Sometimes I feel that magic (the real kind — sorcerers and dragons and witches with wands) is only a heartbeat away.
It is as if I need only to hold my breath for one more beat of my beating heart before that castle-cloud will shift, fling wide its gates, and let me walk inside, a real castle now with knights and festooned battlements.
Sometimes, when the air is thin, as it was on the mountaintop I visited the other day, I feel magic’s only a finger’s breadth away.
Scratch the surface of reality’s skin and magic will bleed out over the steep decline of rock at my feet, make the marmot munching scrub grass five yards off rise up on her hind legs and talk to me.
Other times, it’s not so obvious.
Other times that time spent (as a child in the afternoon) watching clouds seems wasted on a burning planet where people live in parking lots, huddled in tents before battalions of ill-meaning cops, batons, and bulldozers also festooned with torn strips of nylon like prayer flags in a Tibetan wind.
“They call them sweeps,” she said.
She was sitting on a curb in the grocery store parking lot, the remains of a Burger King dinner they’d bought with a stranger’s coupon strewn at her feet. Her husband, named Tommy, leaned against her; he’d dropped his head over his knees as we approached, but I saw the lighter and foil disappear beneath the army blanket. I watched as he grew lost in whatever world lay beyond the gray skin of that parking lot, smoke like a scratch with a delicate nail, magic (of sorts) spilling out.
He leaned and swayed, she talked.
I petted her dog named Molly who was friendly and had pink-and-blue ribbons tied to her harness. I complimented her wedding ring, and she held it up, one carat, to glitter in what was left of the sun.
“They call them sweeps,” she said. “They come and sweep us away like the dirt beneath their feet.”
They call them sweeps.
She was skinny with blonde hair and tattoos I didn’t register running down her chest. She told me how the tide of things had carried her from foster homes in Pennsylvania to Orlando to save an aunt’s house that couldn’t be saved, and thence to here, where there was housing that couldn’t be kept, and, at last, to the streets where, now, sometimes, they are swept
like dirt
beneath our feet.
I wondered as I walked away, what reverse magic that incantation works:
Thou art dirt
Thou art dirt
Thou art dirt
I wondered what obscenities such words, spoken or simply believed, might perform upon the sacred castle of a human soul, converting all its features — gentle voice, blonde hair, bright smile, hidden chambers of depthless love — into the flat gray of asphalt reflected in Tommy’s eyes as he leans and sways.
“They call them sweeps,” she said.
I didn’t want to pray.
Yet pray I did, not then, but later — in a time I’ll tell you about, not today, but soon, when I came quite by accident upon a magic deeper even than the kind my mind can almost believe in on mountaintops.
But for now, for tonight, sit with a woman in the parking lot.
Watch her precious ring glitter in the dying sun,
and wonder where she’ll sleep tonight,
and if she’ll toss
and
turn
and
tense
waiting
for sweeps.
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