There once was a boy named Rodney. He lived in a snug house on the corner of a quiet street lined with black streetlamps and trimmed hedges. Rodney’s father was a doctor who liked to read the newspaper and retire to his study in the evening with a glass of brandy, the light glowing under the door until late at night. His mother was a lady of consequence who smelled of sweet powder and red lipstick when she left in the evenings to play bridge, her skirts ironed stiff and straight. Rodney also had an older sister named Jeannie who lived in the corner room over the garden. Jeannie had curly, maple–syrup–hair and a thin mouth that curled down when he came near. Sometimes, when everything was quiet, his family in their separate corners of the house, Rodney would stand in the dark kitchen, close his eyes and imagine that he could hear his father and mother and sister laughing with him.
Rodney’s room was on the tip–top of the house where the roof peaked. He had picked this room because the walls slanted over his head at night when he lay in bed, gazing out the small, round window. Rodney liked to sit on the scuffed wooden floor and draw pictures on butcher paper with his waxy crayons. He hummed songs to himself so he could not hear his parents’ raised voices echoing across the dark house and up the stairs and past the landing and through his heavy, old door. At night, when Rodney tucked himself into bed, he would read out loud and pretend his voice was deep and big like the sky.
At this age, all boys are special — Superman, starship captains, questing knights. They could fly faster than light, could lift whole buildings on their shoulders, could do amazing things until the story ended and then they dropped their swords that became sticks and put away their trusty steeds that were tricycles and went inside for dinner.
But Rodney was different — he was something much keener than a starship captain, something much more extraordinary than Superman.
Rodney was magic.
When no one was looking, Rodney could make leaves dance in fractal patterns. He sat under trees and listened to the birds talk to each other, heard the thoughts of the little white mouse in his classroom as it tumbled endlessly on its wheel. Trees leaned their branches out of the way when he walked by. Water parted in the streambeds as he crossed. When he looked at the stars, craning his neck back and spreading his arms out, Rodney could almost hear them singing, could almost read the story written in the vault of heaven. It was a secret he was still learning.
No one believed Rodney — not his parents, not his sister, not the little boys down the street. They all scowled at him and pointed their fingers and told him to stop making up stories. They demanded he prove it, but Rodney couldn’t, not when they were looking. Rodney would try and try, would squeeze his eyes shut and search for the whisper inside his chest that made the leaves dance. But it never worked and they just walked away shaking their heads. As soon as they left — always — the wind erupted like a cyclone, tearing up new–planted flowerbeds and overturning heavy picnic tables. Rodney eventually learned not to talk about it anymore, learned to press his little lips into a thin line, to swallow the secrets deep into his tummy.
One day, Rodney ran home from school, the cold stinging his red cheeks. His breaths left a trail of white vapor where he passed. Rodney had forgotten his rule. He forgot to keep the secrets. In his excitement, Rodney let slip that a rock in the schoolyard had sung him a little bit of the song of creation, a secret that Rodney had bent his mind to learning for so long. The other kids laughed at him, called him crazy, and even the teacher smiled a little bit. Rodney’s face had burned like the sun that he could call from behind the clouds. His heart had thudded angrily in his chest and there was a stinging wetness in his eyes.
Rodney was not crazy. He knew the truth, but his father was in his study and his mother didn’t care. She asked him where his hat had gone and he told her it fell off on the way home. She made him go back and find it.
Dripping cold in his too–warm kitchen with his too–silent mother, Rodney suddenly hated his magic, hated the stories trees told and the little poems made by raindrops. He hated the song of the earth and the secrets in the sky. Rodney hated like he’d never hated before and the anger that bubbled in his chest erupted volcanic. He wished that he had never heard the first murmur of the wind nor felt the stirring of the rocks. He wished that he weren’t magic at all. He wished it as hard as his boiling heart could wish.
Walking out of the house, frozen snow crunching under his shoes, Rodney saw his hat at the bottom of the lawn, next to the fire hydrant on the sidewalk. Running down the steps that led to his house, Rodney didn’t see the ice under the powder of new snow. For a moment, the world tilted and Rodney reached out, tried to grab at the air that would turn solid under his touch if he wished it.
This time it didn’t.
And Rodney fell.
Tumbling, tumbling, tumbling, Rodney fell head over knees over feet and landed with a painful thump at the bottom of the ice–slick steps. He lay on his back, looking up at the sky that hung low with snow clouds. Everything was quiet as the snow began to fall down on him, his mind hurtling forward into the grasp of heaven. That was when Rodney realized that he could not hear that little bit of the song of creation anymore, could not even hear the singing of the wind.
Rodney could not hear anything.
That was when the howling started. Rodney’s mother and father rushed out of the house, shouting his name, and he realized that the keening came from him. He’d never heard such a desolate, empty sound in his life and could not make it stop. Tears poured down his cheeks. His father called an ambulance and his mother cradled him in her lap and Jeannie covered him with a blanket. For a moment, in the silence, he could hear their voices and they hovered around him, blocking the wind. For a moment, Rodney was fooled into thinking it was warm.
Rodney had broken his leg.
And his magic.
In the weeks after, Rodney could forget at moments that he’d lost his secrets. It was easy when his mother scolded him for running on ice, rearranged his pillows and brought him soup and crackers and games to play. He could almost forget when his father read him stories from the worn, dirty books that he kept by his bed. Especially when Jeannie’s mouth turned up a little when he asked her to reach for the packet of drawing paper in the hall closet.
Rodney swore he would never really forget, never really let go. Not the song of creation. Not the secret that was still hiding in the stars. How could he forget on those nights when he lay alone in his bed, thinking as hard as he could, thought until the tears leaked out his tightly shut eyes and not a single whisper stirred in his little room?
One day, hobbling down to the kitchen on his crutches, Rodney saw a book on the kitchen table. Its corners were worn and its cover scratched; the inside bore the name Jeannie McKay next to a column of other scribbled names. When he looked inside, into the matrix of words and printed text and enumerated laws and careful rows of numbers, Rodney discovered a way to regain his secrets.
Physics would bring them back to him.
Physics was itself a secret, one that easily unfolded in his mind, and Rodney was voracious in his pursuit. Physics would help him gather the little secrets back like lost marbles, would help Rodney put them back where they belonged. Rodney promised that he would never wish them away again if only he could get them back.
But they just weren’t as good — the secrets that physics bought him. They were pale, shuddering little things, wriggling pathetically in the weak light of winter. Rodney kept them anyway, kept them because they were all he had.
In time, Rodney did begin to forget, no matter how he tried not to. Every evening when he bent over pages of scribbled equations, hands cramping as the tip of the pencil dug sharply into the paper, another piece of the song faded away. In desperation, Rodney let his mother buy him piano lessons. For a while it worked, staved off the disappearance of his songs as Rodney’s fingers frantically searched for the secret in the music. But in time, the last song faded despite the anchoring musical notes, and Rodney could only hear the plunking of the piano keys and the little melodies he spun from thoughts of dead men.
That left only physics and its trivial insights, the equations and theories frustrating, blunt–tipped tools. Rodney carried it with him, carried physics in his gut with the anger and kept them next to the hollow space where the secrets used to live.
Enough time passed that Rodney could no longer remember what he was looking for. All Rodney had left was the search and eventually, his mouth turned down too, curling like his sister’s maple–syrup–hair. The comfort of his mother’s voice and his father’s stories and his sister’s smile had long faded back to the silence in the corners of the house. They took with them the illusion of warmth, and Rodney hugged the physics tighter to himself in the darkness of the kitchen.
This story was written with happy thoughts and good wishes for my friend and beta on the occasion of her twenty–fifth birthday. It is about the magic we all lost in growing up and the pain we suffer for it. I admit, it’s not a kind and cheerful sentiment for the celebration of one more year in one’s life, but perhaps an appropriate reflection on our choices.
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