Epilogue: After Thirty - The Man of Wind and Moss

What a nightmare just to remember. What a horror just to think. And that’s all Marco does now. He looks back on that age, twenty-nine, thirty, and he swallows his beer and just thinks. But he never thinks too hard, never for too long. Because he can’t let it become action. No. Not like with Pansy, not like with the bookseller. The potential energy must never turn kinetic. Must never form some vector outward. Even suicide, as appealing as it is, seems too bold and agentic for this new man he’s become. And besides, the garden that beckons him is the wrong type of warm.

In short, Marco simply lives now. He does not want, he does not desire, and he does not feel. Or, rather, perhaps that’s not accurate. He feels everything all the time. Yes. But he never lets it in. It can’t enter him. He can’t let it. You see, it’s too risky. To be driven, to have ideas, to want anything. No, no. God no. Not with the yellow eyes waiting out there. Not with the black arms ready to embrace. But a clarification needs to be made. Marco is not adrift. Adrift implies a want for safety or seeking refuge. It has some connotation that he was interrupted getting from point A to point B. This is not that. This is something pointless. Meaningless. This is a man hollow by choice. There are so many people out there who are hollow from circumstances. They feel nothing because nothing can take root. They’ve been salted over. But Marco is the opposite of that. So fertile, so ready to grow, but refusing it. He’s running around the inside of his head, corner to corner of his soul, dropping to his knees and weeding, plucking, and pulling out anything that settles. He will not let desire screw him again. He will not let love lead him astray. He will not let anger, misery, depression, romance, insecurity, rage, jealousy, lust, or anything take root. Too many people have suffered.

And of course, he feels bad. He misses his friends, he misses his family, and he tries really hard to miss the person he was, but he can’t really identify that person. In a lot of ways, he wasn’t anybody until all of this occurred, and now he’s desperate not to become anyone at all. It is the action of inaction. It is the choice of . . . well, you get it.

It didn’t start like that, at least not right away. When he got out of the woods, he first went to Sasha’s apartment and grieved. Then, a few days later, he went through her things and taught himself to scry, and he looked at Monchito, fighting with his wife in a shack. He taught himself Spanish from their yelling. Or he tried to at least. He also looked at Pansy and saw that she was in rehab. He watched her shuffle around a detox center, and he spied on her NA meetings where she talked about her stillbirth. She kept mentioning a detail that nobody else believed. A detail that made Marco cold. It was that when they rushed Lily away, the doctors said that leaves had come out of her.

After that, he stopped wearing amulets, stopped practicing magic, and even went as far as taking all of Sasha’s materials and burning them. It was a great relief that Zaäper caught fire. He did it all by himself on a beach in the Rockaways. One man, one fire pit, feeding the flames sigils and spells that turned to ash and wafted up, orange petals going black.

Pansy still lingered though, classic. Her voice rattled in his head, and he thought he saw her in bodegas and on subway cars, but he knew it wasn’t real. Dean stalked him in every tree, Doll in every flower. Keith waved at him from old social media posts, each one a tender goodbye before Marco clicked delete. And Lily stalked him everywhere, hiding right under his eyelids whenever he lay down, that mewling, moss baby never asleep. But Sasha was the worst. When he thinks back—again, always thinking—to what nature means to him, the answer now, is Sasha.

And it breaks his heart. She did everything she could to find herself. She did everything she could to not be a lonely witch, and then finally she embraced the solitude, only to die and be sucked into the earth, the earth that she’ll have to share with everyone else. Perhaps she’s satisfied to finally be in a club. But a club that admits everyone isn’t much of anything, Marco considers, and again, his heart breaks.

Every month, he goes up to the cabin and tends to Sasha’s garden. He’s done it a few times before and that first time he did it, when he came off the trail, he was wracked with anxiety that he’d see Erether there, on all fours, making a project out of her. But so far that hasn’t occurred. So far, he’s been left alone. And he thinks he knows why.

Now, it’s spring again, and Marco is planting more flowers. He thinks back to what she said on their last night together. How when she’s not doing magic, she likes when he looks at her. But, to Marco, she was always doing magic. Still is. The colors of petals and the curls of stems that grow from her, the pollinators that make work, the soft breeze that carries her scent. He looks at her all the time, and his heart will never heal. And even though he likes to tend the garden and say her name, the heartbreak is always worse there. Because above them, the Dean Tree looms. And its shadow is long. And he can never say hi to Sasha without stepping beneath its crooked branches and looking up in pain.

The worst part of it all is that, pragmatically, you have to pay bills, pay rent, and move your feet forward. You have to go outside and buy groceries and sometimes you have to learn new recipes and sometimes, on the worst days, you hear a joke. And that’s the true evil. Because sometimes, often in fact, life is good. There is happiness hiding in the mundane, there is joy, hell, there is even love in the world. It’s easy not letting the bad in. It’s miserable not allowing the good.

Oftentimes, when he makes coffee with la greca, he thinks of his brother and the birds calling for their flocks. Then it occurs to him that many birds are probably tired of calling. Scared too. They know that calling for help alone in the forest risks being heard by a predator. And isn’t that where he is right now? Too burnt to try again. Deeply para­noid and afraid to call for help, to reach out to anyone, to ask for advice, to seek guidance, to make connections, find love, find his flock? Because he knows each whistle risks an answer. An answer with long black arms and bright yellow eyes and shiny red shears.

Now, we’re finally caught up, and we see Marco sitting in a bar on a Wednesday night. He has long lost the taste for mojitos, so he sticks to beer, a light lager, whatever is cheap. Down the bar is a coworker’s birthday. Someone carries a cake out and people smile and clap in the glow of the candles. A car passes by outside, its loud music penetrating. Marco looks at the party, and he smiles to be polite, and drinks some more beer. He’s not going to get drunk. That’d make him maudlin. He needs to ride the line as best he can. But then his phone starts vibrating and he fishes it out of his pocket. It’s Monchito.

His chest tightens. This is not the first time his brother has called him since he last left the woods. But he has never answered. When the voicemails started to pile up, Marco skimmed them, briefly, before swiping his thumb and deleting them. They were too sticky. Their roots got too deep, too quickly. Now, he silences this call and, when it passes, without looking, he deletes this voicemail too. The party continues and he orders another beer and his phone lights up another time, this time with a text: I’m back in Tampa, wya?

After the party, Marco stands on his balcony and it’s midnight and he’s drunk like his father. Looks like he got maudlin after all. Oh well. Don’t worry, he’s not going to jump. He’s much too afraid of the Grafting. Instead, he looks at the lights out there just like his old man used to. He tries to put himself in the headspace of his dad. The lights out there, the twinkling spots of yellow, what are they? Who are they? Marco can’t be sure. He tries to channel his dad some more. What was it he did when he was drunk? What was that early, formative memory that clung to Marco’s psyche like an ivy?

Ah, yes.

He talks to ghosts.

In the morning, Marco makes his final cup of coffee with the moka pot—never a greca again—and he tosses it in the trash. Too risky. Too risky by far.