Monday, April 2, 2012

Cowboys and Sporks

Nathaniel pulled a shiny silver spoon out of his bag after sitting on my living room sofa. “What's this?”

I raised an eyebrow at my instructor. “You're kidding right?”

But of course he wasn't. That would require a sense of humor.

“What is it?” he asked again.

I sighed. “It's a spoon.”

“Is it?”

Gah. The old and wise guro thing that had been done to death in movies decades ago didn't suite Nat at all. For one thing, he was barely out of college. For another, his jet-black skin had almost as many piercings as pores. And, probably worst of all, he wore a cowboy hat. All the time. In Boston.

“Okay, maybe it's an object you've glamored to look like a spoon.”

“Is it?”

My eye-rolling was entirely automatic. Mom was constantly telling me to lay off the motion, but I didn't see how anyone could possibly refrain in my position.

He rolled his eyes back. “You're supposed to prove it. Without magic.”

“You're my magic tutor,” I pointed out.

“Yeah. And I'm trying to teach you something. How can you tell this is enchanted?”

I shrugged, something else Mom bugs me about doing too much. “Touch it?”

Most glamors are completely vision-based tricks and can't stand up to touch. Everyone that.

“What if you can't reach it?”

Obviously, I could reach it. Nathaniel looked tough, but he worked for my mother, who was easily the most bad-ass witch in New England, so he wouldn't hurt a hair on my pretty blond head if I tried to take it. “Whatever. I don't know.”

He held it up in the shaft of sunlight piercing the window until its shadow fell on the coffee table between us. Its decisively fork-shaped shadow. “Illusions fool eyes, but not the sun.”

Okay, that was worth knowing. Still, I was going to say something scathingly sarcastic until a little voice in the corner of my mind screamed at me to look down.

My eyes drifted to the floor and I started to laugh.

Turned out, Nathaniel did have a sense of humor. Though maybe a slightly twisted one. Because his shadow wasn't wearing a cowboy hat. His horns would have pierced it.

The minotaur sighed. “Took you long enough.”

Prompt above found through +Flash Fiction Project.


  1. Cool story. Great work on the dialogue and some nice story development in a short piece. Keep up the good work and thanks for sharing.


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