March Tale 2021

Hello! If you're new here, here's how this works: in the beginning of the month, I ask a question. I get answers from people, hopefully. I take one of those answers and write a short story based on it, then put it out on the last day of the month. Sometimes they're actually pretty good, and sometimes they're a real mess. But at least every time I put some words on paper. Screen. Whatever.

Here you can find that story.

I also read it into an audio format, if audiobooks are more your thing than actual written words. With this particular story, though, I would suggest reading it yourself, because I think it just works better in text than audio, and because my reading really isn't very good here. But I get it's easier to find time to listen than to read, so do whatever works for you.

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What song does March remind you of?

Frontside ollie - Robin (answer from Maria)

(Sorry not sorry to anyone who now has it playing in their head for the rest of the week. If you're not Finnish and don't know the song, I linked to it on YouTube there.)

The ringing tone comes once. Come on, Tommy. Twice. Pick up. Five times. For once. The robotic voice informing him he has reached the voicemail floods Oliver’s ear. He sighs and hangs up. Maybe it was too much to hope Tommy would answer this time. He never does, nowadays.

Oliver doesn’t get it. They’ve been best friends for years. Tommy is the one who’s kept all his embarrassing secrets from their teenage years, who never judges him, no matter what stupidity he’s done this time, who he’s been always able to count on to be there, even if everything else goes wrong. But in the last few months it’s become harder and harder to get a hold of Tommy. And it’s not just Oliver. None of their friends have heard much from Tommy. It’s like his not-quite-new-anymore girlfriend has stolen him away from the entire rest of the world. Or that Tommy’s decided the rest of them aren’t worth his time.

It was fine at first. Tommy still remembered he had friends, and spent time with them. But now it’s been… a few weeks -- can it have been that long? -- since Oliver last saw him. They were supposed to meet up for a movie night on Saturday a week and a half ago, but Tommy called in the morning for just long enough to tell Oliver he wouldn’t make it after all.

Oliver sends Tommy an angrier text than he’s entirely comfortable with, telling him to call when he sees it. Tommy might have all but disappeared, but he agreed to help Oliver with this months ago, and Oliver isn’t going to let him simply not show up.

He doesn’t have time to fret about it right now. Tommy will call when he calls, and Oliver has better things to do than sit around staring at the phone, waiting. He heads out, makes his way to the town center and through a handful of stores, picking up the last supplies. A surprising number of places are out of peppermint oil, and he starts to get nervous before finally finding it in the fourth place he goes to.

Walking down a busy street, he almost misses it when his phone starts buzzing in his pocket. He pulls it out and sighs in relief as Tommy’s name shines from the screen.

“Hey, finally. I tried calling you like three times,” Oliver says, making his way around a corner to a spot where it hopefully isn’t too windy or noisy.

“Yeah, I noticed,” Tommy’s voice comes from the other end of the line. “What’s up?”

“Just wanted to make sure we’re all good for tomorrow,” Oliver says. A silence answers him. He checks the screen to see the call wasn’t cut off for some reason. It wasn’t. “Tommy?”

“Yes. Tomorrow.” Tommy’s voice is too toneless. For a moment it confuses Oliver, but then a doubt starts creeping in.

“You are still coming tomorrow?” he asks.

“To… the game?”

“Dammit, Tommy!”

“I’m sorry,” he starts, but already Oliver doesn’t believe him. “I can’t keep up with everything that’s going on with you.”

“I’m not asking you to keep up with everything. Just this one thing. It’s super moon tomorrow, and I need your help capturing a moon spirit, and you forgot?”

“Ooh, right. That. I do remember that. It’s tomorrow?”

“Yes, it’s tomorrow,” Oliver tells him. “And I need you there.”

“Any chance we could do it the day after?” Tommy asks, and Oliver’s stomach sinks.

“Oh, yes, I’ll just ask the Moon to stop moving for a day so it will be full on a day that’s more convenient for you,” Oliver hears the annoyance bubbling over into his voice and takes a deep breath. “You agreed months ago you’d do this. It’s a two person spell, I literally can’t do it alone. And supermoons only come around every fourteen months. So yes, it has to be tomorrow night.”

Tommy is silent for a long moment.

“Can you find someone else?” he finally says.

“No, I can’t,” Oliver says, sharper than he intends to. “Because I need someone strong, and someone who’s good at skymagic. In case you’ve somehow forgotten everything about our friends, they’re good, but they’re not that good, or if they are, they’re good at life or sea or something, and that doesn’t help. You know it’s not that common to be good at sky.”

There’s a moment of silence again.

“I can’t go,” Tommy says.

“Tommy, you have to go,” Oliver starts to feel a light panic settle in. “I’m not kidding. You promised. And I need you. I need you to do this one thing for me, and then I’ll never bother you again.”

“Why would I be bothered by you?” Tommy sounds like he genuinely doesn’t understand what Oliver is talking about. Oliver lets out a short, bitter laugh.

“Well, you clearly are,” he says, “Because if your friends hadn’t become such an inconvenience for you, maybe you’d show up for once.”

“I…” Tommy starts, but someone starts talking to him, their voice too faint through the phone for Oliver to hear what they’re saying. After a few seconds he talks again. “Oliver, I’m sorry. I can’t make it tomorrow, and I have to go now. But I promise, we’ll hang out soon. Let me know how it goes, okay?”

“Tommy.”

But he’s already gone.

Oliver blows out a sigh of frustration. He literally can’t do the spell alone, and he doesn’t know anyone else who would be able to do it with him. He starts running through his acquaintances in his head, in case he’s forgotten someone, anyone who could help, but doesn’t get very far before a voice interrupts him.

“I thought I heard a familiar voice,” a young woman, a couple of years older than Oliver, rounds the corner and stops in front of him. “Haven’t seen you around in a while.”

“Oh, Tamika, hi,” Oliver says, surprised.

“I heard you saying my brother’s name, I assume into the phone? He giving you trouble?” she asks.

“Well, yeah, you could say that,” Oliver says, wondering why Tamika even bothered stopping to talk to him. They don’t know each other very well. They’ve met dozens of times, of course. You’re not best friends with someone and not keep meeting their sister. But the two of them aren’t really friends.

“So what’s his problem?” she gives Oliver a knowing smile, and he has to laugh.

“The girlfriend,” he tells her.

“Oh, yeah. She’s been around a lot lately. More than you ever were. And I’ve barely seen you since they started dating. Or any of his other friends, for that matter.”

“That’s because he doesn’t have time for any of us anymore,” Oliver says, and Tamika rolls her eyes.

“Men,” she says, and he has to grin again.

“Anyway, he was supposed to help me with something,” Oliver finds himself venting, simply out of the joy of complaining to someone when you’re in a bad situation. “I need a moon spirit, and they have to be caught during a supermoon, which is tomorrow, and they come so rarely I can’t exactly wait for the next one. But he literally just informed me now he won’t be coming, even though he promised me ages ago he would.”

“What do you need a moon spirit for?” She sounds genuinely curious.

“Oh. It’s nothing. It’s stupid.” She raises an eyebrow. “I want to develop some of my photos using this technique that needs one, that makes the photos look… I can’t explain. You have to see some to get it. But they’re amazing.”

Tamika looks at him for a moment, thinking.

“Sounds fun. I’m in,” she says. Oliver simply stares for a second before the words register.

“Wait, what? You know sky magic?” he finally manages to get out. Tamika snorts.

“Please. You have my number?”

“Um. I think so, yeah.”

“Cool. Send me the details. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

With that she waves, turns, and walks away, leaving Oliver behind, utterly confused by the conversation.

***

It’s a clear, cold night, probably the last properly cold one this spring. The Moon hangs huge in the sky as Oliver and Tamika make their way through the forest. In town the snow has already begun to melt, most streets almost snowless, but out here the ground is still covered in white. The only sound is the crunch of snow under their boots. It has taken them a while to get here, but it’s important to be in a place where the only light is from the Moon and the stars. They come to a clearing, and Oliver starts to pull materials out of his backpack. He’s prepared with a flashlight he planned on using while setting up, but there’s no need for that. The shine of the full Moon and the white snow glittering with reflected light are easily enough to see by.

Tamika picks up the stone orb he just set down and turns it around in her fingers. The blue-white translucent coloring makes it almost look like it’s glowing in the moonlight.

“This is an impressive stone,” she notes.

“Yeah, well, it has to be a perfect sphere to hold the spirit. So anything less than impressive won’t work,” he says and takes it back from her, carefully laying it down in the middle of the nested circles he’s traced in the snow with peppermint oil, dried nightbloom petals and the powdered, silvery scales of Qaspian dragons.

“Here, put this on, and try to position it over your heart,” Oliver tells Tamika as he hands her a tear-shaped pendant of the same stone as the orb in the middle. As she slips it on he opens a small container with paste in it and offers it to her too.

“One stripe from your forehead and down your nose, and another two along the cheekbones.”

He slips on a matching pendant and makes the same lines on his own face, the paste cold against his skin. She wiggles her nose at the stinging smell.

“What’s in this?” she asks.

“Mostly the same stuff as in the circles. And a couple of other things. You don’t want to know,” he says. She raises an eyebrow at him.

“You underestimate me, Ollie,” she says.

“It’s Oliver,” he corrects absentmindedly, already focusing on the spell. “And if you really want to know, you can look it up once we get home. You ready?”

She nods and they start to pull in magic that is inherent in the air around them, in the clear sky above. Their pendants begin to glow, and after a moment so does the orb in the middle as they carefully channel the magic into it through the pendants. It’s not a bright glow, not enough to drive away any of the shadows of the night-time forest, nowhere near enough to rival the shine of the full Moon, but it does challenge the twinkle of the stars that spread across the sky.

As their magics meet, Oliver is distracted by the way Tamika’s feels. Mixing magics always whisper to each other, gently circling together before intertwining. Tamika’s magic is only whispering because, right now, she needs it to whisper instead of yell. It’s strong and steady, perfectly focused. Solid. Simply from the way it exists it’s clear that if they weren’t working for the same goal, it would take over, snuff out any magic touching it with no less effort than it takes to put out a candle flame, leaving behind only a wisp of smoke rising from the wick before that too disappears. She is good. Much better than Oliver, and certainly better than Tommy. He can’t believe what he’s feeling. How did he never know his best friend’s sister was a genius with skymagic? And she makes it look so easy.

As his own stream of magic flutters, Tamika glances up at him, moonlight drawing soft shadows on her face. He clenches his jaw, pushing his awe to the back for now and directing his focus to the task at hand.

They keep it up for a couple of minutes, turning the stone orb into a beacon of magic, an invitation for a moon spirit to come to them. The longer it takes, the more Oliver can feel the skymagic seep into his mind. The longing for freedom comes first. To be able to explore, to soar. To not be tied down. To not be bound to earth by gravity. He wants to feel only the wind whip around him. He wants to be a bird in the air, a star in the sky, with nothing around him but open space and endless possibilities.

He pushes the thoughts to the side and looks up at Tamika. If there’s a similar struggle going on inside of her, she doesn’t show any sign of it outward. He goes back to solely focusing on what the intellectual part of him knows he really wants: a moon spirit.

And then finally one appears in the sky above them, a flutter of mist that looks like it’s made of moonlight, its shape constantly shifting. Sometimes Oliver thinks he recognises the shape it takes, but the next moment it’s gone again, morphed into something else. The spirit makes its way down on a ray of moonlight, circling towards the stone in the middle. It almost seems curious, but Oliver knows spirits like this aren’t conscious enough for anything resembling actual curiosity. It flutters closer and closer to the orb, until finally it’s almost enveloping it.

Tamika and Oliver share a look, then simultaneously yank their magic away. For a split second the orb stops glowing, then lights again with a glow that is the exact shade of moonlight. The spirit is gone, sucked into the orb as the suddenly removed magic left a vacuum in its wake.

Oliver looks up at Tamika, who’s grinning at him. He lets the success of the night settle in as he grins back. Tamika picks up the stone orb.

“Here’s your moon spirit,” she says as she tosses it to Oliver.

“You’re pretty awesome at this,” he says. “I can’t believe I never knew.”

“Yes, I am,” she agrees, and grins. “You’re welcome. Now let’s pack up and go somewhere warm.”

***

Oliver sends Tommy a message the next day, saying the night went great and Tamika was a huge help. His phone rings about fifteen seconds later.

“Tamika as in my sister Tamika?” there’s disbelief in Tommy’s voice.

“Yeah. She’s great. Who would’ve thought, right?”

“My sister.”

“On the way back we agreed to have a movie night next week. You’re welcome to join us, if you want.”

The only answer from the other end of the line is a long silence, and Oliver can’t help but smile quietly to himself.