Magic Spells, Fiction Sketch

Words

Awareness of the outside world. “honestly frodo’s journey is so wild. like, imagine your uncle goes missing after his birthday party, and his old stoner friend from out of town tells you the souvenir he brought back from a vegas trip 80 years ago is actually satan’s mood ring and now zombie assassins are coming to burn down your town unless you and your lawn guy meet up with medieval hozier in a dark gastropub…” Paper Rose Doodles, Doodlin Stuff, a Tumbler blog, May 30, 2021.
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Z stood in front of the chain link fence, considering the opening they had made with the Hole-In-Fence spell. It was a fiddly little spell. One had to specify exactly what sort of hole and where. After all, a chain link fence is more hole than metal. Most fences had some sort of opening for wind and water to pass thru. If you get down to the atomic level, everything is a cloud of holes.

They hadn’t gotten to the atomic level. It just felt like it.

Turns out magic has always been among us. It’s just not worth the time.

If you wanted to make a hole in your own fence, it was easier to grab a set of bolt cutters. Or saw. Or drill. If you wanted to make a hole in someone else’s fence, perhaps for illegal purposes, the owners of the fence and their security cameras were not going to take kindly to you standing in front of the fence for 45 minutes while you composed yourself.

Turns out you could design your own spells. Z’s D&D friends used to joke that Locate Parking Space would be a useful spell. So they tried to make it.

Turns out, once again, you had to be specific. Very, very specific. There was always space in the middle of intersections and on sidewalks. Even at the curb, you had to account for fire hydrants, No Parking zones, handicapped spaces, and so on, and so on. Given all that, it was easier to drive around & look for a space.

Every 25 or 50 years, someone discovers a dusty tome at the back of a shelf in a quaint, dimly-lit bookstore, or in the stacks of small, out of the way library.

What a treasure!

What possibilities!

What a lot of work!

What a waste of effort!

The dusty tome would go back on the shelf for another generation to find, and the wannabe magician would go off to become an engineer or quantum physicist or itinerant street chalk artist.

~~~ curtain~~~