This is what my days look like at the moment, at least when I'm not working: I sit on the sofa staring at a piece of paper with a phone number on it. You’d be amazed at how much time I can spend like that.
The name above the phone number says Anak Orphanage, where my parents adopted me as a baby.
Hunter is on the sofa beside me, his head on his paws. I'm not relaxing against the dark grey sofa cushions, but leaning forward because I am on the cusp of calling that number—really, I am.
I stare at the paper some more. Next to it is my mobile phone—normally quite a handy tool when it comes to calling phone numbers, or so I’ve heard. The phone works fine, too. It has a full battery, full signal bars, and everything.
The problem is that if I call that number, then I will have called it. That means I’ll have taken the first step towards finding out about my birth parents.
It was a bit of journey to get here, but I've decided it would make sense to find out about them, so I can get a better handle on what the deal is with my magic.
Unfortunately, I don't actually want to find out about them. What if I'm more like them than my parents? What if I have their magical abilities, their looks, their personality? What if all the things that currently connect me so tightly to my parents end up looking tenuous at best, or pathetic at worst? Like I’m deluding myself?
I realise that as a fully grown woman, and a practitioner of magic (weak magic, true, but magic all the same), I should be so badass that this kind of thing doesn’t trouble me. What can I say? Family is enormously important to me.
I stare at the paper some more. If I was a Touched who had kinetic magic, maybe the paper would ‘accidentally’ fly away or spontaneously combust. Not that it would achieve much given that all I need is a Google search to get that number again.
Hunter lets out a low whine. I turn to him. We have just returned from a two-hour long trek up in the volcanic hills of Panong, so I can't reasonably take the whine as a sign that Hunter needs to go out. Unfortunately.
Instead, I take this as a sign that I need to practise my magic. I reach out for him. It takes me a moment, but suddenly Hunter perks up, looking me in the eye. I grin—we’ve connected. For some reason it really is a lot easier for me to achieve this when the proverbial has hit the fan, and I’m up to my eyeballs in trouble. I’ve been practising religiously though, and I’m getting better at connecting with Hunter. Sometimes I can now even use that instead of calling him when we’re out walking, given that calling him by voice achieves precisely nothing. It still takes a lot of concentration on my part, though.
As to using my magic on objects I’m not yet familiar with, that’s still very much a work in progress. I’ve stared hard enough at lampposts or bins to give myself a headache, but without achieving anything much. The fact that I’m improving with Hunter is encouraging, though.
I stroke his velvet head, his silky ears. “It's a bit rubbish sitting here, isn't it?”
As I speak, out of the corner of my eye I catch a speck of dirt on the floor. I immediately get up. I'm definitely a clean freak, and I can't stand any dirt inside my house. Lucky that my magic helps with that, because with a golden retriever and numerous small animals living out in my courtyard, in normal circumstances it would be hard to keep the house pristine.
When I first moved in, the place was a disaster, not fit to use as storage, let alone to live in—hence why I pay a pittance for it. There was mould everywhere, on account of the innumerable leaks, and the place stank of rot and damp. Many of the floor tiles were broken, too, as were two of the windows.
It took a lot of elbow grease and a serious amount of magic, but now it’s a cosy little house in the traditional Old Town layout. Which means the house itself is just about as wide as a room, with a single bedroom and bathroom upstairs, a living/dining area downstairs, and a kitchen that opens out onto my very own little courtyard.
I hurry to the kitchen to break out the cleaning supplies. That smudge of dirt, real or imaginary… Well, let's be honest, it's highly likely to be imaginary. Cleaning is my preferred avoidance tactic, and I have been avoiding calling the orphanage for a couple of weeks now.
Which means you could get on all fours and lick the entire floor of my house without coming across any dirt or bacteria. I'm even running dangerously low on floor cleaner. Which means I need to make more!
Catastrophes are born from less than that. (The cleaner is a secret family recipe, passed down by my mother. No, I won’t share it.)
I hum to myself as I pull out the plethora of cleaners, rags, cloths, and sponges. Cleaning is as much about the music as it is about the cleaning itself, naturally, so after washing my hands I spend an inordinate amount of time riffling through my records to select the perfect accompanying album. I sniff a couple of records just for fun—I just love the smell of vinyl mixed with old paper and cardboard. It conjures up images of old jazz clubs, blaring trumpets, girls in flapper dresses dancing the Swing and the Charleston.
My record player is an ancient one that I renovated using my magic, and it produces a sweeter sound than anything modern you could buy in a shop. I can feel its anticipation as I lift its cover. I select a swing record by Akio Tanaka, an artist I recently discovered, whose piano riffs I love. I remove the lining, careful not to crinkle it, the vinyl whispering as it slides against the paper.
Yes, I know, as a record lover I should be storing my records in plastic sleeves—but you try buying anything made of plastic when your mother's a conservation biologist.
Akio Tanaka is just launching into one of his amazingly fast and accomplished piano solos when there's a knock at the door.
At this rate, between the interruption, the cleaning I still have to do, and the need to make more floor cleaner, there's no chance I'll get to ring that number before it's time to go to work.
Shame…
