A new idea!

For the first time in years I finally had an idea for a new story. I guess the Lamott 3000 words a day thing actually helped me jog my brain into a creative process. Well, anyways, here it is. (I might read it for the symposium)

Backfire

I squinted at the letters. The more I rearranged them, the less sense they seemed to make. Despite spending a fortune at this school to learn how to rearrange my letters, they still looked weird. But I never was a very good speller anyways. Everything I tried looked wrong on the paper, wrong when I tried it aloud, and wrong when my workshop class tore it apart letter by letter. They had every right though, their spells were better than mine. They had better ideas. It still hurt. I’d read all the books they read, done all the exercises they’d done, and mastered the itty-bitty rules of where to place your pauses and stops just like they had. But I couldn’t even compete with them.

My new spell was going to prove them wrong. Or, so I convinced myself. I’d gotten the idea for it when I was standing in line for the Public Port on my way home for class. It occurred to me that the one spell that no one had written was making a person. Of course it broke one of the rules, energy cannot be created or destroyed only blah, blah, blah. But sometimes rule breaking worked. Like in Christina’s spell last week, she used a triple A followed by a x, but there was no backfire. It was the prettiest trans-morg spell I’d seen a student create. She changed a rabbit to a human with clothes and back to a rabbit with only fur. It was smooth and only had a few glitches. (Let’s just say that the clothing was not gender friendly and if he were a real human, he would have been very embarrassed.) 

13 explosions, 22 strangely formed corpses, and one brainless golem later I was nearly ready to give up. I knew that the wording was perfect and I’d tried nearly every hand gesture I could think of, from flipping the bird to thank you. The misspent energy from my previous spell failures clung to my skin and made my antsy, cranky, and wired. Some people exercised and some meditated, but I just danced the feeling away. I turned on my SCAMP with a flick of the wrist. It was a song I’d never heard before. It had a heavy beat and the sound of clapping and I could imagine lasers and the nons dancing to this in the no-magic clubs. I let the music infect me and released the energy before it could build bad luck.

Before you start criticizing, I know I shouldn’t have been dancing. I know what could happen if a speller loses control and moves in the wrong way while saying the wrong thing. I know it. But nothing bad had happened when I danced before so I was just overconfident and stupid, I guess. And it hit me hard.