Blackberry Magic

Blackberry Magic Madeline Thomas, Third Place

Runa’s father placed a steady hand on her knee as a final reminder to stop fidgeting.

The strangers that wandered through her grandmothers’ living room likely mistook his intention as condolence, a gentle touch to his child on the day his wife’s grandmother intended to pass. None could guess at the storm brewing behind the eight-year-old’s narrowed eyes. When she squirmed again, Nelson finally turned an eye in her direction and shook his head with microscopic precision. She recognized that look: Not now, Runa. She inferred through his subtlety: Don’t make a scene, Runa. She guessed the final conclusion, his favorite admonishment:

Not everything is about you, Runa. The unspoken words echoed through her chest with unusual sting; while she normally pretended to accept his attempts to reform her behavior, on this particular day everything was absolutely and irrevocably meant to be about her. His audacity rendered her speechless. Did he imply that something held greater importance than she did, on her birthday?

The only time she would ever pass from seven to eight? The one day her parents allowed Runa to dictate every aspect of their lives, a privilege they withheld on every other day of the year? How dare he shatter the only day of bliss she could ever expect? But even at eight, Runa understood that the stubbornness that grew like vines up her spine belonged to her father first, and she settled back into the rose covered couch with crossed arms. He granted his attention back to tiny Mari, who colored in jagged lines with crayons Grandma Kathy kept stored in a wicker basket. And Runa knew that the villain who ruined her birthday wore a much different face than her tired father. She knew that face to be covered in wrinkles, bruises, and the matte pink lipstick she reserved for guests in her shared trailer home. Before the litany of community members appeared in the long gravel driveway to say their goodbyes and peer into the witches’ hovel for the first and final time, Great-grandma Amelia gathered her large family in her small bedroom to announce her plans for the day. She made four requests: a threehour open house that had been announced on flyers and social media weeks before, a final meal consisting of waffles and fresh blackberries from the bushes out back, that Kathy open her window so the ravens could bear witness to the processions, and that the family return to the bedroom at 3pm to receive her final words.

While the mayor of their Podunk town shook Amelia’s hand and thanked her for the remedies that cured his favorite cow’s mastitis, Runa checked her electric blue watch a final time. Ten more minutes until the random people disappeared from the room. One of her aunts mixed the waffle mix and washed the blueberries in the kitchen. The ravens cawed through the open window. Runa only needed to wait for the crone to deliver her final words, and then her family could return across the field to their own home and get to the day’s most important events. Great-grandma had been talking about the day of her death for forty years, and Runa was tired of sharing July 17th with a stupid prophecy.

Less than an hour later, Runa dragged her good church shoes across the brown carpet until she stood beside Amelia’s bed with all the Wylan cousins. Out of habit, her fingers found the animal heads carved into the side of the headboard and began to trace until they came to rest on the smooth head of the raven. She pretended not to listen as Great-grandma called her out from the lineup of family and bequeathed her entire collection of writings to the girl barely able to read. She stared out the window as the crone demanded that no one else lay eyes on her work for as long as they live or risk the most heinous of her curses. No one asked her to specify exactly which torture or grisly death or foul fortune she imagined. The labored breath with which Amelia made her final request convinced them, once and for all, of the validity of her first and greatest prophecy. Runa only looked at her after the old-lady breath stopped assaulting her nose, and empty eyes stared back. She turned to her parents and extended family gathered in the room.

“Can I have my birthday party now?”

Her mother flushed and sighed and led her out of the room. Runa didn’t notice the tears creeping out of the corners of Elsie’s eyes or the way all her aunts shook their heads as the pair passed. Her father waited outside for the hand-off of the problem child, little precious Mari already standing slightly behind him, afraid of death and of too many people and especially of Runa in one of her moods. He walked the girls back across the green hayfield to their own ranch style farmhouse, shooing at the ravens that followed them from Greatgrandma’s yard. In the entryway, Nelson picked the hay from their Sunday best; the minute her father finished his monkey-like grooming, Runa bolted down the hall and peeled off the green memory of her ruined day. To replace the crumpled dress, she donned a t-shirt and her favorite pair of overalls. While she changed, she strained her ears to listen for the squeak of the back door to mark the rest of the family joining the party. By the time she bounced back to Mari and Nelson in the kitchen, his steady sketching hands held a lighter in front of her cake. No one else stood in the room, and Runa moved around the island as if they were going to jump out and surprise her. He asked if she wanted to wait another few hours until they were done at the grandmothers’, but she shook her head. If they weren’t going to prioritize her, they didn’t deserve a slice of her cake. Mari and Nelson sang a quiet version of happy birthday, and she

blew out eight squiggly purple candles she’d picked out the week before. While he cut the cake, Runa looked up at her father.

“Why is mom choosing Great-grandma over me on my birthday?”

Nelson breathed a familiar sigh. “Your mom has always been very close to her grandmother. You will have many birthdays, but a person only passes away once. She’ll be here as soon as she can to celebrate.”

Runa blew out the candles without responding and felt the room pulsate with her father’s quiet disappointment. She ate a piece of funfetti cake in front of the television cartoon too violent for Mari, who her father sequestered in the kitchen. At the end of her piece and the episode, she wandered back to the kitchen, bored without feeling like she stood on center stage as Mari colored scribbles in her dollar-store dinosaur coloring book and her father unloaded a still-steaming dishwasher with his fogged-over glasses sitting atop his shaggy brown hair. Runa cocked one hip in the doorway, watching for their eyes like the most desperate patron at karaoke night. She dared them to look, and she dared them not to. Finally, she faked a sneeze that radiated through Mari’s jumpy spine.

When all eyes fell on her, she smiled. “I want you to come play with me in the blackberry tunnels. There’s a new game I made up that needs three people.”

While Mari begged their father for permission, Runa turned to the door, sure with the wisdom of two whole birthdays in her memory that her every wish would soon be granted. Her father’s voice lowered a gate across her path with all the flashing lights of a train crossing; his wait sent her hands clenching in and out, in and out. She faced away as he said something about being there for Elsie and playing more tomorrow and respecting the memory of her great grandmother on the day of her passing. All in all, several stupid somethings. She willed herself through timetested limits on her father’s expectation of acknowledgment, granting attention back to the kitchen only when the clank of Corelle dinnerware broke the silence. She slunk past the island and kicked the back of Mari’s chair on her way before she sprinted down the hall and slammed her bedroom door behind her. For the rest of the afternoon, she refused to come out, finally emerging when her mother returned and attempted to coax her with macaroni and hotdogs, her most favorite meal, which also happened to be her father’s most detested. She debated the offer with her council of stuffed animals, who strengthened her resolve to protest on principle. When Mr. Raven tapped at the window to offer his council, she let him convince her to join the family and the creaky dining room table. At the same time, he taught her the meaning of traitorous, so she ate her meal in silence.

Years passed and Runa grew in height, freckles, and, to her parents’ great relief, independence. Summer months spent dragging Mari through thorny fortresses and cow-ridden woods transformed to sneaking away while her sister ate her slow morning meal. She mastered her ninja-fueled ability to make it away before

her parents demanded she include the eager deadweight in her plans, with Mr. Raven and his friends as her only companions. To bring Mari meant to walk slowly, to bring bandages that prevented tears when blackberry bushes drew blood, and to carry the girl back through the hayfield when her short legs gave up on the hike back home, but the worst offense was the endless questions that highlighted the disparity between seven and ten years of life. As Runa developed boundless energy, Mari seemed to waste away; her body regressed in development, growth halted, naps became necessary multiple times a day once again. More and more often at the dinner table, Runa saw her father’s forehead and nose wrinkled under his glasses, and her mother’s face hang droopy and downcast like it hadn’t since Greatgrandma’s funeral. The house developed a cloud of pungent dread that Runa avoided as if it were a disease that could leech the joy from her limited summer days, when even the thought of returning to school threatened the delicate balance of complete freedom. She knew something: Mari’s weakness hurt everyone, but Runa refused to be dragged down by her sister’s incompetence. Mari needed to grow up and run around and work hard to be healthy, and she chose not to. The world was that simple in Runa’s mind. The light that filtered in from the woods behind her house became the lifeblood of summer, the fresh breeze against the stifling question of what comes next. Her ravens became the companion her sister always failed to be, the companions her parents never wanted to become. She sometimes wondered if they were the same ravens that attended Amelia’s funeral, but never asked.

When the doctors’ appointments started, worried, weepy Grandma Kathy offered her services to parents convinced that eleven-yearold Runa couldn’t be left alone. They seemed to forget that she existed without any supervision almost twelve hours a day, their concern for Runa a mere habit whenever Mari needed help, which happened to be always. After more than a month all but living in the caves she’d carved from the huge expanse of blackberries, Runa found herself corralled to the tiny mobile home and her grandmother’s smothering attention. Though the trailer rested even closer to the blackberry tunnels and woods than her own home, Grandma Kathy still believed in quiet afternoons learning womanly skills, and none of those involved tramping through the underbrush like a heathen child. When Runa was young and would complain to her mother about Kathy’s straight nature, she learned that when the woman hadn’t inherited her mother’s gifts she chose a path of rebellion. To the witch that spent hours rooting through the woods for ingredients, sewing and flower arranging seemed like the greatest waste to her daughter’s potential. Kathy’s husband and seven daughters, however, served a great purpose— another chance for an heir. She didn’t find one in her granddaughters either. Eventually, Kathy lost patience for teaching Runa the wonders of crochet and began to leave her to her own, indoor, devices. One evening in late August, as the gnat watered plants in the back, Runa found herself standing outside the only place in the house with any potential left for discovery. Something stopped her typical

barreling trajectory; when she opened the door to her great-grandmother’s room, she almost understood the Sunday-driven concept of reverence.

Hazy young memories regained clarity. Runa took a few steps toward the bed and touched the raven carved into the wood, and something her anger had kept her from appreciating on her eighth birthday came flooding back: Great-grandma Amelia’s last words. While the idea of reading normally sent Runa running for the woods, the mystery of the unread journals of a witch, meant only for her eyes, excited her senses like nothing but adventure could. She scrambled over the top of the dusty bed to the low bookshelf that served as an end-table on the other side. Dozens of journals filled the bottom shelf, in every form imaginable, from huge leatherbound volumes to dollar store notebooks and a stack of note-ridden napkins of varying sizes. Out of the bunch, Runa selected a purple spine and pulled, revealing an inspirational scripture inscribed on the butterfly covered cover. She wiped the dust off with the end of her t-shirt, plopped down to the floor, and opened the cover of the book while holding her breath. Though nothing flew out of the pages as she hoped it would, what she found on the opening pages sparked magic all the same.

While she expected endless spells scrawled in hand-dipped ink, what she found captivated her like simple words never could. Inside the lined pages, she found sketches that refused to follow college-ruled order, sprawling images of plants, animals, and clouds, along with the occasional familiar face. In all the spaces left open by the sketches, she uncovered words, spiraling lists, and lines covering everything from the history and folklore surrounding animals to all the known medicinal uses for every plant. It took Runa several moments to locate the spells she sought, built into the fibers of the sketches themselves. Where a finch flew across the page, tiny words formed the feathers and trails of air left behind. Where a young German Shepherd’s ears perked, spikes of hair outlined a cure for insomnia. A focused view on a grasshopper’s face showed the combination of actions that would lead to long lasting eyesight. The deeper Runa spiraled into the patterns laid out in the journal, the more her hunger grew; even without finishing the first she pulled more journals from the shelves and began to compare. In the casual notebooks and napkins she found what seemed to be sudden sparks of inspiration, ideas for sketches and spells alike. Consistently, she found them repeated in hardback versions with complete art and researched magic. The lack of recognizable pattern enslaved her focus. She spent the next four hours matching rough ideas to their final forms, finding a match of some kind for every half-baked idea other than one. On an old fast-food sack, in bright red ink, lay five simple words: “a remedy for long life.”

Before Runa could reexamine the journals to see if she missed anything, Grandma Kathy called to her from the other room. Runa felt a flash of guilt before realizing her right to the journals. Grandma didn’t seem to notice the mess on the bed and floor, barely registering her granddaughter’s presence even as she

directly addressed her.

“Runa, darling, your parents are here to take you home. They have something important to tell you.” Her fat cheek showed no signs of the dimples Runa believed were carved into the woman’s face like stone.

The cloud from her own house settled over Grandma’s in an instant, and Runa knew the world shifted around her even as she closed the cover of the nearest journal and stood. Anything that could mellow the forced cheer in her grandmother’s voice represented a terrifying force, and Mr. Raven at the window agreed. She folded up the bag and slipped it into her pocket. When she climbed inside her parent’s car, she tried to ignore that both parents refused to look at her. The car seemed to limp the quarter mile back to their own garage.

Mom ran a bath for Mari complete with bubbles and her favorite ladybug towel. As a finishing touch, she moved the kitchen speaker to the bathroom counter and began to play bouncy cartoon music; even when the door closed the sound of Mari’s careful singing spilled into the hall. Mom took Runa by the hand and pulled her into the distant living room where Dad sat waiting. While the red rims under Mom’s eyes belonged as much as any of the family pictures that lined the walls, the dried tears under Nelson’s felt like a bear rummaging through the kitchen cabinets. Runa fingered the sack in her pocket and lowered herself slowly to the couch. Mom sat so close her breath caused the baby hairs on her head to flutter and turned her eyes to her husband, ever the bearer of disappointment and bad news.

He took a chest swelling breath while his hand reached for the hair on the back of his head. Runa watched, enraptured by the discord that surrounded the man she always pictured as a living statue. For the first time, the dark cloud overhead held electricity, the power to destroy rather than depress. Catching some breeze of determination, Dad leaned forward and placed his elbows on his knees.

“Runa, I know you’ve noticed how sick Mari’s been and how many doctor’s appointments we’ve gone to trying to make her better. We left you out of those conversations because we weren’t sure that you were ready to deal with everything. But we received some news today that we felt we had to share.” His legs began to bounce, or shake, Runa couldn’t decide. “Mari is dying, Run. There’s nothing they can do to help her.”

While her parents watched with eyes that begged her to fall apart, everything off with the world clicked into place. The ominous cloud hanging over Mari and the house. The days spent carrying her through the woods. The turkey vultures that circled the yard at all times. The ways her parents shunted her out of the way whenever Mari fell or cried or sneezed too hard. Long hours spent in the old lady smell of Grandma’s. All her aunts who came to visit far more often than ever before. Nelson’s loosening of rules or care or general disappointment and his loss of interest in his architecture. Elsie’s switch from constant health to comfort food. Their fight sessions held late in the night, when they hoped the vast living room

prevented either daughter from listening in. The unrooted, ethereal nature Mari took on over recent months that Runa had once considered a trick of the light but that she now believed represented the approach of death. The mumbles that Mr. Raven uttered under his breath whenever Mari came near but never repeated for Runa’s understanding.

The implications of death arrived late to the gathering. Though most of her memories painted Mari as little more than a buzzing bee floating around and blocking her paths, she also knew that much less color would exist in the world without her yellow and black stripes. Grandma Kathy used to joke that Mari became Runa’s perfect shadow, milder and less defined, but a spitting image all the same. Now, it clicked into place with the lack of substance Mari possessed in her body, just as the intangible nature of a shadow existed but didn’t, all at the same time. The metaphor fell into line just as everything else did, but a singular image circled through her mind and hit like little else could. She reimagined a familiar scene. Runa walked through the hayfield just after harvest, when only the remnants of dried alfalfa remained after baling and pickup. The sun hung lazily in the western sky. She turned to see the familiar shape of her shadow distorted on the bumpy field, but the sun reached every inch of the ground behind her. She spun in a circle to find the darkness so integral to her being she barely noticed it — except for when it vanished. Panic rose in her chest, panic which translated to the tangible world her parents watched from and she soon rejoined. Mother wrapped an arm around her and clung tight, descending into tears as Runa blinked away a few of her own. Father crossed the distance from the opposite couch and grabbed her from the other side in an embrace that clarified the end of everything known and sure in the world. Mari continued singing in the bathroom. Runa, for the first time, contemplated the dangers in loving a sister.

As Runa stared up at the stars through the window of her room that night, the words printed on Amelia’s bag flew back to her mind. A spell for long life. Her great-grandmother, brilliant and frail and magic, who lived to be 104 years old and accurately predicted her own death, possessed in her mind some sort of ward against early death, the exact kind of cure that would save Runa’s shadow. She tapped at the window for Mr. Raven, with whom she communed in the night in a plea to his wisdom that she finally connected with Greatgrandma’s life and death. Tomorrow, the search for the answer could begin in earnest, but her eyelids grew too heavy to care anymore that night.

Runa spent the next week tearing through every journal, every note, every page to try to find the drawing that linked to the only unfinished spell in the whole collection and came up with nothing. On the second day, her mother asked why she moved Greatgrandma’s collection to her room, but she kept her pursuit hidden as if speaking it out loud might eliminate the possibility of success. The second week she searched through all the finished spells for anything else that might save her shadow but uncovered nothing beyond

cures for chronic diarrhea and warding off evil spirits. She tried the second one, just in case what destroyed Mari came from outside rather than within. When she stole matches from the kitchen to light the dried herbs in her straw bound bundle, her father caught her and forbade the use of fire without direct supervision but asked no further questions. She rejected Mari’s requests to build puzzles or play pretend. The third week she decided to test simple spells with fast results to see if her efforts held even the slightest potential for success; if a long-life spell existed, could it even work? Her blackberry bush caves became her testing ground for defined magic. In her first success, she summoned an animal using its image— Mr. Raven watched as she lined up three stuffed rabbits, which after a short incantation yielded three young bunnies that hopped through the tunnel entrance and into the cave. They sat and watched for the rest of the day. Her second spell grew a plant in an hour, with little more than a direct ray of sunlight, salt, and intense concentration. Her confidence grew. The raven watched with impossible curiosity as she weaved her way through simple tasks that cemented, in her mind, her great-grandmother’s credibility. The fourth week she searched through the journals once again. The fifth week she started experimenting with spells of her own.

The only moral line she drew at the mouth of her tunnel specified that she not take the life of anything living in the pursuit of a cure. The next logical step led her to scavenge in the forest with Mr. Raven for something dead. Her luck came with the companionship of her family dog, who scared Mr. Raven into a tree but also dug up a deer leg left behind by a hunter. It stank like the garbage neither parent remembered to take out any longer, and she would have preferred a whole something dead, but after a wasted day spent searching for another option, she found herself in her cave with all the ingredients she could gather from her grandmother’s journals and the leg. She combined and focused, burned with more stolen matches, mixed and pounded and swirled and cut and crushed, but whenever she introduced the dead flesh or bone into a process all magic seemed to leech away. Through all her experiments, she came to understand a single truth: death opposed magic. Without death as an ingredient, her well of ideas ran hopelessly dry.

Runa returned home that afternoon despondent and dirty, so odiferous that her father looked at her for the first time that day and demanded she immediately go shower. She let the hot water roll over her failure of a body until the pads of her fingers wrinkled completely. When she finally emerged steam completely obscured both the mirror and door and she sat in quasi blindness and silence and tried to forget the way it felt to cut hair and flesh off of a bone of an animal that days before had pranced and frolicked through a field in perfect belief of life. Mari still didn’t know her death approached more surely than her next birthday would. Runa left the bathroom wrapped in a black towel and took the long steps to her bedroom without looking toward the kitchen, where in one of her few good hours Mari helped their mom prepare to bake

monster cookies on the island. Once dressed, Runa fell back into one of Great-grandma Amelia’s journals, the one that focused on exotic mammals and exotic remedies. If she could only get her hands on a few of those hard-to-find ingredients…

Mr. Raven tapped on the window just as Mari opened the door and peeked her head into the room. Runa slammed her book closed and looked from the girl to the bird, who watched each other with cocked heads. The girl moved past the strange appearance of the bird first.

“Will you bake cookies with me and Mom? She won’t let me come find you in the blackberry tunnels anymore, and I want to play.” Mari stared over at Runa with wide deerling eyes, the exact eyes Runa pictured as she hacked apart the deer leg that afternoon.

She considered finding an excuse not to but gave in the unspoken pleas radiating from Mari’s hunched posture. “Sure, Mar. I’ll come in a minute.”

The girl left the door cracked as she shuffled away. Runa flitted to the window to ask Mr. Raven why he came, but by the time she reached it all that remained of the bird was a single black feather, which he generally made an effort to never leave behind. She reached out and pocketed it, wondering if she might find use for it later.

In the kitchen, the ingredients lined the counter with the accuracy of the recipe, the exact pattern of usage-first that Runa used to lay out ingredients for Great Grandma’s spells. She realized then that the habit must come from Mom, who hummed a show tune at the sink as she rinsed one of their measuring cups for reuse. She set Runa to level off Mari’s scoops of sugar and flour, baking soda and salt while she preheated the oven and prepared the baking sheets. Somewhere from the last time the sisters baked together Mari moved past the “let me do it” phase of growing up and often uttered “show me” -- words that appealed to Runa’s quiet narcissism like nothing else. Once the dry ingredients swirled with wet in the stand mixer and various forms of chocolate joined the mix, a final idea whizzed through Runa’s mind. What if Great-grandma never wrote down the spell because it could only work on herself? What if only your own magic could elongate your life? What if the key to Mari’s cure lay in Mari herself? The more her mind sniffed and inspected the idea the more traction it gained until the prospect of teaching Mari how to stay in the world proved too good to keep to herself any longer.

“Mom, can I start taking Mari out to the blackberry tunnels with me? I’ll carry her across the field and make sure she doesn’t get too tired or scratched up or hurt and I’ll be sure to be back by dark–”

Mom looked up from scooping dough into perfect balls. “Really?”

Runa nodded with gusto.

“That sounds great, if Mari feels up to it.”

Mari stared at Runa with narrow-eyed disbelief. Slowly, as no prankish grin broke over Runa’s face, they started to widen until her small frame thrummed in anticipation.

The next morning Runa kept her promise and carried Mari, along with one of Great-grandma’s earliest journals, to the blackberry cave that hid her collection of ingredients. Before explaining, Runa asked Mari to swear on the heart of her favorite Teddy Bear that she would never tell a soul what she saw or learned that day. Once they reached an agreement, the work began in earnest. Together, they worked through some of the simplest spells Runa learned early in the month. Together, they mixed and pounded and swirled and cut and crushed. It took more than a week for Mr. Raven to convince Runa that Mari possessed no talent for spells or magic. It took Mari growing too weak to leave bed to convince her to stop trying. One night, near the end, Runa lay next to Mari in bed with their parents long asleep. Drowsiness had just begun to lay its gentle fingers over Runa as Mari’s voice emerged in the darkness.

“Why doesn’t Mr. Raven like me? He only comes around when he thinks I’m not looking or nearby.”

Runa opened her eyes. Without responding, she rose and padded down the hall to her own room and the side table that held the feather he’d given her a few weeks before. She returned and placed it in her sister’s shadowy hand.

“He loves you. He’s never given me a feather before, and he left this the day you met at the window a few weeks ago. He says they bring good luck.”

Mari rolled over, satisfied with black feather in hand. Runa fell asleep with her arm beneath her sister’s head.