Letting Magic In by Maia Toll

Author:Maia Toll [Toll, Maia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2023-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

My takeout chai went in the cup holder and the books I’d bought got tucked into the passenger seat (Twelve Wild Swans by Starhawk, Shape Shifters: Shaman Women in Contemporary Society by Michele Jamal, Owning Your Own Shadow by Robert Johnson, and Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler). I’d had dinner at an Indian restaurant, thumbing through my new reads over lamb vindaloo. Now it was getting dark, and I was very ready to be home.

Rosie purred to life. I flipped on the headlights, then pulled out of the lot. Purposefully, I left the radio off. In my mind, I pulled up the cards from my tarot reading: the Fool, the Hierophant, the Hanged Man, Ten of Wands, King of Swords, Prince of Cups. When the fox-haired woman laid down the King, she had asked me about my father, if we were having any issues. In the moment, I couldn’t think of anything relevant. But now, I was remembering last night’s dream.

In it, I was talking with Dad. He said, I expect you to have Saddam Hussein tied and unconscious on the couch by the time I return. I’d been hearing Saddam Hussein’s name repeatedly in the weeks since 9/11, so it had been no surprise to me that he’d turned up in dreamland. I’d written off the dream as my mind processing current events. But thinking about it now, I focused on my dad, on the expectation that I could do this near-impossible thing, on the thought that I hadn’t lived up to my father’s expectations. I was supposed to become a lawyer. I was supposed to be straight. I was supposed to live in a nice house in the suburbs and have 1.5 kids who played behind a white picket fence. If all facets of a dream represent some part of the dreamer, maybe I was using my dad as a symbol for my own over-the-top expectations. Did I think that I could somehow be useful in stopping the war my country was starting? Those were some extravagant expectations.

In the Shape Shifters book I’d browsed over dinner, there was an essay by a voodoo priestess. She explained that when you go for training in voodoo, the priest or priestess will ask the gods whose child is this? The question is a way of learning to which voodoo loa the initiate will be attached. The question had churned up a longing in me, a loneliness. I couldn’t turn to the parents of my birth to help me understand who I was becoming. Whose child was I? Who would claim me? Tears pricked my eyes.

Blinking, I flipped on the radio, searching for a news update. Station after station, the announcers’ voices came through strident and overzealous. A feeling that had started earlier—a sort of heavy nausea pinging between my stomach and throat—began again. It wasn’t physical; I didn’t need to vomit. The sensation stretched, an energetic queasiness climbing to my crown and descending to my core.

Just before the turn onto I-87, something darted across the road.

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