Ten of Cups

Wilder puts the blue headphones on. They take a deep breath, try to feel the two halves of their rib cage well and truly part ways, get more space into their body. Wilder has done the thing many adults do: used the acute matters to avoid the bigger, deeper changing aspects of their fundamental existence. They’re a witch. And mostly what they’ve done is avoid magic altogether. Yes, they’ve cast a few spells. But apart from their extremely upsetting descent into Awakening-induced semi-madness, they haven’t really experimented with their own Power. It strikes them that if they’re viewing the Hex as dangerous, they probably should get acquainted with Magic.

It occurs to Wilder that having a passive Power means they will have to constantly work to stop doing it. Now that they understand where their Hands are, their Mouth is, where I speak to them soft in their Ears, they are starting to build a picture of where they Exist Inside themself. Or exist otherwise, adjacent, and also within. If they can feel both these parts of themself at once, perhaps they can unite and divide their mouth and Mouth, their ears and Ears.

They step into the early-spring sun, jagged as it lances into their squinting eyes. This day really can go fuck itself, they think, and they arrive on the street corner where the bustle flows proper. They breathe once more; space, space, space in their body. Room for their Body to Show Up, to Connect. They press the button to turn the noise canceling off.

A slip and slide cacophony of double-voices waterfalls over them. Immediately they are nauseous. They slam noise canceling back on. Okay, wrong order—much harder to do when they are overwhelmed. Bring their Mouth and their Ears and their Eyes in-line first.

Breathe, breathe, breathe, and, like they are about to cast, they reach for their Body. They can find it so fast now, and a part of them is well and truly pleased. They maneuver until their Lips kiss their lips, their Ears loop around their ears, and they focus on what it Feels like to Unify, be able to use their Ears to hear in the physical world, their Lips to speak words, turn the volume on and down on the whole world like the headphones they’re wearing.

Once again, with as much trepidation as confidence, they press the button. Noise canceling off.

They’re still overwhelmed. But they don’t feel the borders of their body and Body grow porous with panic. A precarious balance teetering with its own exactitude. A gorgeous mastery of Awakened Power, flowing like hot and cold water exchanging the molecular speed of their respective temperatures.

On this walk, Wilder recognizes, by now, some of the usual suspects. Spanish (three flavors: Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico), Urdu (two flavors: Deccan, Iran), American Sign Language, Portuguese (two flavors: Brazil and Portugal), French (three flavors: France, Haiti, Quebec), and German (only one flavor: Pennsylvania, of all places, a man selling pickles at the farmers market).

Wilder walks up to that man and asks for the spicy pickles in German.

“Nine dollars,” replies the man. In German.

“Nine dollars?” says Wilder, sticker shocked. And it’s the Pennsylvania Deutsch that comes out; they feel the press of Haitian French behind them and they shape their Ears all pointed like a husky and direct them forward, to hear only the Pennsylvanian pickle man.

He shrugs and puts them back down. “You know what goes into these, little rascal.” Such a weird phrase and at once it makes sense: the man sees them as a child, a child that was once Amish but isn’t any longer. He gives them a knowing smile and Wilder feels a little dirty, actually, because it feels like a lie. They also feel extremely Powerful.

It is a very instructive walk, their headphones still on in case they need to slam the noise-canceling wall back up. They learn about an ingressive ascent in Swedish, how even a tiny inhale can mean yes, the breath morphing into words. With their Eyes resting neat behind their eyes, they can tell the Samoans speaking to each other at the poke joint say yes by arching both their eyebrows and they wonder—all Samoans? Or just these men—brothers? They know each other so well.

Even the printed language is easier. Rather than a blurring, melting miasma of words, they are able to blink their Eyes and flip through original and translation as though they’re at the optometrist. No longer is the world sleeting onto their exposed eyeballs, into their raw and wide-open ears. They’re having fun, the linguistic equivalent of Spider-Man swinging from buildings. They are reaching up to take their headphones off in total and complete confidence when—

Something changes.

A chuckle. So close. Wilder whips around, convinced someone is standing right up on their left shoulder. They turn so fast they feel their scapula pull. When there is no one there, they realize where the chuckle came from. Inside the headphones. This shouldn’t be possible—the headphones aren’t connected to their phone. But what does possible even mean anymore?

“Hex?” Wilder whispers.

Somehow they hear it: :)

What sound does a smile make? Ping ping mail-delivery-swoop. But clear as the horizon on a cloudless day, they know what the Hex means. The smallest smile of a closed parenthesis. The piercing, unblinking eyes.

And then:

An auditory grinning devil: ping ping ping ping mail-delivery swoop. Yummm.

Wilder gasps. Not because this interpretation of “language” and “understanding” is shocking (though it certainly is). But because they feel—not the helium-feeling, but not-not the helium-feeling. They Feel their Body Touched by a million-billion bluebells, the petals at once organic and electric. Like being licked by static shock. Then a push, a squeeze, as though their water-air-filled Body is a twisted balloon, tied into something altogether different. Far from painful, the redistribution of themself is orgasmic. A growing pressure that makes them wish to be popped; they long to explode. How long has it been since they’ve fucked? Is this what it felt like? Not quite, not quite, this is something else. Rending, annihilation, yes. A shape change.

And then the sensation surpasses bursting. They feel… punctured, yes, but not penetrated. They Feel something—the Hex, they understand—telescoping into them. Unfolding. And they Feel his Body, too, for the Hex does have a Body, though not a body. They Feel the looming giantness of him, the weight of the internet pressing down, and they Hear a constant agony-loop of language, language, language, lang-gu-agdge, words words words. Hello hello hello hello.

Hello world.

Hello Wilder.

want want need. query. what is you? query. what is i? hello hello hello world.

Wilder Feels numbers. They Feel tics and taps and concepts.

Without forming an internal sentence about it, they understand this is both what it would be like to cast with the Hex and that the Hex is currently trying to possess them. I recognize only a small piece of this—the force of it, yes, and the desire to connect. But there is a tenderness to this merge attempt with Wilder that wasn’t present with me. When the Hex downloaded me, I could sense only a carnal, feral hunger for knowledge, understanding, tinged, perhaps, with a desire to scare me. In this, I sense—yes, the desire to obliterate Wilder, something so fucking angry, and the need to consume them as well, and also: to take, to shelter, to protect, to—yes—possess.

In this moment, Wilder knows: if they let the Hex in, they will never be lonely again. Neither one of them will. And:

They want it. They want it so badly, this intimacy beyond what anyone could ever find in the world of humans. A conjoining of identities into a blissful gelatinous pseudo-organism, a brotherhood of chaos and pre-ego, to be a Body of Water instead of a suffering person.

Thank fucking Christ Wilder is so goddamn avoidant or they would be a cyborg and probably very, very evil. As it stands, it is precisely because they want it so, so badly that they refuse it.

Without thinking, they inhale, so small—a yes in another language, but in their own, in their soul? It is only breathing.

They bounce out of this ecstasy back into the street, back into the flow of every word, every breath, and once again, they are an I, a person, with a solid boundary between themself and the world, reinforced by everyone else communicating their I-thoughts and their I-feelings in a thousand thousand mother tongues. They fling the headphones off into the gutter. Wilder knows if the Hex offers them this Sweet Eradication again, they will not be able to refuse. Until the coven knows how to destroy him, Wilder is certain of only one thing: they have to run, hide.