Disenchantment
by Seth Bockley
One day you were born and nothing magical happened to you. This was contrary to all your expectations. As a baby you were sure your mother’s breasts would grow like balloons and then you’d bite on and fly over the yard and houses, but that didn’t happen. In kindergarten you thought everyone else might [snap] disappear and you’d be left alone in the world, and then you would play with all the toys by yourself. This didn’t happen and you had to share with the other children.
As you got older these wishes did not diminish. They became baroque. You expected to receive complicated calls to adventure, not just pleas from ladies in lakes with swords and wizards in disguise but conspiracies among the coastal birds to make you their king. You felt yourself to be on quests that looked just like going to the store with your grandfather but would turn out, when the true nature of the world was revealed, to be galactic battles with the fate of planets on the line. You were sure you had the power to fly up to the ceiling. If I focus on ascending up to the ceiling, you thought, in Social Studies class, I’ll float up. The same with healing yourself of minor wounds with your mind, and giving your legs super-speed—become bionic, whatever that meant. Fast. As you came of age you expected to undergo all kinds of sexual curses or blessings. You steeled yourself for the supernatural consequences of sin. But these never came to pass. You had bad sex like everyone else, and then later you had good sex. There was no magic.
Around the age of twenty-three, something else happened. The word nothing came into your mind one day, clear out of the blue. You were working as a shellfish fisherman. You were getting ocean clams out of the nets, then shucking them into freezer-bags, a dangerous part of an already-dangerous job, a procedure that involved scraping the animals out of their shells with a short curved knife. Scrape scrape scrape, went the knife. Nothing. It caught you short, mid-shuck. You looked out at the wrinkling sea. Nothing. Nothing.
This nothing, you knew right away, was a cousin of magic, or a sinister half-cousin. And it seemed small at first—seemed like nothing—an irritant inside an oyster’s shell. But you knew such things calcify, make pearls.
Picture the Pacific Ocean, any part of it really, water all the way to the horizon, and let’s say some great clouds, whopping wispy ones, terrifically lighting up an afternoon at sea. Nothing. More clams and sea urchins hauled onboard, and small fish that other workers sometimes used for bait. Nothing. Later, at home in your small apartment in the housing complex by the town center where people with boots walked right through puddles when they could have gone around, nothing. The word nothing became your companion. Nothing nothing nothing. On the bus, going to work at the pier, you were thinking nothing. Nothing nothing nothing nothing.
That summer you even fell in love but nothing was there. She said you smelled like fish. “Mollusks,” you corrected her and she asked you to show her how you did it, shucked the things with such a small knife, and you realized she was flirting and you thought a deep green enchantment would fall over you both then and there and that someday you’d be able to switch bodies, experience sex from both sides, so to speak. But that didn’t happen, you just had sex the usual way, and over time you came to love each other deeply, and later your love died.
Alone, in your thirties, you thought you might have children like Zeus did, a girl-baby cracking out from your head. Your head, an egg. Crack. You thought a lot and looked out the window of the seafood export office where you worked. You answered the phone and nothing was there. It scared you.
The thoughts grew like tumors, one benign and one malignant. Magic on the one side and nothing on the other. They seemed to you like characters in a Kaiju-type movie, Godzilla or Mothra or Godzilla v. Mothra. They stood above the city, above the islands and halfway in the ocean (where they came from, due to nuclear experiments on other islands far away). Your mind was the city where the battle would take place, to devastate the populace and flip over buses and step on tanks.
So it happened deep into the night in your bed that magic and nothing fought. This went on for decades until you were very old. To the end, they fought. You cried and smiled.
Seth Bockley thrives in the greater Midwest. His story “Repertorio" recently won a debut fiction prize for Boulevard magazine. He also makes plays and films, teaches at the University of Chicago, and is at work on a novel about Outsider Art. Follow him online at @sboke and sethbockley.com.
