Free Homecoming by Scott Tracey

Homecoming
    by Scott Tracey
    Nothing sucks more than getting the Addams Family theme stuck in your head every afternoon. Whenever the mailman, Mr. Collins, pulled his rickety, gray mail truck up into our driveway to drop off the mail, he was humming it. And as soon as he left, it hung there in the air, creeping into my ears like a parasite.
    I was sprawled across one of the green and white plastic lawn chairs Uncle John had bought at a garage sale last spring. The chair was currently on the porch and out of the sun, so I don’t know if it still counted as a lawn chair. A porch chair, then. Either way, it was still tacky. But it beat being out in the sun, where it was at least twenty degrees warmer.
    In the height of summer, Mr. Collins always decided that his uniform was optional, and drove around town in T-shirts and jean shorts. But this year, the summer swelter hadn’t ended with the new school year. It was one of the hottest summers on record, at the end of September, and the temperatures were staying consistently at 90 degrees or higher.
    â€œMornin’, Braden,” he said, tipping an imaginary hat in my direction. Then he went right back to humming that song. I could never decide if he did it on purpose. He’s always polite, but there are always those moments. Moments where the mailman would look at me, forehead knotted in curiosity. The “is he blind? Or can he really see behind those sunglasses?” look.
    It wasn’t unusual to wear sunglasses with the way the sun was blazing and it was hot like a crematorium outside. But that wasn’t why he looked. Everyone in Garroway knew about me. “Seizure boy.” Like I didn’t know they called me that behind my back.
    We’d lived in Garroway, Montana, for three years. Why? I have no idea. One morning, out of the blue, Uncle John woke up and decided on a total life upheaval. I’d grown up in Arizona, in some place that was even more of the middle of nowhere than Garroway was. At least in Garroway, there were people. In Arizona, we were isolated. Fifteen minutes outside the nearest city, and fourteen minutes to the nearest neighbor, unless you counted the bobcats and coyotes.
    Mr. Collins climbed the porch steps, clinging to the handrail as he did. His knees had started getting bad last spring, but he wouldn’t let me meet him down at the truck. He insisted on delivering the mail all the way to our mailbox, even if that meant climbing up and down every day.
    â€œSchool?” he grunted, eyeing the texts in front of me. Every day, the same question. Same song. Same stained T-shirt. Mr. Collins liked routine, and he’d never met a sentence he didn’t bite in half if he could.
    â€œSomething like that,” I said, just as usual. I wondered if he ever noticed that my books were always old and dusty, and written in languages that even Google had trouble tracking down. My busywork was never as simple as geometry or the Civil War—my projects were always Peruvian charm circles and Sumerian devil binders.
    Uncle John was—in addition to being a grump, a hardass, and a giant nerd (not necessarily in that order)—a witch. We both were. And part of the reason we lived where we did—nearly off the grid and mostly independent—was because teaching a teenager to use magic was flashy, loud, and dangerous. As I’ve tried to explain to him a dozen times, sometimes you just need to blow something up. He was never amused.
    It’s not like I ever intend for the magic to escape me. John made it look so easy, a word or a gesture or a ritual he’d performed a thousand times. Of course it was easy for him. He’d been doing it all his life and he was ancient.
    â€œNot knockin’ down mailboxes, are yuh?”
    â€œWhat?” I looked up, trying to figure out what Mr. Collins was talking about. And then I remembered. John had brought it up during dinner one night: some kids were using street