Magic Hands
Storm Humbert
For David Farland
I could have snapped my fingers, but instead I chose to fly from LAX to Detroit, rent a car, and drive to my parents’ house northeast of Webberville—a total travel time of eight hours. I was sure that told Mom how little I wanted to be there to see my father die, but I was coming—didn’t really have a choice. A wizard’s death is always a major event. It changes the world.
Webberville’s Main Street was unchanged other than an uncomfortably modern facade for the post office. There was still the Panther Barber Shop and the Happy Home Salon. Nothing named for people, so the names could stay the same even when ownership changed. There was comfort in that familiarity that somehow compensated for the excitement a young magician like me got from LA or Vegas—something appealing about knowing my home hadn’t left me behind because it wasn’t going anywhere.
It was as if my father had frozen everything with a time charm until I returned. He hadn’t, but that would have at least explained why he was dying so young—he was only sixty-one. I’d thought I’d have more time to forgive him for Maggie. I wasn’t sure I was ready, but this was my last chance to do it—his last chance to ask.
When I pulled into my parents’ drive, Mom walked out a little slower than I remembered, gave me a long hug, and said how happy she was that I was home. Once we’d gotten into the kitchen, she said, “He’s back in our room.”
I didn’t respond. I’d hoped there would be more talking—maybe she’d ask about work or if I was seeing anyone—before she asked me to go in.
“You can do this,” Mom said, as if I’d been there only yesterday—as if it hadn’t been years.
She had this way of smiling that was like a dare. Her eyes locked onto mine, and she held the stare as if she thought she could will her confidence, joy, laughter—whatever she wanted me to have—directly into me.
That was a kind of magic neither my father nor I could imitate. I always thought that if I held that eye contact, maybe it would work, but I never could.
I left my bags in the kitchen and took the long, short walk down the hall. The closer I got to the room, the more the magical flux of my father’s passing pressed on me like a desperate humidity.
The smells of his favorite foods suffused the air: an acrid sweetness with a hint of grill marks. I was consumed with a confusion of fear and happiness—of everything at once. There was a charm of Dad’s own making on the door—one stronger than I could ever craft—designed to contain the energies that were spilling from him. I hadn’t opened the door yet, and the shadow of his waiting presence already overwhelmed me. What will it be like inside? I took a breath and turned the knob. The first vision hit as soon as I entered the room, and it was all I could do to close the door behind me.
“You’re doing great, sweetie,” Dad said. He was clean-shaven, his hair short and dark. In all my life, I’d never seen Dad without some kind of facial hair. He looked barely a boy.
Mom breathed, “He, he, hoooo,” as she lay in what seemed to be an adjustable medical bed complete with stirrups, but it wasn’t metal or plastic. It was twisted bark covered in pillowy moss. The branches had grown from beneath two sets of floorboards and burst into the center of what would eventually be my room.
It was a southern magnolia, Mom’s favorite, and the smell of the yellow flowers clung to everything like a too-sweet film. Mom’s light-brown hair was matted with sweat, and the bags under her eyes were full of undreamt dreams.
I was in the doorway with a clear view of the red-and-purple sunset out the window over Dad’s shoulder, but I was higher than I should’ve been—as if I were floating.
“All right,” Dad said. “One big push.”
As Mom inhaled, all the charms I’d failed to notice came alive. They covered the walls, ceiling, and floor—rippling with light. I’d never seen so many in one place, packed so close together. I was sure the swelling edges would merge at any moment and swallow us all in a blink of unbound, chaotic magic. I tried to decode the charms, but it was like trying to read a sentence written in three dimensions while standing inside a single letter.
Then Mom sighed, and a baby cried. The charms leapt from the walls and shrunk down to motes of light that rushed to cover the baby. The child glowed in a way that made the sunset in the window seem drab, and this light reflected in Dad’s sea-green gaze.
I now looked up at him through my own infant eyes instead of down upon the scene itself, and there was love in him that shamed magic with its power.
“Hello, little Liam,” he said, but as he spoke, my vision darkened, and he faded away. But his voice echoed after me as if it sought, with all its baritone might, to pull me back.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” Dad’s elderly voice finished from the bed where he lay dying. It took me a moment to connect the ends of the two sentences split across time.
I staggered into the chair at his bedside. “Mom asked me to.” It was the truth, but not all of it.
Dad smiled, and the lights glowed a little brighter. A breeze full of lilac and dogwood blew through the closed windows even though it was the middle of fall. The entire room bent to Dad’s whims.
“You say that like she hasn’t asked you before,” Dad said.
His eyes were identical to the ones that had looked at me when I’d been born just moments ago, and that made me sad for all the time I’d missed. That wasn’t only on me, though, and he knew it.
“Dad, I just—”
He shook his head, and my mouth slammed shut. I wasn’t sure if it was magic or obedience, but I was too scared to check.
Dad flipped his hand over on the bed. The hand was as thick and strong as ever, wrinkled by age but not withered or shrunken. I knew he wanted me to take it. The gesture wasn’t conciliatory. It was neither forgiving nor asking forgiveness. It was instructional. It was my father leading me through a process, as he always had. I didn’t want to take it, but if I didn’t, I’d come for nothing.
Once I did, he squeezed and said, “We have work to do.”
Dad, why do we have to do this?” I said in a small voice as I lugged a belly-sized boulder to the loader’s bucket. “You could snap your fingers and make all the rocks disappear.”
It was the middle of May—an especially hot, muggy May—and Dad and I were walking lines up and down the field, pulling up rocks so they didn’t damage the planter. We’d been at it since early morning when it was a cool sixty-five degrees. By eleven o’clock, it was ninety with a stiff, thick wind, and cicadas squealed the heat from the nearby woods.
“I don’t use magic for work,” Dad said without a trace of labor in his voice, despite carrying four stones the size of the one I’d just struggled with.
After he clacked them all down into the bucket, I said, “It’s not like I’m saying do a magic show or anything.”
Dad was already walking away to get the next load of rocks, but he glanced back over his shoulder to let me know he was still listening.
“I’m just saying you wouldn’t have to work so much if you used magic sometimes.”
Dad bent down and palmed another big stone out of the dirt, then walked back to the loader. He carried it like a weightless rubber ball, and I stared. I was always a little obsessed with my father’s hands. They were so thick and strong, like my grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s—so much different than mine.
Even years later, when I hit puberty and started working out and playing sports, my fingers remained spindly little things with narrow joints and small nails. No matter how often I helped Dad on the farm over the years, my hands never got more like his. Of course, I didn’t know that then, so I often wondered what I’d do when I had my father’s hands—what sort of miracles I’d make.
“If I use magic to grow the crops, then magic gets to be a job. It gets to be that I’m selling magic,” he said. “Trust me, squirt, you don’t want to sell your magic. It never feels right. Better off if you learn to love your work.”
Somehow, I yanked my real hand from his, and the memory blinked out like an unplugged TV. Cheap shot.
“Really, Dad?” I said. “That’s what you want to say? Trust me. I get it. You don’t like what I do.”
“I love what you do,” he said.
His face was so earnest—almost surprised—and that threw me. I didn’t know what to say.
“I didn’t like it at first,” he said. “But then I figured out why you do it.” He was calm as he looked into my eyes. “We’ve seen all your magic shows. Even the pay-per-views.”
I hated how he looked at me—like I was still a boy—so I said, “You don’t get to say that. You haven’t known me for twelve years. You don’t know why I do it.”
“Liam, you just want me to hate it so you can do it to spite me.”
“It’s not like you wouldn’t deserve it.”
My father looked calm, but the room’s temperature dropped, and a window cracked from the change. By the time my eyes found the noise, it had been repaired. My breath misted in front of me, and my hand shot back into my father’s as if drawn by an invisible cord.
It was over ninety degrees—typical for June—but it felt at least a hundred as Dad and I carried my and Maggie’s winter stuff to the barn.
“She’s gonna flip,” I said as we set the snowsuits inside the door.
“That’s the plan,” Dad said. “You know what they say, you only turn eight once.”
I was fifteen, so it was hard for me to admit that I was as excited for Maggie’s surprise as she would be. I tried to play it cool because I was getting to be a man and that seemed like the thing to do. I’d grown four inches in a year, and Dad had just taught me how to shave. On my next birthday, he’d start my magic lessons so I could be a wizard, like him.
I tried to watch—to learn—as Dad cast glowing charms into the barn rafters, but the changes around me were distracting.
The first thing was the winter smell. It was the crisp, empty-air scent that’s left after the pollen is long gone and the sweet aromas of summer aren’t even a memory. Dad’s breath misted first, maybe because he was in the haymow, but soon mine did too. It wasn’t like normal breath mist, though, because it didn’t go away. Instead, the fog drifted up into the peak of the barn, and a small cloud began to form.
That cloud grew from a spinning twist of my father’s breath into a giant, fluffy mass that filled the entire peak of the barn and reached all the way down to about five feet above the haymow. The barn walls transmuted the heavy summer breeze that blew in from outside into a howling winter wind, and a couple minutes after our breaths stopped being drawn into the cloud, it started to snow.
It took about twenty minutes to get a few inches of snow on everything, during which time Dad and I put our jackets on and threw a couple snowballs back and forth to test it out. Dad had barely finished making a fifteen-foot snowdrift from the haymow to the barn floor when Mom led Maggie in.
Maggie dropped the lunchbox she’d taken to basketball camp right in the small side doorway. She squealed as she ran in her sandals and shorts through shin-deep summer snow to jump into Dad’s arms.
“Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh! Thank you, Daddy!”
“Liam helped too,” Dad said as he put her back on the ground.
Maggie jumped and hugged me just as hard—as if I were the one who’d made a cloud inside or conjured a snowstorm in the middle of June. She always hugged me like that—like I was magic just because I was her big brother. I missed it.
“Put your snow stuff on, sweetie,” Dad said. “Then we can build a snowman.”
“Okay.” Maggie let go and bounded away.
I nearly fell over—as if I’d been leaning on her.
While Maggie, Mom, and Dad were rolling the balls for a snowman, I climbed into the haymow and stuck my hand into the cloud. Pinprick motes of cold danced on my skin, and I spun snow through my fingers like cotton candy.
Dad stared up at me with a deep smile. It wasn’t extra broad or toothy, but deep—something in the eyes—and that was when I understood he’d made that miracle just to see the looks on our faces.
I slid my hand from Dad’s and took a deep breath to steady myself. I wasn’t going to let him sneak under my guard with some sweet memory of Maggie.
“Why that one?” I asked.
“Because that was what I thought of the first time your mom talked me into watching one of your shows,” he said. “That look on your face—wonder. That’s why you do it.” Then he rolled his head to look at me. “And because you weren’t the only one who loved her.”
I had so much I wanted to say—so much I’d wanted to say for years—but I couldn’t even look at him. I wanted to tell him that in all my study of magic since I’d stolen his books and left home, that I’d never found another mention of an indoor weather charm—that he might have been the greatest wizard ever.
I also wanted to tell him that he loved his magic more than he’d loved his daughter—that he hadn’t done enough to make her better—but I didn’t get the chance because Dad squeezed my hand, and we were off again.
“You’re getting close, Liam,” Dad said from across the cherrywood kitchen table. “The form of the charm is perfect, but you’ve got to let the magic flow into the shape.”
Dad traced the figure of the simple luck charm he’d been trying to teach me into the air again, and it glowed a soft cerulean. Then he balanced the coin on the knuckle of his thumb for at least the twentieth time.
“What do you want to bet this time?” he said with a sly smile.
“I don’t want to bet anymore,” I said. “I want you to tell me what I’m doing wrong.” I slammed my fists on the table. “Why doesn’t my magic work?”
As the thunder of the blow rolled out of the room, the click of my father’s thumbnail sent the coin spinning.
“Better call it,” he said.
“Heads, I win. Tails, you lose,” I said as quickly as I could. “Loser mows the lawn until I’m eighteen.”
“Deal,” Dad said as the coin thunked onto the table. It bounced a few times, then twirled as coins do before they fall one way or the other, but it didn’t fall. It spun slower and slower until it stopped stock-still on its edge.
Dad stroked his beard in faux befuddlement. “Huh,” he said. “That’s so weird. Don’t you think that’s weird, Liam? It’s not heads, so you don’t win. And it’s not tails, so I don’t lose.”
I rolled my eyes and slouched into my chair.
“If you don’t win, and I don’t lose, guess that means I have to win, right?” Dad said.
“Guess so. Gee-whiz, I’m learning so much, Dad.” I clenched my fist under the table. All I’d ever wanted was to be a wizard like him, but my magic wouldn’t work, and all he did was tease. What if I didn’t have it?
“You would if you relaxed and focused,” he said.
“Yeah, it’s my fault,” I said. “Sorry I can’t focus on studying magic while Maggie is in the hospital and my all-powerful wizard dad isn’t doing anything to help her.”
Dad’s face tightened so hard, so fast, that his forehead seemed about to split right down the crease between his furrowed eyebrows. He put his pointer finger against his forehead and scorched a symbol into it.
The smell of charred skin filled the room, but he didn’t wince.
“Come here,” he said.
When I didn’t move immediately, he stepped out of himself—like a ghost dispossessing a body—and walked through the table to stand in front of me. His translucent nose hovered about an inch from mine, and I could see through his scowling, astral eyes to the serene, closed ones of his body slouched in the chair.
I screamed when he touched his smoking finger to my forehead, but it didn’t hurt—didn’t feel like anything, actually.
He snapped his fingers in my face, and I blinked. When my eyes opened, we were in the middle of Maggie’s crowded hospital floor.
“They can’t see us,” Dad said.
He didn’t wait for me to respond before stalking toward her room and through the closed door. I ran to catch up. He walked through her curtain and stood over Maggie, who was sleeping. I went to the other side of the bed.
By then, Maggie looked healthiest while she slept—like the doctors would release her as soon as she was awake—so I was glad we’d come at night.
“Magic isn’t about making things out of nothing,” Dad said. “Magic doesn’t make anything—at least not anything you can touch, taste, or smell. Magic lets us move things from one place to another.”
Dad looked at me for the first time since the kitchen, and I felt I should understand something that I still didn’t.
“When we make fire, we pull heat from somewhere else. When we freeze things, we move their heat elsewhere. Even now, all I’ve done is move our consciousnesses from the house to here.”
He ran his fingers through Maggie’s hair. It didn’t move.
“You don’t want to get in the business of moving life, Liam,” he said. “We aren’t gods, and it’s damn important you understand that.”
“What’s the point then?” I asked. “Why bring me here just to say that?”
“Because you need to focus.”
Dad’s finger glowed again, and he traced his luck charm onto Maggie’s cheek. The symbol shimmered, but then he kissed it and it sunk in.
“I won’t take someone’s life to make your sister better, but I can give her all my luck that she pulls through, and I can make her a lightning rod for all those who would do the same. That’s what I’ve done.” Dad motioned for me to stand closer to Maggie’s head. “If you want, you can too.”
“It doesn’t work though,” I said. The muscles around my eyes twitched as if I might cry, but I shouted instead. “My magic doesn’t work!”
“Just focus,” Dad said. “Feel it run up and down your spine and tingle across your skin. Feel it in your chest—like your heart is swelling. Direct it into your finger and trace the symbol.”
The bags under Maggie’s eyes were deep purple, and her lips were dry. Her breath was strong, though, and she had the memory of a smile at the corners of her mouth.
I couldn’t feel her skin where my fingers touched her face, but I knew how it felt when she pressed her cheek against mine every time we hugged. My finger began to glow at the tip, like I’d brushed it against a star, and I wrote my luck charm on her cheek.
It was the first time I’d ever seen my magic. It was a different color than Dad’s—maroon tinged with orange—and I stared before I leaned down, as Dad had, to give her a small kiss.
When I looked up, Dad was smiling. He snapped his fingers, and I blinked again.
I didn’t open my eyes in the kitchen, though. Instead, I was back at Dad’s bedside. I wanted to go back—to see Maggie again.
“I spent that whole week stubbing my toe, forgetting pencils for class, and spilling food on myself,” I said.
Dad smiled. “Me too.”
“It wasn’t enough, though, was it?”
Dad’s smile burrowed back under his beard, and all he could manage was a curt nod.
“I would’ve taken a lifetime of stubbed toes to keep Maggie alive,” I said. “But that’s not what it would’ve taken, was it? And you knew that. You just didn’t think I was ready to consider what it would take, so you lied.”
Dad’s eyes were cold and hard as they shot up to meet mine, but they were wet too, and he trembled under the strain of crying.
“You were never to go in my study,” he said. “You were never to look through any book I didn’t give you. Those were the rules!” His voice literally thundered from all corners of the room as if we stood alone in a desert tempest.
I didn’t know if the house actually shook or if it was my imagination, but I cowered for a second all the same. No boy ever becomes immune to his father’s shout.
“It’s my fault, though,” he said, as he surrendered to the soft shake of crying. “I could have guarded the books. I could have charmed them. I could have booby-trapped them—anything. I didn’t.”
“You could have told me about the transference charm and let me decide for myself.”
“You weren’t old enough!” he said. “Ask any fool child to give up some years and some health so his dying sister will have a fraction more, and he’ll say yes. Giving life is an uphill battle, Liam. Minutes are hours, and hours are years. Death doesn’t make even exchanges.” He looked up at me, pleading. “Even now, Liam, you’re still just a boy.” Dad said it as if he were disappointed—as if I should have been more. “You have more years in front of you than behind. You don’t know how precious they are—how much you’ll want more once you can count how many are left. You can’t even fathom what I wouldn’t give for more time … lying here now—”
“Wish I could help,” I said more coldly and cruelly than I’d intended.
“No,” Dad said, shaking his head. “No, you don’t, but that’s my fault too.” Tears streamed down his face.
The way he said it, he meant it every which way, and that struck somewhere deep, and I shook as the blow revealed how hollow my anger had become. I wanted to take it back, but Dad squeezed my hand harder than he ever had—so hard I was afraid he’d break it—and we were gone again.
I was in Maggie’s hospital room again, but I was floating above the scene just like in my birth memory. Dad and Maggie were the only ones there, and Maggie was asleep.
“Hey, baby doll,” he said, his fingers on her cheek. “I know you’re tired, and the doctors say you don’t have a lot of fight left.” He ran his fingers through her hair, and his mouth smiled, but his eyes were angry and confused. “I told ’em they don’t know you, if that’s what they think.” He laughed, and it was a real laugh—a full laugh. “I told ’em you’re the only kid to ever get what you wanted by holding your breath. That you actually passed out.” The smile and laughter fell away, and the caverns below Dad’s eyes and in his cheeks ran deep. “I need you to fight a little more, baby doll. I need you to fight a little longer so we can all say goodbye. Mom, Liam, Grandma, Grandpa—everyone’s on their way.” There was real pleading in his voice as he said, “Everyone just loves you so much, sweetie.”
It was one o’clock in the afternoon—December 14—right in the middle of fourth period. Mom would pull me from school soon. Normally, it would take about forty minutes from the school to the hospital, but with the bad snow and an accident on the highway, we wouldn’t be there until almost two thirty.
At 1:12, the machine hooked up to Maggie squealed, and her vitals went flat. I watched her chest rise and fall and then not rise again. I couldn’t shout her name. I couldn’t interact. All I could do was watch, but Dad didn’t hesitate.
The squealing cut off no more than a second after it began, and all other motion in the world stopped with it except for Dad’s fingers as he completed the time charm. It was a charm so complex I’d never learned it, but he carved it into the air in a blink.
“No,” Dad said. “Not yet.”
His hand left the glowing charm and hovered by Maggie’s cheek. He didn’t touch her because if he did, time would begin to move for her again.
I didn’t know how time charms worked—how they interacted with time or what exactly they did with it—but I did know they put great strain on the wizard. Dad’s face was pensive, which it often was, but it was also confused and horrified. He seemed lost in a way I’d never seen, but then he nodded his curt nod and burned a symbol into his hand that I would recognize anywhere—the one that eventually made me leave home.
The transference charm.
“Don’t tell your brother,” he said as he pressed his marked hand to her cheek, his fingers resting just under her ear.
The veins on Dad’s face leapt out just as Maggie’s eyes popped open, and I could tell it was all he could do not to scream for that long moment.
“Hey, baby doll,” he said as he sat back down a few moments later, winded, and took Maggie’s hand.
The hospital began to move again, but the squealing monitor had stopped.
Mom and I got there about an hour later, and I got to talk to my sister one last time. I got to hear her laugh and see her smile—to feel her cheek nestled into the crook of my neck during our last hug. I would have given years for that, but I hadn’t had to. Dad had taken care of that for me. I had gotten one last evening with Maggie, and that night, at 11:35 pm she passed in her sleep.
I didn’t realize at first that I was back in the present moment because my eyes were closed, and I was crying. I really was still just a boy. I should have been more.
“I’m sorry,” I said as I looked down at Dad as if through a rain-washed window.
He nodded, but not his curt, efficient nod. This one was more of a soft bob.
“Me too,” he said, in a single, weak exhale.
It was as if it took every ounce of his energy—every bit of his breath—to form those words.
Then I watched his chest fall and fail to rise.
“Dad?” I drew in a sharp breath. No lilac. No dogwood. “No, Dad!”
I didn’t freeze time, but I didn’t have to. I carved the transference charm into my hand and placed it against his cheek like he had Maggie’s.
I had more to say. I wanted to tell him everything—all the things I wished I had for years. I wanted to tell him that I loved him.
His beard brushed my palm, and I waited for the pain, but it didn’t come. Instead, a symbol rose to the surface of his forehead—a blocking charm. He wasn’t going to let me make the same mistake.
I moved my hand from his cheek to his palm. I’d never wished more that I was a god, but I wasn’t. Dad had taught me that.
“I love you,” I said.
I don’t know if he heard me or not, but all the charms around the room glowed just as the ones in my birthing memory had. They surged with magical light, but it wasn’t my father’s. It was mine—maroon tinged with orange—and the symbols swam down to cover my father’s skin. Their light flowed from all over, down his arm, and into the thick, powerful hand I still held.
I felt my father’s life—his knowledge, his joy, his memories—flow into me, and I knew that when I left the room, he’d be with me, as he always had been.
Storm Humbert grew up in Ohio, got an MFA and taught for a bit at Temple University in Philadelphia, and now lives with his wife, Casey, in Michigan. His writing has appeared in Andromeda Spaceways, Interzone, and Apex, among others. He is also a winner of the Writers of the Future contest, and featured in the 36th edition of the Writers and Illustrators of the Future anthology.
Storm has been lucky to have had tremendous writing instructors and mentors throughout his life, including Lee K. Abbot (who first drew him to this craft), Samuel R. Delany, Don Lee, Tim Powers, and, of course, David Farland, so he tries to teach and facilitate others whenever and however he can.