Caffeine

"Uh-oh." I had just drawn out my mug, the brown one with the stylized cats stretching around it, and peered into it. Mya did the dishes last night. We get pests in the house sometimes and I'm usually the one to do the dishes, so I'm careful to put cups and glasses away upside-down, but Mya isn't usually doing the dishes and forgets.

"Mmm?"

I show her the cup. Carefully, because I don't want to wake it. "Look."

Mya peers into the cup, squints a bit. "Oh, dear."

"Yeah. We're going to have to spray."

"Again?"

"The stuff I put down wasn't for that. It works on spiders."

"What will it do to them?"

I give her A Look. "Mya, c'mon. What do you think it'll do?" She stayed at her mom's house for three days after I sprayed for spiders, and still she jumps a foot in the air at barely glimpsed dust bunnies, misidentified hair ties peeking half out from under the sofa and faint breezes that ruffle the fine hair on the back of her neck. Mya doesn't do fabulously well in East Tennessee where the climate is perfect for virtually every bug and beast known to humanity, everything short of moose and penguins. So she stays indoors, and I spray, but she hates it.   

"He's kinda cute though..."

"Sweetie." I reach for the cup.

"No..." She cuddles the cup with the curled up brown dragon in the bottom, itself almost exactly the color of the coffee I want to pour in there. It's facing her, not me, but I can hear a squeak come from the cup. "Oh!"

I wait for the scream, the throw, the jump, the whatever. If it's smaller than a softball Mya is almost pathologically afraid of it, whatever kind of animal life it might be. She finds elephants adorable, thinks a Great Dane the size of a small pony is the perfect pet and believes mice wait in seething millions to torture damned sinners in hell - where both the sinners and, more importantly, the mice belong.

The dragon in the cup is a lot smaller than a softball. It's bigger than a mouse, but not by a large margin. And it squeaks.

It zips out of the cup and halfway up her arm, and squeaks again. 

     A perfect moment of stillness follows as the little creature unfurls and flaps its wings once, twice, and folds them again. It makes little kneading motions with its front legs, like a cat padding at a spot it's about to sleep on. Mya gasps, her breath coming in little hiccups.

"Oh. Oh. Oh."

I move to cup my hands around it, and she shies back. She pulls the arm closer to her and puts her own hand over it. Now it's sheltered in a dark cavern of hand and arm and breast. It pokes its little head out between her protective fingers, tiny claws clinging to her engagement ring.

"Oh my goodness he's so cute."

"Where is this coming from? Aren't you usually hopping up and down and yelling at little critters like this?"

The tiny dragon looks up at her and squeaks again. It isn't a mousy high-pitched squeak either, it's a surprisingly mellow sound for such a little animal.

"Don't hurt him."

"I was just going to toss him outside." Usually that's what I do with spiders when she yells for me to come step on one, or to smash it with a hammer or shoot it with a flamethrower. I just pick up the spiders and carry them outside. Not cockroaches - they get vaporized by size-twelves applied with malice. But spiders and moths and even centipedes? Yeah, they get carried out. I sprayed because she asked me to, but I don't really want the bugs to die. They have their place in the natural order, same as us, even the cockroaches.

I just want Mya not to be frightened.  I love her and her peace of mind is everything to me.  If it makes her feel safe and comfortable, whatever it is, I'll give it a try. It's worth it.

"Don't. Not yet."

"Can I have my cup, then?"

American house dragons - scincidae draco - are considered pests by most people, but there are some folks out there that are fans and raise them. That's the case with everything, really, there are nutjobs out there raising cockroaches too.

I think about what I know about house dragons while my coffee is oozing out of the maker. Mya is toying with the animal and it's walking back and forth on her arm, chasing her fingers as she waggles them at him. Her hair bounces and his attention immediately goes to, then dismisses it. Her earring gets a beady once-over, the dark body scurrying up her arm and leaving a trail of goosebumps as he goes so he can inspect the darkly glistening tigereye stone more carefully.

Coffee cup's full, so I pull the sugar jar out of its usual mooring to drop in the usual half-teaspoon along with the usual half-cup of cream. I like a little coffee in my cream.

A cockroach comes rocketing out from where the sugar jar had stood. Mya's mouth opens to scream, except,

"Get it!" she points at the jittering bug, and the dragon flashes off her shoulder. I swear it moved faster than I believed possible. The roach jinks, zigs and jumps like a skilled quarterback but the little dragon changes direction just as fast, flipping wings and tail to pop side to side and herd the bug away from the shadows until...

crunch.               

"Good boy!" Mya is uncharacteristically delighted. "Well done, you got him!" The little brown dragon munches down the cockroach in a few gulps, passing a black tongue over his lips and then, startlingly, his eyeballs. Mya laughs, charmed, and picks the dragon back up and places him on her shoulder where he goes back to examining her earring which I now realize could be mistaken, from a distance, for a cockroach. She tickles him with a fingertip and giggles when he bats tiny claws at it.

Well. I guess he's not such a pest after all.

"Can I let him stay? If he eats bugs, that means we won't have so many bugs, right?"

It's worth it.  I'll give it a try. "Right." My coffee is perfect. Light, slightly sweet. "What do you want to call him?"

"He's so quick and jittery and he was in your coffee cup, I was thinking..."

-end-   

The Magic of Music

 It makes sense, when you think about it. Magic and music come from similar places, really. As mathematically rigorous as music is, how you order the numbers and operations, as it were, has a big effect on the emotional response it invokes. And magic, when performed by a skilled caster, has a similar echo across the spirit of the world. Because where music works in the hearts of people, magic works in the heart of the earth. And oh, how she does love her music.

I've been touring with a troubadour band for almost as long as I can remember, moving up from banging a tambourine as a lad of five to a steady drummer now at hmmm I think I'm about twenty-three now? And we would go wherever the money seemed to be, sometimes getting it a little wrong. But I've been practicing, learning new songs wherever I can and even picking up instruments - I can even compose a little on a guitar now, and it's great. Better still - with care you can thump a rhythm on the guitar even as you're playing, so it's like I'm still the drummer too.

Don't get paid twice as much for playing two instruments at the same time, ah well.

But then we picked up the wizard. She tells us to call her Wiz, so we do. It feels a little weird; she doesn't look like a Wiz. Or a wizard, for that matter. No beard. And she brought with her a wagon of instruments, including a flute that she plays, some big furniture looking thing that she called a pee-yunno and some other things. She played the flute to audition and was an immediate sign-on, when she played, every flower for about a hundred feet in every direction bloomed brightly while we were watching.

"I thought magic was, you know, spells." We kept it together while she played but honestly by the time she was done with the piece nobody was looking at her. Some of the flowers looked like they were straining to bloom bigger while we watched.

"Well, it is! But nobody ever said the spells had to be words like humans use."

So the wizard joined us and the take got better. WAY better, because when she played crops thrived, gentle rains fell, entire herds of ewes all quickened simultaneously, and it didn't take long for the villages we played for to be really glad to see us. And all these good things didn't happen because the wizard played - I mean, they DID - but because the wizard was playing with us.

"I think it might have something to do with harmonics. You know, how one sound sounds one way and another sound sounds another way, but when you play them together they kind of...mesh? Like gears in a mill? Either sound by itself is nice enough but when they're played together they're a lot more. So I've been looking for a group to join for years so I could really expand what I could do for people, but either their repertoire wasn't very good, or they weren't very good, or we didn't get along..."

"We know about players not getting along. You're our second flautist in two years. The last guy was kind of full of himself."

"That's silly. One flute by itself outdoors? The sound disappears. It absolutely has to have other instruments to give it more weight, make it carry. Your drums are crucial for that."

"That's part of why he's gone. He didn't want any kind of backup, he wanted solos."

"Oh, dear."

"So, magic music. Okay, that makes sense to me but...can anyone do it?"

Wiz made a face. "Sorry, sweetie. Lots of people - especially musicians - ask that, and that's part of why I'm gone from them. They can get kind of pushy, demanding to be shown how it works, you know. If they've learned how to play music and music makes magic, they want to make magic. It's not like that.

"It's like being born left-handed. Right-handers can learn to use the left hand the way left-handed people do, but it's a constant trial and it never becomes natural. You aren't left-handed, you're just using your left hand. Get it?"

"I sure do. I'm left-handed myself. I learned to play drums the way I do because a right-handed guy taught me and I never changed, but force me to eat right-handed and I'll probably stab myself in the eye. I feel my left hand more than I feel my right, does that make sense?"

"You're asking a wizard if that makes sense? Of course it makes sense."

"And I restrung the guitar so I could play it lefty."

"I had noticed. You stand on the opposite side of the group from most guitarists I see."

"So okay, that's that. Magic is a kind of left-handedness, either you are or you aren't and trying to practice magic doesn't make you magical. But like in so many things, teamwork makes magic stronger, even if the only one actually magical is you. Right?"

"Wow, I wish I could have had you in the school. You just skipped a year of minutiae but yeah, that's right."

"What is the big box thing, the pee-yanno. I've never seen one."

"A travelilng minstrel far from any city, I'm not surprised. It's a stringed instrument..."

"No way."

"Absolutely! Come look!" And she lifted the lid on the device, showing enough strings to make an entire village's worth of guitars. "It's a chore keeping the thing in tune on the road, I can tell you."

"How does it work?"

She showed me the keys and the little felt mallets. "Huh. Every note is, uh, distinct. No bending notes into and out of each other like with a guitar."

"True. A piano," and she pronounced the word carefully for me, "hits the exact note, the same way a flute does. But you can really make some big chords with this thing." She demonstrated, banging out a thunderous bar from one end of the row of keys. There was a wet pop as the watermelon on the lunch table exploded. "Oops."

"So what else have you got, Wiz? Anytime a minstrel can play more than one instrument, that's for the best. And you've got a lot here. What's...hey, a bugle."

"Not a bugle, a trumpet. Like a bugle how you blow into it, but it has keys for fingering to change the pitch length of the tube - a bit like bending your strings, but not as flexible. But you get a lot of flexibility back with the mouthpiece. The flute I like doesn't let you bend like a guitar does, but the piano doesn't bend at all. The trumpet lets you bend more than a flute does and when I cast with the trumpet, it really packs a punch."

I felt my eyebrows pop up. "How so?"

"The piano's distinct notes makes very precise music, very precise magic...but magic doesn't like being precise. Magic is a heartfelt experience and while you can be very expressive with the piano, it loses a bit of the artistry in the musician..

"The flute, being powered by my breath, is a lot more personal and the trumpet, with its greater input of nuance in the mouth - very intimate, you know? - is even more so. So the magic really responds to it."

"I think I get it. So a drummer might not be able to make much magic because the drum really only does a few things."

"Exactly. But it goes a long way to enhancing a spell that's underway, never forget. Magic, like music, has a beat, and the drum IS the beat."

I noticed a big misshapen heap of wrappings, carefully secured with a length of cord. "What's hiding under there?"

Wiz suddenly looked a little shifty. "Um...That's a tuba."

"Okay?"

"Like a trumpet. But bigger - way, way bigger."

"What does it sound like?"

"Honestly, it sounds like a whale orgy if you don't know what you're doing. But I know what I'm doing and I don't dare play it."

"How come?"

"You DO remember I'm a music-casting wizard, right? I don't think anybody hereabouts wants a new volcano."

-end-