illusionists busking illegally, shimmering lights disintegrating as they run
plant mages tending tiny rooftop and windowbox gardens
elementary school kids learning basic sigils on the playground
wixen taking a while to key into the magic in new cities when they move
alchemists dealing on the side to support their experiments
middle schoolers making friendship talismans and amulets for everyone
numerologists who’ll do your math homework for $5 or divine your fortune for $10
kids mass-texting luck and speed spells when their parties get broken up by the cops
Hell yeah, let’s talk about magic.
Like elementary kids learning silly (or inappropriate) charms from each other on the bus, the same way we learned our first swear words. Clapping games across the bus aisle, but with spells instead of rhymes.
Worrying that your friend is getting into dark magic, but not knowing how to talk to them about it. Intervention programs for kids abusing hexes and runes, because magic has given them control over something for once in their life, and they’re starting to make some dangerous choices.
Psychic teachers knowing when you’re cheating. Knowing when you’re having trouble with homework. Or at home. Knowing when you need tutoring or an AP course because you’re just not being challenged or a different teaching method because you can’t process what you’re learning in class no matter how hard you try, and the teacher tells you it’s okay, they know. They know.
Magic graffiti. Graffiti in wild places, and graffiti that vanishes when certain people roll by like the police. Or graffiti that only appears when the police walk by to insult them. Murals. Swirling, living murals on the sides of buildings. Murals that—if you listen closely—can be heard, not just seen.
In the evenings, kids hiding out in someone’s backyard or an alley passing around a joint and casting minor illusions to watch while high.
Chalk artists making works that are so realistic, they come to life off of the sidewalk.
One man bands in the park, with instruments floating around playing themselves.
Punk concerts in empty lots with amped out music and lights, but noise-cancelling spells and illusion hide them in plain sight from anyone outside of the lot.
Mediums predicting people in need, and making sure to be there at just the right moment to lend them a helping hand. “You seem upset, do you need to talk?” “Oh, you’re a dollar short? No, don’t put the milk back; I’ll cover you.” “You really ought to try taking your resume to this store. Trust me.”
Necromancers in forensics speaking with the dead to solve homicides and cold cases. Living lie detectors as beat cops and detectives and DEA agents.
Strangely cheap five star food diners that bake actual love into their apple pie, and they always know your dietary restrictions without being told.
Service golems in various sizes and shapes, making sure their magic users aren’t crowded, get medical attention, go where they need to, etc. They don’t get distracted, they can be hollow to hold things like medications, and in rare instances, they seem to develop loving attachment to their users despite not being alive.
Little old landladies who dabble in witchcraft brewing homeopathic remedies for people in their apartment complex.
Street magic is an amazing concept.
Heck yes.
Cars with paintjobs covered in sigils, protecting them and others from harm.
Churches that are literal sanctuary, backed up with wards to prevent violence being done within their walls.
Practitioners of Sympathetic Magic using company logos to invoke the associated concepts – a nike tattoo makes you faster, something stamped with “Nokia” is more durable.
The old leylines don’t work, but the highways, train lines, water mains and high-tension cables do the trick.
Magic Conventions.
just. Magic Conventions.
All of this please.
There’s one street where magic doesn’t work right and everyone avoids it because “something happened there” no one knows what but you know you don’t go down that street.
If you were born there the city knows you. You find shops you’re looking for more easily, doors appear where they weren’t before and lead you right where you need. To be known by the city is a blessing.
Hospitals are places CHARGED with energy. So much happens in them they become living leylines. Often they realize they don’t need machines anymore, the rooms monitor the patients just as well. Nurses will get a feeling something is wrong with a certain room and arrive right before a patient codes so that they can help as soon as possible.
An old woman in the park feeding pixies instead of pigeons.
A woman who takes in imps and other injured magical creatures instead of cats.
it’s all you americans talk about… liminal space this… cryptid that
america is big, we got.,.,.,. its a lot happening here
It’s at least 3,000 miles just from the East Coast to the West, depending on where you start.
If I try to drive from here in Maine to New Mexico, it’s 2,400 miles.
From here to Oregon, 800 miles from my current residence to my relatives in NJ, then another 3,000 miles after that.
A brisk 8 day drive that meanders through mountains, forests, corn fields, dry, flat, empty plains, more mountains, and then a temperate rain forest in Oregon.
The land has some seriously creepy stuff, even just right outside our doors.
There is often barking sounds on the other side of our back door.
At 3 am.
When no one would let their dog out.
It’s a consensus not to even look out the fucking windows at night.
Especially during the winter months.
Nothing chills your heart faster than sitting in front of a window and hearing footsteps breaking through the snow behind you, only to look and not see anything.
I live in a tiny town whose distance from larger cities ranges from 30 miles, to 70 miles. What is in between?
Giant stretches of forests, swamps, pockets of civilization, more trees, farms, wildlife, and winding roads. All of which gives the feeling of nature merely tolerating humans, and that we are one frost heave away from our houses being destroyed, one stretch of undergrowth away from our roads being pulled back into the earth.
And almost every night, we have to convince ourselves that the popping, echoing gunshot sounds are really fireworks, because we have no idea what they might be shooting at.
There’s a reason Stephen King sets almost all his stories in Maine.
New Mexico, stuck under Colorado, next to Texas, and uncomfortably close to Arizona. I grew up there. The air is so dry your skin splits and doesn’t bleed. Coyotes sing at night. It starts off in the distance, but the response comes from all around. The sky, my gods, the sky. In the day it is vast and unfeeling. At night the stars show how little you truly are.
This is the gentle stuff. I’m not going to talk about the whispered tales from those that live on, or close, to the reservations. I’m not going to go on about the years of drought, or how the ground gives way once the rain falls. The frost in the winter stays in the shadows, you can see the line where the sun stops. It will stay there until spring. People don’t tell you about the elevation, or how thin the air truly is. The stretches of empty road with only husks of houses to dot the side of the horizon. There’s no one around for miles except those three houses. How do they live out here? The closest town is half an hour away and it’s just a gas station with a laundry attached.
No one wants to be there. They’re just stuck. It has a talent for pulling people back to it. I’ve been across the country for years, but part of me is still there. The few that do get out don’t return. A visit to family turns into an extended stay. Car troubles, a missed flight, and then suddenly there’s a health scare. Can’t leave Aunt/Uncle/Grandparent alone in their time of need. It’s got you.
Roswell is a joke. A failed National Inquirer article slapped with bumperstickers and half-assed tourist junk. The places that really run that chill down the spine are in the spaces between the sprawling mesas and hidden arroyos. Stand at the top of the Carlsbad Caverns trail. Look a mile down into the darkness. Don’t step off the path. just don’t.
The Land of Entrapment
here in minnesota we’re making jokes about how bad is the limescale in your sink
pretending we don’t know we’re sitting on top of limestone caverns filled with icy water
pretending we don’t suspect something lives down there
dammit jesse now I want to read about the things that live down there
meanwhile in maryland the summer is killing-hot, the air made of wet flannel, white heat-haze glazing the horizon, and the endless cicadas shrilling in every single tree sound like a vast engine revving and falling off, revving and falling off, slow and repeated, and everything is so green, lush poison-green, and you could swear you can hear the things growing, hear the fibrous creak and swell of tendrils flexing
and sometimes in the old places, the oldest places, where the salt-odor of woodsmoke and tobacco never quite go away, there is unexplained music in the night, and you should not try to find out where it’s coming from.
The intense and permanent haunting of a land upon which countess horrors have been visited, and that is too large and wild for us to really comprehend is probably the most intense and universal American feeling.
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