenagers. One day we’ll be too old. I know you’ll be real sorry!”
    I tried to laugh. It wasn’t very successful, but we both
smiled anyway. “It’s not every set of parents who have kids who cross
worlds—you’ll have to give us time to get used to it.”
    She hugged me again, and flitted away to get dressed.
    o0o
    “R.J. has taken to telling me stories,” Rick said a few days
later. Not—quite—admitting anything, just offering me these stories instead of
me reading to him.”
    Only Lauren went about as it nothing were different,
everything were normal. Keeping the other world secret was important to her, so
we had to respect that and give her the space to keep it.
    o0o
    “Alisha told me more about magic,” I said that next week.
    The kids were gone again. A spectacular thunderstorm raged
like battling dragons outside. We didn’t even try to sleep. We sat in the
kitchen across from each other, hands cradling mugs of hot chocolate. Rick had
put marshmallows in it, and whipped cream, and just enough cinnamon to give off
a delicious scent.
    “Magic.” He shook his head.
    “The amazing thing is, it sounds a lot like the basic
principles of engineering.”
    “I think R.J. has learned how to turn himself into a bird,”
Rick said, stirring the marshmallows round and round with his finger. “They fly
in a flock, and watch for the Grundles, who I guess have a bad case of
What’s-yours-is-mine as far as other kingdoms are concerned.” His smile faded,
and he shook his head. “Nothing will be the same again, Mary—we can’t even
pretend to be a normal family.”
    “Is anybody?” I asked. “I mean, really?”
    What is normal?
    We live in our houses and follow schedules and pick jobs that
are sensible and steady and keep the bills paid, but in my dreams I fly, as I
did when I was small.
    “The universe is still out there, just beyond the palm trees
and malls and freeways,” I said. “And the truth is we still don’t really know
the rules.”
    What we do know is that we love our children, will always love
them, until the stars have burned away to ash, and though parents are not
issued experience along with our babies’ birth certificates, we learn a little
wisdom and a lot of compromise as the children grow.
    Rick said slowly, “Well, I hope Lauren and her sword-swinging
princess pal are kicking some serious Grundle butt.”
    We remember how to laugh.

The Glass Slipper
    We’d just stepped off the school bus and were starting