Free Magic for Beginners: Stories by Kelly Link

foraging on his lawn. They
froze as he dismounted and pushed the bicycle across the grass. The
lawn was rumpled; the bike went up and down over invisible
depressions that he supposed were rabbit holes. There were two
short fat men standing in the dark on either side of the front
door, waiting for him, but when he came closer, he remembered that
they were stone rabbits. “Knock, knock,” he said.
    The real rabbits on the lawn tipped their ears at him. The stone
rabbits waited for the punch line, but they were just stone
rabbits. They had nothing better to do.
    The front door wasn’t locked. He walked through the downstairs
rooms, putting his hands on the backs and tops of furniture. In the
kitchen, cut-down boxes leaned in stacks against the wall, waiting
to be recycled or remade into cardboard houses and spaceships and
tunnels for Carleton and Tilly.
    Catherine had unpacked Carleton’s room. Night-lights in the
shape of bears and geese and cats were plugged into every floor
outlet. There were little low-watt table lamps as well—hippo,
robot, gorilla, pirate ship. Everything was soaked in a tender,
peaceable light, translating Carleton’s room into something more
than a bedroom: something luminous, numinous, Carleton’s cartoony
Midnight Church of Sleep.
    Tilly was sleeping in the other bed.
    Tilly would never admit that she sleepwalked, the same way that
she would never admit that she sometimes still wet the bed. But she
refused to make friends. Making friends would have meant spending
the night in strange houses. Tomorrow morning she would insist that
Henry or Catherine must have carried her from her room, put her to
bed in Carleton’s room for reasons of their own.
    Henry knelt down between the two beds and kissed Carleton on the
forehead. He kissed Tilly, smoothed her hair. How could he not love
Tilly better? He’d known her longer. She was so brave, so
angry.
    On the walls of Carleton’s bedroom, Henry’s children had drawn a
house. A cat nearly as big as the house. There was a crown on the
cat’s head. Trees or flowers with pairs of leaves that pointed
straight up, still bigger, and a stick figure on a stick bicycle,
riding past the trees. When he looked closer, he thought that maybe
the trees were actually rabbits. The wall smelled like Fruit Loops.
Someone had written
Henry Is A Rat Fink! Ha Ha!
He
recognized his wife’s handwriting.
    “Scented markers,” Catherine said. She stood in the door,
holding a pillow against her stomach. “I was sleeping downstairs on
the sofa. You walked right past and didn’t see me.”
    “The front door was unlocked,” Henry said.
    “Liz says nobody ever locks their doors out here,” Catherine
said. “Are you coming to bed, or were you just stopping by to see
how we were?”
    “I have to go back in tomorrow.” Henry said. He pulled a
toothbrush out of his pocket and showed it to her. “There’s a box
of Krispy Kreme donuts on the kitchen counter.”
    “Delete the donuts,” Catherine said. “I’m not that easy.” She
took a step towards him and accidentally kicked King Spanky. The
cat yowled. Carleton woke up. He said, “Who’s there? Who’s
there?”
    “It’s me,” Henry said. He knelt beside Carleton’s bed in the
light of the Winnie the Pooh lamp. “I brought you a new
toothbrush.”
    Carleton whimpered.
    “What’s wrong, spaceman?” Henry said. “It’s just a toothbrush.”
He leaned towards Carleton and Carleton scooted back. He began to
scream.
    In the other bed, Tilly was dreaming about rabbits. When she’d
come home from school, she and Carleton had seen rabbits, sitting
on the lawn as if they had kept watch over the house all the time
that Tilly had been gone. In her dream they were still there. She
dreamed she was creeping up on them. They opened their mouths, wide
enough to reach inside like she was some kind of rabbit dentist,
and so she did. She put her hand around something small and cold
and hard. Maybe it was a ring, a diamond