Edgar's Father's Magic WordsBy JWM Morgan
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Sleepless Edgar, in flannel pajamas and slipper socks, gazed into his father’s study as into a gigantic amber jewel. Edgar’s father, poised magnificently in a cone of lamplight, was working at his desk, confronting the stubborn, vital dilemmas of human society. The neighboring houses on their quiet street were long-since dark. Hours earlier these monumental challenges Edgar’s father now faced had driven all other worthy, would-be triumphant men of their town to sigh and put aside their books and go to bed.
Edgar’s father paused in his great labor and welcomed restless young Edgar in. His massive hand cupped Edgar’s shoulder. A few magic words erupted lightly from his lips and circled above Edgar’s head like threads of silver-gray cotton candy. Edgar tipped his head to follow the shivering marks. The words came into perfect focus, bobbled, shuddered, and split apart. The separated letters tumbled like tiny gymnasts, became flying ants chasing after lumpy mint-filled chocolates. The words then resumed their previous invisibility and formlessness. A gorgeous, shimmering iridescence lingered where Edgar’s nascent hope for understanding had been frustrated.
Edgar attempted to voice his appreciation for his father’s words but produced only disappointing warm splutter.
Edgar’s father then turned to serious secret matters. Gargle noises accompanied complex rumbling within the deep mine of his cavernous chest. Blood-heavy sounds emerged from his heart and lungs, surrounded his tree trunk throat, flew out around his vast tongue, through his great lips, and became light and airborne like special mosquitoes or flies which usually vanished instantly, but, at this very happy time, when Edgar’s own perceptivity briefly achieved what would one day become its abiding brilliance, Edgar continued to see these words for a short while, like the opalescent residue of a burst soap bubble.
* * *
Edgar told his preschool classmates his father was preparing future human splendor. Absorbed in aimless play with alphabet blocks and Legos and petty squabbles about whose turn was next, most showed little understanding. Those who acknowledged Edgar’s unusually high estimation of his father seemed not to care. One friendly boy said his father was a janitor at the elementary school they would all one day go to. Another’s was a dentist. A girl said her dad sold greeting cards and diapers.
Often Miss Barrette made the children clap and sing. Each noon the children washed their hands and ate sandwiches their mothers had prepared and packed for them: peanut butter and jelly or bologna with lettuce. One miserable Monday morning, Miss Barrette forced them all to wear rabbit ears made of construction paper and to hop around on the cold, dirty floor until their arms and legs hurt. Later, Miss Barrette, having observed Edgar’s precocious spoken vocabulary, poured out the pieces of a Scrabble game on the floor. In a week of effort, Edgar was able to assemble seven pieces into ABCADAB. Over the weekend, Miss Barrette put the game back in its box.
* * *
Most mornings, Edgar’s father left the house early, hurrying to climb the golden stairway which existed only briefly as the sun was rising. In his well-lit, spacious workplace, loyal assistants greeted Edgar’s father with respect and love like dutiful pages in earlier times assisting an important knight into his stirrups. Specially chosen leafy plants and blooming flowers gave his work area the elusive and essential perfume of glorious mastery. Edgar’s father then dusted his hands with fine talc and touched the controls.
He worked incredibly hard specifying the secret and magnificent details of the future. His powerful thoughts writhed like muscular serpents wrestling open a path through a dense jungle of obstacles at the frightening border of comprehensibility. At pauses in his exertions, broad rivers of inspiration like Jell-O cooled and soothed the strained, cracked earth of his brain. Occasionally, vast relocations, like earthquakes, shuddered everything and he would have to set aside the work for a time, await the passing of the subterranean storm.
In workaday moments, Edgar’s father deftly assembled the nearer parts of time, arranging the world’s pleasing days and months to come. He plotted the advance of the seasons, taking care to incorporate a fine sequence of blizzards into next winter’s calendar.
At more serious times, when feeling his strength in its full magnificence, Edgar’s father conscientiously tackled the big issues: arranged for air to be breathable, for bathtubs to drain properly. With steady-handed precision, he assured next season’s crops would germinate in timely abundance, the chemistry of digestion would break down food and make nutrients available as it ought, and spring would again be fabulously perfumed and adorned with birdsong.
* * *
May’s rain drops on the windowpanes of the preschool classroom were exceptionally large, soft, sweet-smelling, and conducive to a bright boy’s foreknowledge. Edgar followed the trembling paths of tiny rivulets down the glass and saw his future achievements etched on the interior walls of the drops that separated from the flow. These magical accomplishments only he could see twisted and gleamed in uncanny storm light.
Each of Edgar’s dream visions was polished to a high sheen and danced in a special wind, like chimes on a rotating clothesline spinning in a blazing secret sun. These magical conglomerations, though they could never be opened in the conventional way, contained, perhaps, an ampule full of a secret fluid that would alleviate the world’s sadness, or maybe an enormous magical knot which Edgar would one day unravel to fabulous effect. A sword he must pluck from a stone to establish new authority and consequent justice, prosperity, and peace, as was Edgar’s as yet unrevealed destiny.
“What letter comes after K?” Miss Barrette asked. Edgar laughed. Miss Barrette was sweet but silly. So many letters came after K! “Edgar? Edgar! Are you with us? If you know the answer, raise your hand.” Edgar raised his hand dutifully. But when Miss Barrette nodded for him to recite, no words emerged. His thoughts and dreams had moved on.
* * *
“Let’s go swimming at Silver Lake,” Edgar’s mother proposed. “It’s our first chance this year.” Edgar’s father had to work that day.
Beside the dark water, Edgar’s mother, in her modest blue one-piece bathing suit, lay on a stretched-out towel on the steep beach. Edgar left his mother’s side and broke a new path through mud and high reeds. He ventured to the tip of a small peninsula; his private lookout faced the black hole Miss Barrette had told the class the retreating glacier had carved out long ago. Now filled with trembling water, the hole had become the lake.
Edgar’s footsteps in the mud disturbed and raised the must of ancient times. Overhead the clouds parted and the colored map of the heavens expanded into an immense dome on which there loomed fantastic lands, oceans and seas, marked with the lines of stellar currents and eddies, with the brilliant streaks of heavenly geography. Edgar eagerly drank the precious message of the magical sky. Each of the secret countries he saw above had its cadence, its melody, its own mysterious tale to tell. Edgar wanted to go to all these places. And when he had traveled everywhere, and folded every story of every country into the recesses of his heart, Edgar would follow his father’s great example, mount to the heavens, and nobly bear the sacred burden of guiding our world toward the proper path of progress and correction.
* * *
Edgar’s father had to go shopping. Edgar was playing with a toy truck on the front yard lawn. As his father trotted down the steps of the house, he said to Edgar, Priceless, immortal luck is threaded through your life, your future, your past, your body, and your soul, like gold and silver threads.
Edgar clapped his hands.
Edgar’s mother called out, “Don’t forget the Bisquik.” Edgar’s father cast a dark glance backward. Edgar’s “practical” mother understood nothing.
Later, Edgar listened at the bathroom door for his mother’s humming and the splash of her entering the great claw-foot tub. While she reclined in the perfumed bath and his father was away stocking up for a barbeque, Edgar dared to enter his father’s tiny private room.
Edgar settled into the hollows his father had formed in the cane seat of his chair. Across the great wooden desk, Edgar looked through the bare white wall into the mysterious “distance,” where his father often found his inspiration.
Edgar picked up his father’s pen and moved it about in the air. He heard his mother singing an English hymn in the bath upstairs. He laid down the pen and lifted the black cover of his father’s notebook like the lid of a treasure chest. On the lined page, long, mysterious blue-inked sentences bore the weight of incomprehensible wonders. Edgar raised the notebook to vertical. He frowned and “studied.” His father’s letters softened and dribbled off the paper’s edge like warm honey. On the desktop they pooled and bubbled.
A miniature whirlpool twisted into upthrust fibers like a carpet’s. This protuberance continued to turn and grow until a tiny Edgar’s father stood up in the bubbly ooze. This small Edgar’s father, in his dark slacks and checked shirt, wiggled his fingers in the air, tapping at an invisible keyboard while reading from an invisible screen.
When Edgar’s father turned from the screen and smiled at Edgar, Edgar offered his palm and his miniature father climbed aboard. His squirrel-sized body pulsed against Edgar’s hand. He showed Edgar his excellent teeth. He was doing well and he wanted Edgar to know. Edgar ached with love for his father!
The little Edgar’s father surveyed the warm ooze and, with an orchestra conductor’s confident wave, raised the twisting fibers into dozens of busy little people. From this restless crowd of avid participants frightening barks of ancient language arose.
Edgar’s father stepped down from Edgar’s hand and joined the tiny, pale-skinned people in breech clouts building a fire of twigs on the desktop. The little people worked harmoniously, like happy angels.
Clothing formed about these creatures: vests, jackets, trousers—quaint skirts and interesting old-fashioned shoes. Doctors, sailors, seamstresses, mothers with babies on their hips. Bankers. Shoemakers. Some were people Edgar knew from their town, but others were strangers, some from unheard-of remote places. Beyond the familiar, pink-skinned people, Edgar saw dark-skinned African and Australian people, and Asian, Mongols, and Chinese. He saw across space and time to the ancients: camel-riding nomads, court magicians, galley slaves. And, even further, the cave dwellers and beyond them the apes.
Edgar’s father paused in his great labor and welcomed restless young Edgar in. His massive hand cupped Edgar’s shoulder. A few magic words erupted lightly from his lips and circled above Edgar’s head like threads of silver-gray cotton candy. Edgar tipped his head to follow the shivering marks. The words came into perfect focus, bobbled, shuddered, and split apart. The separated letters tumbled like tiny gymnasts, became flying ants chasing after lumpy mint-filled chocolates. The words then resumed their previous invisibility and formlessness. A gorgeous, shimmering iridescence lingered where Edgar’s nascent hope for understanding had been frustrated.
Edgar attempted to voice his appreciation for his father’s words but produced only disappointing warm splutter.
Edgar’s father then turned to serious secret matters. Gargle noises accompanied complex rumbling within the deep mine of his cavernous chest. Blood-heavy sounds emerged from his heart and lungs, surrounded his tree trunk throat, flew out around his vast tongue, through his great lips, and became light and airborne like special mosquitoes or flies which usually vanished instantly, but, at this very happy time, when Edgar’s own perceptivity briefly achieved what would one day become its abiding brilliance, Edgar continued to see these words for a short while, like the opalescent residue of a burst soap bubble.
* * *
Edgar told his preschool classmates his father was preparing future human splendor. Absorbed in aimless play with alphabet blocks and Legos and petty squabbles about whose turn was next, most showed little understanding. Those who acknowledged Edgar’s unusually high estimation of his father seemed not to care. One friendly boy said his father was a janitor at the elementary school they would all one day go to. Another’s was a dentist. A girl said her dad sold greeting cards and diapers.
Often Miss Barrette made the children clap and sing. Each noon the children washed their hands and ate sandwiches their mothers had prepared and packed for them: peanut butter and jelly or bologna with lettuce. One miserable Monday morning, Miss Barrette forced them all to wear rabbit ears made of construction paper and to hop around on the cold, dirty floor until their arms and legs hurt. Later, Miss Barrette, having observed Edgar’s precocious spoken vocabulary, poured out the pieces of a Scrabble game on the floor. In a week of effort, Edgar was able to assemble seven pieces into ABCADAB. Over the weekend, Miss Barrette put the game back in its box.
* * *
Most mornings, Edgar’s father left the house early, hurrying to climb the golden stairway which existed only briefly as the sun was rising. In his well-lit, spacious workplace, loyal assistants greeted Edgar’s father with respect and love like dutiful pages in earlier times assisting an important knight into his stirrups. Specially chosen leafy plants and blooming flowers gave his work area the elusive and essential perfume of glorious mastery. Edgar’s father then dusted his hands with fine talc and touched the controls.
He worked incredibly hard specifying the secret and magnificent details of the future. His powerful thoughts writhed like muscular serpents wrestling open a path through a dense jungle of obstacles at the frightening border of comprehensibility. At pauses in his exertions, broad rivers of inspiration like Jell-O cooled and soothed the strained, cracked earth of his brain. Occasionally, vast relocations, like earthquakes, shuddered everything and he would have to set aside the work for a time, await the passing of the subterranean storm.
In workaday moments, Edgar’s father deftly assembled the nearer parts of time, arranging the world’s pleasing days and months to come. He plotted the advance of the seasons, taking care to incorporate a fine sequence of blizzards into next winter’s calendar.
At more serious times, when feeling his strength in its full magnificence, Edgar’s father conscientiously tackled the big issues: arranged for air to be breathable, for bathtubs to drain properly. With steady-handed precision, he assured next season’s crops would germinate in timely abundance, the chemistry of digestion would break down food and make nutrients available as it ought, and spring would again be fabulously perfumed and adorned with birdsong.
* * *
May’s rain drops on the windowpanes of the preschool classroom were exceptionally large, soft, sweet-smelling, and conducive to a bright boy’s foreknowledge. Edgar followed the trembling paths of tiny rivulets down the glass and saw his future achievements etched on the interior walls of the drops that separated from the flow. These magical accomplishments only he could see twisted and gleamed in uncanny storm light.
Each of Edgar’s dream visions was polished to a high sheen and danced in a special wind, like chimes on a rotating clothesline spinning in a blazing secret sun. These magical conglomerations, though they could never be opened in the conventional way, contained, perhaps, an ampule full of a secret fluid that would alleviate the world’s sadness, or maybe an enormous magical knot which Edgar would one day unravel to fabulous effect. A sword he must pluck from a stone to establish new authority and consequent justice, prosperity, and peace, as was Edgar’s as yet unrevealed destiny.
“What letter comes after K?” Miss Barrette asked. Edgar laughed. Miss Barrette was sweet but silly. So many letters came after K! “Edgar? Edgar! Are you with us? If you know the answer, raise your hand.” Edgar raised his hand dutifully. But when Miss Barrette nodded for him to recite, no words emerged. His thoughts and dreams had moved on.
* * *
“Let’s go swimming at Silver Lake,” Edgar’s mother proposed. “It’s our first chance this year.” Edgar’s father had to work that day.
Beside the dark water, Edgar’s mother, in her modest blue one-piece bathing suit, lay on a stretched-out towel on the steep beach. Edgar left his mother’s side and broke a new path through mud and high reeds. He ventured to the tip of a small peninsula; his private lookout faced the black hole Miss Barrette had told the class the retreating glacier had carved out long ago. Now filled with trembling water, the hole had become the lake.
Edgar’s footsteps in the mud disturbed and raised the must of ancient times. Overhead the clouds parted and the colored map of the heavens expanded into an immense dome on which there loomed fantastic lands, oceans and seas, marked with the lines of stellar currents and eddies, with the brilliant streaks of heavenly geography. Edgar eagerly drank the precious message of the magical sky. Each of the secret countries he saw above had its cadence, its melody, its own mysterious tale to tell. Edgar wanted to go to all these places. And when he had traveled everywhere, and folded every story of every country into the recesses of his heart, Edgar would follow his father’s great example, mount to the heavens, and nobly bear the sacred burden of guiding our world toward the proper path of progress and correction.
* * *
Edgar’s father had to go shopping. Edgar was playing with a toy truck on the front yard lawn. As his father trotted down the steps of the house, he said to Edgar, Priceless, immortal luck is threaded through your life, your future, your past, your body, and your soul, like gold and silver threads.
Edgar clapped his hands.
Edgar’s mother called out, “Don’t forget the Bisquik.” Edgar’s father cast a dark glance backward. Edgar’s “practical” mother understood nothing.
Later, Edgar listened at the bathroom door for his mother’s humming and the splash of her entering the great claw-foot tub. While she reclined in the perfumed bath and his father was away stocking up for a barbeque, Edgar dared to enter his father’s tiny private room.
Edgar settled into the hollows his father had formed in the cane seat of his chair. Across the great wooden desk, Edgar looked through the bare white wall into the mysterious “distance,” where his father often found his inspiration.
Edgar picked up his father’s pen and moved it about in the air. He heard his mother singing an English hymn in the bath upstairs. He laid down the pen and lifted the black cover of his father’s notebook like the lid of a treasure chest. On the lined page, long, mysterious blue-inked sentences bore the weight of incomprehensible wonders. Edgar raised the notebook to vertical. He frowned and “studied.” His father’s letters softened and dribbled off the paper’s edge like warm honey. On the desktop they pooled and bubbled.
A miniature whirlpool twisted into upthrust fibers like a carpet’s. This protuberance continued to turn and grow until a tiny Edgar’s father stood up in the bubbly ooze. This small Edgar’s father, in his dark slacks and checked shirt, wiggled his fingers in the air, tapping at an invisible keyboard while reading from an invisible screen.
When Edgar’s father turned from the screen and smiled at Edgar, Edgar offered his palm and his miniature father climbed aboard. His squirrel-sized body pulsed against Edgar’s hand. He showed Edgar his excellent teeth. He was doing well and he wanted Edgar to know. Edgar ached with love for his father!
The little Edgar’s father surveyed the warm ooze and, with an orchestra conductor’s confident wave, raised the twisting fibers into dozens of busy little people. From this restless crowd of avid participants frightening barks of ancient language arose.
Edgar’s father stepped down from Edgar’s hand and joined the tiny, pale-skinned people in breech clouts building a fire of twigs on the desktop. The little people worked harmoniously, like happy angels.
Clothing formed about these creatures: vests, jackets, trousers—quaint skirts and interesting old-fashioned shoes. Doctors, sailors, seamstresses, mothers with babies on their hips. Bankers. Shoemakers. Some were people Edgar knew from their town, but others were strangers, some from unheard-of remote places. Beyond the familiar, pink-skinned people, Edgar saw dark-skinned African and Australian people, and Asian, Mongols, and Chinese. He saw across space and time to the ancients: camel-riding nomads, court magicians, galley slaves. And, even further, the cave dwellers and beyond them the apes.
JWM Morgan’s stories have appeared in The Montreal Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly, War, Literature & the Arts, and other magazines. He lives in Oakland, California, where he teaches and mentors people who are developing basic skills. http://www.jwmmorgan.com/