The gray cat had accompanied her return, darting into my apartment as Molly opened my door. The cat had immediately taken to my couch, but only momentarily before deciding on the window. The window hadn’t proved sufficient either, and the cat was again on the couch, nestled against my feet.
Molly had told me the cat’s name was Charles and that it was a witch’s familiar. I hadn’t said anything. I had nothing to say. I was mostly just waiting to wake up or for my pain to fade. I had the deep slash on my chest where I’d accidentally stabbed myself, and a series of dime-sized chunks missing from my shoulder. One of my fingers was broken. I had an extensive range of bruises and cuts, the latter ranging from “this barely needs a bandage” to “Josh, get off the couch and go to the hospital.”
“Drink… what?” I asked the crazy woman who was holding up a menacing blue fluid in a clear glass vial, gesturing for me to drink it.
“It’s a healing potion,” Molly said.
“There’s no such thing as healing potions.”
“There’s no such thing as giant beetles, either, right?” Her eyes didn’t so much as flicker to the three dead monstrosities in my apartment. They didn’t need to. Her point was made.
She nudged the top of the vial to my lips. I opened my mouth and drank, fully aware that I was acting like an obedient child. Maybe afterward she could toss me over her shoulder and burp me.
“This is supposed to be magic?” I asked. It tasted like spicy toothpaste.
“Potions are a kind of magic, I guess.” She was munching on pizza. She’d brought back two with sausage, one with abundant mushrooms, and one with pepperoni. The allocation was that I got one of the sausage pizzas, and Molly got everything else.
She said, “But potions aren’t like, actual magic. I mean, they’re not like spells. They’re more similar to stews. It’s just that one of the ingredients is magic. It’s hard to explain. I’m not really the one to ask.”
“I’m supposed to believe it can heal this?” I asked, pointing to the wound where I’d managed to cut my chest with the box cutter. I was a total mess. My broken finger felt like it was being continuously slammed in a car door. I held it out and looked at the broken thing, showing it to Molly.
“Your magic potion didn’t work,” I told her.
“It’s not ‘my’ magic. Fridu made it. The two of us spent an entire week collecting honeycombs, butterfly wings and virgin dryad piss, so… yeah, I did do some of the manual labor, but Fridu’s the one who added the magic. And yes, it’s working. Quit being such a dick.”
She leaned closer and touched my chest, drawing my attention. I watched in amazement as the flesh knitted together until there wasn’t even a scar. And then my broken finger snapped back into position. All my bruises disappeared. I felt reinvigorated. Honestly, I felt better than ever.
“What the fuck?” I said.
“Magic,” Molly told me. “Even though it doesn’t exist, of course.” She laughed to herself, then looked to the cat and mumbled something that involved several hisses. Charles glanced up and did a coughing sort of laugh. It was almost as if they were communicating. The cat ambled onto Molly’s lap, leaving mine.
“My mother was a witch,” Molly told me. “You met her. She used to live next door to you. Salena was her name. Remember?”
“You’re shitting me! You’re Salena’s daughter? When? How?”
“Well, you see Josh, when a woman loves a man very much, they collide their private parts together and—”
“I meant, she didn’t have a daughter when she lived here. Or at least never talked about one? About… you?”
“We don’t talk to outsiders. Not about real things. But she did, I guess, with you? I want to know why. She told you she was a witch, didn’t she? Before her murder?”
“She wasn’t murdered. She died in a fire. It was an accident.”
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
“You’re so na?ve, Josh. Witches don’t have accidents with fire. Ask Fridu when you see her.”
“Who’s this ‘Fridu’ you keep talking about?”
“A witch. A dwarf. You’ll meet her. I adore her. I’ve known her for something like fifty years.”
“That’s impossible.”
“It’s not, though. You keep thinking in terms of what’s possible in your world, but there’s an impossible amount of possibilities in other worlds. For one thing, how old did you think my mother was?”
“I remember exactly. She was twenty. Thirteen years older than me at the time. I knew her when I was seven.”
As we talked, I grabbed clothes from a packing box. For some reason it’d felt okay to be in my shorts when I was injured, but now that I was healed it was wrong. I shimmied into a pair of blue jeans and an old ZZ Top concert shirt I’d inherited from my dad.
Molly said, “Mom lied to you, then. Good. She should’ve always lied to you. She was a lot older than twenty, Josh. She dropped a couple zeroes. She was over two thousand years old.”
“Fuck off,” I said. Then, “Ah. Sorry. I mean, that’s not possible.”
“We elves live a long time. I’m five hundred and thirty-six.”
“You’re not a real elf,” I stated.
“You an expert, then? It’s such an honor to meet you, Professor Elf Scholar. Listen, I’ve seen your intelligence rating. Eleven? Honestly, that’s not bad. But an eleven can’t exactly run around proclaiming themselves as an expert on anything.”
“But none of this is making any sense,” I argued. “From a scientific standpoint, bugs can’t get this big.”
“Ooo, a scientific standpoint? Now you’re a scientist? What an amazing man-of-all-trades! Except, here’s a big fat and much smarter counterpoint. I say that bugs can get this big, so now we’re at a stalemate. It’s just too bad that we don’t have any hard evidence to support one of our—oh! Oh wait! We do have evidence! We have three giant bugs right here, don’t we?”
“Well—”
“Listen, Mr. Zero Level, bugs do get this big. Bugs get even bigger. The size of cars. Houses, even. It’s gross. And some bugs are smart, too. Some insects can talk. Some are even charming and sexy, if you’re into that, which I’m not, because bugs and I don’t get along. Now here, hold this.”
She picked up half of the giant beetle she’d sliced in two, all but shoving it at my chest. There was nothing to do but take it. It was heavier than I’d expected and I almost dropped it, which from a “messy goo” standpoint would have been the right move. I did my best to hold the dead thing with the “goop” side up, like I was holding a huge pot of unsavory stew.
Molly said, “Unless you’d like to decorate your apartment with dead monster beetles, we should get rid of these things.” She paused, looking at me, expectant. I didn’t know what she was waiting for. Then it hit me.
“Oh,” I said. “No. I definitely don’t want them in my apartment.”
“Some boys do,” she said with a shrug. “Like, as hunting trophies, I guess. Some kind of ‘masculine identity’ thing, a not entirely subtle way of walking around with your cock jutting out.”
“Wake me from this dream,” I muttered, low, under my breath. “Wake me from this dream.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Cool. Follow me.” Molly walked toward my old bedroom, picking up the beetle she’d speared with the chair. She carried the full-sized beetle with more ease than I was carrying the bisected portion, and I tried not to let that bother me, even when we walked past the floating words that listed my strength at ten and hers at sixteen.
Inside my old bedroom, she marched around the stacks of boxes to the desk I had against the wall. There, she plopped the dead beetle onto the desk and then pulled it entirely away from the wall.
“Did you ever go through?” she asked.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, still holding half a beetle and trying very hard to keep the gooey parts from my clothes.
“The door, Josh. The door to Goncourt. Did you ever go through?”
“Goncourt? A door? Molly, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I was thinking of how the floating words in my living room had listed her intelligence at thirteen and mine at eleven. That wasn’t such a big difference, was it?
“Oh, Mom,” Molly said with a sigh, muttering to the wall. “What’d you ever see in this kid?” She turned to me and said, “Mom made you a door, Josh. You could’ve gone through at any time. Although, I have to say, maybe it’s best you didn’t.”
Shaking her head, she reached out to the blank wall with its aging wallpaper of medieval heraldry, the wall I’d had next to my bed back when I was a child. Even as Molly’s hand reached out, I abruptly remembered the night Salena and I’d held hands and used our combined fingers to trace lines on the wallpaper, and she’d told me that now there was a door.
Molly’s hand found a latch where there wasn’t one.
She pulled.
A door opened in my wall.
Sunlight poured through, and a pleasant wind. There wasn’t, as there should’ve been, a view into the adjoining apartment where Salena used to live, nothing of the youth center manager and his boyfriend drinking their fine coffee. Instead, there was a vast meadow bisected by a wide stream, with immense mountains looming in the distance.
A whole world. A different weather pattern. Endless skies. It wasn’t the apartment next door, the way it should have been: it was a different reality. It wasn’t just somewhere else, it was Somewhere Else.
There was a herd of wolf-like creatures, but with the heads of deer, complete with antlers twisted into odd shapes. The strange creatures were grazing and paid us no mind. A flock of passing butterflies filled the air, each with wingspans of nearly two feet.
Most alarming of all, a woman fluttered among them. She was a short, stout, bursting plug of a woman, swooping along with the butterflies, yelping in delight when she saw us, zooming immediately closer, covering almost a hundred feet in no more than a couple seconds. She hovered an arm’s reach away from us, and waved.
“Molly!” she said.
“Hey, Fridu!” Molly said, and then put a hand on my shoulder.
“I found Josh,” she told the flying dwarf.
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