I feel as though I have been running. My feet ache and my lungs burn. I feel old and worn, lost in the process of decaying day by day. My outer shell has cracked and split apart, there are bits falling constantly, fading, temporary: skin, blood, memories, equations, plans, words, whispers, ambitions. Laughter.
The things that define us slowly change with time until we become someone new and when we see our reflections, our hearts weep for the way we were.
"Yes, yes, this is fascinating, but please pass the sugar will you?"
Secil scowled. "This is an autobiography, Mercery, it has to contain fact and musings."
"You can't muse without coffee-"
"Actually, I'm on a cleanse."
"A cleanse?" Mercery gasped in horror.
Secil smiled inwardly. Outwardly, she said, "Rightly so. I'm on green tea and soda water."
"No tonic?" Mercery whispered.
"None at all."
"No gin!"
"Not even."
Mercery gasped again, louder and with wider eyes, and clasped a hand to her chest. "Secil! The madness!"
"It is," Secil agreed wholeheartedly, because it was. She hadn't planned to go on a cleanse, as it were. She'd been down at the post office paying a bill, with intentions to visit the herbal shop next door for supplies - what with Beatrice on holiday and Beatrice's husband decaying six-feet under ground, slowing down progress - when the man behind the counter had pointed out her dismal appearance.
"He was rather rude," supplied Secil, "telling me I had circles under my eyes-"
"You do," Mercery interrupted grimly.
"- and going on about bronze door knockers and the time his niece broke into the neighbour's house for a lawn gnome-"
"Huh?"
"- honestly," Secil waved her wand through the air dramatically, "it's a wonder I didn't turn him into a toad weeks ago!"
"You did what!?"
"Hmm?" Secil had glanced down at her ingredients list and noticed a spelling error.
"SECIL!"
"How do you spell mushroom?"
"DID YOU TURN THE MAILMAN INTO A TOAD?"
"Keep your wig on!" Secil crossed out 'munchroom' and wrote 'muchroome', stared at it and sighed, crossing that out, too.
"SECILIA!"
"Yes! I turned him into a toad. And I took him home, and he's in the garden, playing, and feeding, and singing to his people. Now, tell me how to spell mushroom. It's not with two e's, is it?"
Mercery said, "Oh, alright then. If he's singing..."
Secil tapped the paper with her wand. (It wasn't really a wand; it was a longish, semi-straight stick that had a thin branch growing from one side, which she had tripped over while running away from a bad date one night. Secil refused to buy a proper wand. She had performed a complicated, slightly illegal enchantment on her stick, and after seeing how well it worked out, Mercery had done away with her own wand and copied her.)
The letters rearranged themselves, appearing and disappearing, until the correct spelling of mushroom shimmered up at her.
"Hey, those aren't my o's!"
Mercery clicked her tongue, stood up and stretched. Secil's laziness always made her extremely tired. "That's what you get for enchanting."
"I turned the milkman into a toad, too," she said casually.
"WHAT!?" Mercery dropped the kettle. It bounced extremely hard on the wooden floor and shot out the kitchen window. "FOR FUCK'S SAKE! THAT FUCKING ANTI-SHATTER CHARM IS JUST NOT WORTH IT!"
Secil sighed again, this time in calm contentment. Mercery's aggression at her own spell inventions always gave her a sudden tranquil feeling, much like stepping under a cleansing waterfall after drinking three pots of green tea at once. (She was a recovering coffee addict and the herbal stuff just did not fly). She wondered about detection work. She wondered how to trace handwriting. Was it done?
"You can't just turn people into frogs, Secil, it's not proper!" Mercery turned away from looking out the window. She tugged on her black and silver-star wellingtons, yanking them on so hard in her anger that her toes pushed out the end, and she cursed the stupidity and apathy of whoever made them.
"It's boring being a regular human," Secil complained. "Look at all these spelling errors, look at the multiplication sums on the fridge, look at the shopping carts in Beddells! They're so slow and the people scan my items with glazed eyes, as if they've never heard of-"
"You've never heard of!" Mercery interrupted forcefully, sounding like she didn't know what Secil was talking about (which she didn't). "And now I have to trudge out in the ponds so I can make tea!"
Secil watched Mercery stride out the back door, her long black hair breezing out behind her and long skirts swishing around her legs in determination. When she was gone, Secil jumped up and rummaged around in the kitchen for flour, starfruit, bread crust, ginger, and three sour lollies.
"Spell for tracing..." she murmured, flicking through her little notebook. Secil also refused to perform spells from books. She kept her own notebook with her own inventions, working tirelessly through her mundane existence, switching between writing her soon-to-be famous autobiography (that would go on to become a film starring majorly important actors, and probably even a television series) and creating her own brand of enchantments that she called Severely Secil. Her autobiography was entirely fictional because her own existence was as dull as a wilting cucumber.
"Nothing! Why is there nothing! Why have I not thought of this before?" she groaned in frustration, paused in thought for a millisecond, before snatching up the ingredients and putting pinches, halves, teaspoons and entire packets, haphazardly into the fat, alarmingly green cauldron that sat next to the fireplace. She stirred with the end of a mop, thinking about how expensive cauldrons were these days. This one had been bought from a second-hand store and heaved into the house with the help of three strangers.
"A wedding present!" Mercery had said with false brightness.
"My wedding," Secil had lied in clarification.
"We like to make soup," Mercery offered for no reason, so Secil had countered with, "For the homeless, down on Main."
"So many homeless," Mercery continued.
"Inventive instruments," Secil complimented pleasantly, thinking of the men and women she'd seen shaking their cans with coins in, as if playing a tune.
The cauldron-dragging had resulted in four lined marks all the way from the front door to the fireplace, and none of Secil's spells had worked so far in cleaning it up. It was dismal. Secil still had nightmares about these marks.
The cloudy grey mixture in the cauldron emitted a puff of glittery smoke, which Secil took as an indication that the potion was ready. She scooped half a ladle into a mug, drank it quickly and burped. It tasted like eggplant and brilliance. Yes, she thought smugly, how brilliant she was.
She waited, standing next to the cauldron, holding the mug, and watching the mixture slowly turn a pale violet colour. Bubbles formed in clusters on the surface. Another glittering puff rose up and dissipated.
Secil turned to her right and threw up. She crossed out 'sour lollies', sure that they were reacting with the other ingredients, and wrote 'bottom half of a gingerbread man' instead.
"SECIL!" came a shout and Mercery burst through the back door, puffing, just as the font doorbell rang.
"I think it needs an incantation," frowned Secil.
"Oh my god, Secil..."
"Yes... I know."
"No! You don't! Secil, Beatrice buried her husband in our yard!"
The doorbell rang again and Secil wondered who on earth was calling round at four in the morning. She looked up suddenly, registering. "Buried?"
"YES! SHE BURIED HER HUSBAND IN OUR YARD AND THEN WENT OFF TO CELEBRATE, PROBABLY EATING OCTOPUS AND GETTING A TAN!" Mercery stopped. "What are you doing?"
Secil stared unseeing at Mercery, thinking about starfruit and bubbles and alkalizing and the soothing, restoring properties of dead human toes.
She smiled. "Lead the way."
+
