I’m sure my face is beat red, in part from the exertion of our finger wrestling and in part from my not being able to move an 88-year-old lady’s little finger a millimeter. My whole hand shook like crazy. But did hers? Not a bit. Embarrassing to say the least. 

“Good,” Anna says, nodding her approval when we finally call the truce.

“Good?” I nearly cry out, massaging my poor finger. “I didn’t move you a bit.”

“But you held your own,” she said, seeming to think this is really worthy, “and you were not writing in pain, either.”

“That was probably more due to you than me,” I argue with a pout.

Anna smiles wryly. “Probably.”

“So what did that tell you? Could you feel Magic in me yet?”

“Oh yes, yes indeed,” she says proudly. “You’re a natural. It won’t be long before…” She trails off, noticing a butterfly has landed on her medicine bag.

“Before?” I urge.

She watches it until it flies off, then turns her attention back to me. “Before you are ready to get me out of here without causing a stir. It will take Magic to do so without Helene sensing it. Your magic.”

Immediately, I panic. Cover an old lady’s break from a nursing home without a powerful magician woman knowing? It’s not like she’s asking me to turn five-day-old bread into fresh French toast. Even that is still a trick for me.

“I don’t know how I would, how I could,” I stammer.

“I don’t know either,” she admits. “But Magic knows. If Magic wants something, it will help and show you the way. You can be sure of that.”

“But I’ll work with Michael on it, and Jake, too right?” At least that would be some comfort.

“Indeed, you were shown just that. But were you shown that you would be required to do this behind my back, and Bea’s, or was that just an assumption you made? It makes a difference.”

“Well, I guess I just assumed, since Bea said there was no way, and you seemed to say so too, that if we… Yeah, I guess I did assume. All that was really clear was that Jake and Michael and I would work together. I mean, I got the feeling from Jake that we would do it even if you didn’t like it, but he –or, rather, Magic—didn’t say you couldn’t be in on it, if you were willing.”

“A good lesson in and of itself, isn’t it?” she points out. “We must always listen for exactly what is being said, and only that. Then, we must separate our own ideas and fears from it to know how to best proceed. Now, do you feel this feat of wonder would be better served with all of us behind it?”

“Totally,” I blurt out without a moments hesitation. Relief washes over me. Two old ladies and three young people against one bad woman? Already the odds are much, much better.

“It will still be yours to create,” Anna says, as if she has again been eavesdropping on my thoughts. “Your task will be to listen to Magic for guidance and then plan accordingly. In fact, I sense it to be a kind of test for you. Do you also sense that?”

Do I sense a test? Like what hasn’t been a frickin test since all this started? “Yes,” is all I say out loud.

Anna nods. “Then we must treat it a such. I suggest we make it a grand finale to your summer and Michael’s visit. That way, Magic will be appeased that the time will indeed come, and it will also allow you and Michael as much time as possible to learn. How does that sound?”

“Like a huge relief. And scary. That’s only three weeks from now.”

Again Anna smiles. “Both are appropriate responses.”

“But how does it sound to you?” I ask. “Like three weeks is forever, knowing you will finally get out of here? I mean, this place must be killing you. You are so alive and it is so… so not alive.”

“It is worth it,” she says, looking up through the trees and into the sky.

“For us to learn Magic?”

“Yes, for you three, and those who will come after you. Also for Magic, because this is what she wishes.”

I take a deep breath and dare continue with what I feel, somehow, I just have to know. “Do you ever feel it’s unfair, that you are out here once this week for a few minutes, when Bea gets to look up at the sky every day?”

“Bea is sturdier than I am,” she says, sounding a bit sad, but not jealous or angry. 

“But you just finger wrestled me and you’re strong!” I argue.

“I’m not strong, I’m skilled. There is a difference. I can concentrate all of my strength into my finger, and for a time, I can do amazing things. Rather, Magic can do it through me. But my constitution is weaker than Bea’s.”

“But why? You’re the same age, and you both have magic?”

“You see how smart you are dear Mayden? You already know my weakness isn’t solely because of my aging humanity. Don’t you?”

“I guess,” I say, not really sure.

“You simply don’t have a reasonable context for why I might be so much more frail than my twin and so you can’t find the logic you need for your understanding. Hence, you think you don’t know. But you know, yes?”

Again I’m confused. “What do you mean?”

“Tell me, what do you know, not in your head, but in your very being, about my frailty?”

I try to think, but nothing comes. “I don’t know.”

“You do!” she insists sternly.

I think for another minute, really concentrating, then remember how Bea always says the gut knows. I tune in the way she taught me, by breathing my thinking into my belly and letting it spread to all the cells of my body. What do I know? What do I know? What do I…

“Your work is somewhere else,” I say in a quick jumble. “Isn’t it?”

Anna beams. “Ha! Indeed I do. Spot on dear girl!”

Chills run through me every which way. I just did it. I knew something I had no way of knowing. I just knew it. “That was so weird,” I say.

“Weird? Why? Isn’t this what Bea is teaching you?”

“Yes, but, before, I’d know things just out of the blue, not because I was trying to know. This time, I tried to know, and I knew. It’s different.”

“Yes, it is,” she agrees.

“So, what do you do, I mean, where do you work?”

“In other worlds,” she says, again looking up. “I do like it here, and earth has been good to me, all in all. Bea loves it here, though. She is an earth mama through and through. So I have always done the majority of the otherworld work, and it has taxed my body in a way she hasn’t had to endure.”

 “So when you seem out of it,” I ponder even as I ask, “and sort of seem gone, you really are gone?”

“I really am.”

“What do you do, in the other worlds I mean?”

She sighs and looks me in the eyes, as if searching for how much to say. “You either wouldn’t believe me, or if you did believe me, you would be saddened. So perhaps it is not a good idea to speak of it.”

Anyone else, I’d just feel baited and want to know all the more. But I trust Anna, and I’ve already learned enough to know if she says it will make me sad, it will. Still, I think I want to know. Maybe even need to know.

“I’ll be okay,” I say. “It’s probably best to know, instead of worry about it and make up my own theories that are probably worse.”

“Wise and gifted,” she says, shaking her head at me.

I think that is probably the fifth compliment I’ve had from her since I arrived today. And that so not like my normal life. “So?” I ask.

“As you know, our Magic offers us the gift of shapeshifting. We draw unique strength and power from our animal counterparts and are deeply in touch with their spirits.”

“Yes,” I say, leaning in to hear her better. I’ve noticed several times she seems to speak of these things in lower tones, like someone might be listening, or maybe it’s just because of the awe she feels.

“The animals of this earth are dying out. More than half of all the species alive, on land and in sea, will migrate off this planet in the very near future. In tune with nature, they see what is coming here, and have no reason to return. Since I can vouch for them being such good inhabitants of earth, and I am able to translate between animals and other species, I am helping them find new homes.”

“Homes?”

Again she gives me that wary look. “On other planets, as well as places that are not places at all.”

She looks at me to see if I’m with her. I am, but she’s right, it’s hard to believe. And sad beyond measure if it is true. It think of Scottie, and what it would be if she didn’t want to be here on planet earth, and had never come to be with me. What if my kids never had a kitten to play with? Or a puppy? I feel a great lump chest, and like my heart can’t really beat right.

“It’s because of us, isn’t it?” I ask. “We humans.”

“Collectively,” she clarifies, “not individually.”

“What do you mean?”

“Another concept that is hard to explain. Ah, I know! Do you know how a large school of fish turns direction all at once, thousands of them at the exact same moment?”

“Sure,” I say.

“That is also how cultures within humanity turn. We don’t see it that way, individually, because we have a fish-eye perspective most of the time. But we really are the same. We think we are outside of this collective thought process, but we are not. We have an animal nature, too, after all.”

I know I must look confused.

“For example,” she explains, “how many of you young people have those little music boxes and wires that stick in your ears?”

I shrug, “It’s just how we listen to music.”

“But how many. Ten? A thousand? No, there are millions of you now I hear. All of you, turning like the fish in the same direction at once.”

“And that is bad? Music is bad?”

“Of course not, music is wonderful. This is just an example of the turning. The turning is neither good or bad, and the individual would surely say he or she is good within the turning of what you might call a fad or a trend. But who leads the thought that suggests the turn?”

“I don’t know, lots of people put things out there. Some catch on, some don’t. So don’t we all sort of decide, together?”

“Yes, exactly, as do the fish. But it is not solely by a conscious choice. A part of you decides that you will buy this thing, or that, on a specific day, and you think you bought it because you decided to. In reality, another part of you—a less conscious part deep inside you—decided to purchase it without thinking before you knew it. Same for the majority of the other creatures of your culture who started to turn toward buying it at the same time you did.”

“We didn’t all just decide at once?”

“Yes, but at a level that is decided before your conscious decision. Yet anyone you ask about their purchase will say they made the choice on their own, because humanity, and especially this culture, finds individual choice a great value and what separates us from the animals. It is our own folly, to think we have left behind the strong impulses of collective behavior.”

“So it’s collective. Why is that a problem?”

“When we don’t take into account this collective turning, we are doomed to be led without knowing. Without knowing, we are turning to the messages of our most basic instincts, not the higher ones we tend to chose after a genuine search of on our own values.

“So you think there is this great conspiracy or something?”

“Maybe, maybe not. I only know what while each individual doctor intends to heal a patient, when you put a collective of doctors together, there will be decisions that make doctors look like criminals.”

“Like?”

“Like keeping old women drugged and locked up in places like this, and calling it nursing care. Collectively, this place does not nurse or heal us. It tolerates us. It doesn’t begin that way. There are lovely apartments and vital lives in attractive settings if you get here young and healthy. But if you get sick, or come in late, you know you’re going down a cattle chute towards death. Ask around my floor, if you can get a response, you’ll learn that no one expects to leave the highest level of “care” offered here. Not a single nurse in there would harm any one of us individually. But you’ve seen how they act when they are treating us like we are one of many people to feed and bathe. It’s not abuse, but it’s not nursing, and it is not care.”

Now my gut is in full churn. This is exactly why I’ve wanted to get her out of here. But she’s right, she is an individual to me. I’m not trying to get them all out. “I guess they have to,” I say, “it’s their job and there are a lot of people and a lot to do.”

The whole thing makes me feel sick. I don’t like to think about it. But maybe that’s why I don’t. It makes me wonder if Dad does. Well, yes, I know he does. He talks about it. How he does better than the other guys. And he does. But that doesn’t mean Anna isn’t right. It isn’t nursing, and it isn’t care. If Dad would look at each individual, and not rationalize it, he’d have to admit that.

“I see you are understanding my point,” Anna says. “Individually, most of us make good and wise and caring choices. Collectively, we don’t, in part because we can’t find a way to. Individually, we love and care for others and are willing to sacrifice. Collectively, we have a culture that values making money and success and power and prestige. They are our collective bottom line. Individually, we love our animals. Collectively, we treat them as beneath us, mere pets. We don’t see them for what they are, or could be to us.”

That’s right. This was about the animals, and her work off the planet, which suddenly sounds even more bizarre than before. “So you are saying it’s our fault they are leaving, collectively but not individually?”

“I’m saying we as a collective humanity are at a destructive phase of growth, and like an unruly teenager with beer and keys to the car. Not like you, of course, dear, but you know this kind of friend I am sure. Collectively, we are like that, too young to be wise, with too many opportunities to do exactly as we wish, including destroy ourselves. The animal kingdom is leaving because we humans have collectively made such a mess, they cannot live here anymore. And so I help them find homes where they can.”

I look at her through watery eyes. “That’s not sad, Anna. That’s devastating. You are saying we are doomed!”

“Not quite,” she says gently, knowingly. “If we were truly doomed, my dear Mayden, Magic would not have found you, and brought you to us.”

“What do I do?” I cry out.

“Learn to lead, and so turn your own species in a direction that is good for the collective, as the animals do. Wake up to turn not from base instinct, but from a greater wisdom.”

“But can one person have any kind of impact?”

“This will be the hardest thing of all for you to understand, my dear Mayden, but yes. Not only can one person wake up and lead, one person must. And in your world, at this moment, in this turning point, that person is you.”