Chapter One

I’m dreaming. I know I’m dreaming, but no matter how many times I have had this dream, it still feels real when I am inside of it. I’m little. I would guess four years old, or at least close to four. Time frames as a child are hard to figure out when I look back. All I know is that I feel very young. I’m standing in a park, in a small grove of trees. Their branches are full of yellow and red leaves. The colored leaves are also floating in the air, drifting down to my feet, where they are beginning to form piles of crunchy debris.

I glance over at my momma, checking that she’s right where I left her. She is. Not that I expected her to disappear, but it’s nice to make sure. My momma sits on a colorful quilt a few feet away from where I stand in the leaves. She’s reading. A small, barely-there smile is on her face as she concentrates on the story within the pages. The book is a soft, floppy type book. On the cover are a hugging man and woman. My dad hates those books. I don’t know why, but he gets mad when she reads them. He calls them smut and usually grabs them out of her hands and throws them in the trash. I asked my mom once what ‘smut’ meant. She didn’t answer me. She just said to shush.

The breeze blowing the leaves around my feet is also tossing her hair about her face. The brown locks dance and swing around her head, lifting and falling with the moving air. She looks so small sitting there.

I turn back to the leaves and try to catch a yellow one as it flits about on its journey to the ground. I smack my hands together but miss the bright yellow leaf altogether. My hands, on contact, make a loud clapping sound. That sound is not what drew my undivided attention, though. When my hands connected, white lightning streaks shot out from around my hands to light up, only long enough for me to see them before they faded to nothing once more. The falling leaves are quickly forgotten. I turned my hands, palms up, to inspect them. I see nothing out of the ordinary there on their wrinkled surface. I lift them closer to my eyes. I didn’t see anything but for the lines and calluses that were always present. I lowered my hands away from my face and then, with a small amount of hesitation, clapped them together again.

I jumped back in surprise and maybe a little bit of fear. The lights were back. The same as before, just a quick blink of bright, then gone. “Momma! Come look at this,” I yelled over my shoulder, never once taking my eyes away from my hands. A small part of me thought that if I looked away, the magic would disappear.

“What is it, honey?”

I heard rustling, and then a moment later, my momma stood at my side.

“Watch what I can do,” I said.

My voice was little more than a whisper. I felt my mother lean in closer as I leaned a little away. I clapped my hands, unintentionally harder than I had before.

White sparks shot out from my hands in a show that made me think of the Fourth of July and the sparklers I was allowed to play with just that year.

The sparks were bigger than before and lasted a moment longer as well. I felt my momma jump in surprise. I quickly glanced at her face.

The small smile that she’d had while reading was nowhere to be seen. She looked scared. Her eyes were wide and big, and the blue in them seemed larger than I’d ever seen them. Her mouth was open in a small circle. Was it awe? Was it fear?

“Momma?”

I don’t know what I was asking. Maybe it was a bit of worry about what I’d done. Was it okay? Was it bad? Was she mad at me? What would my dad think? Would he be angry? Would he call it smut? All these questions were heavy on the single word I’d spoken.

Only a moment had passed, but it felt like forever before my momma finally looked away from my hands and turned to face me. She pulled me around to stand in front of her. She knelt before me, so we were eye to eye. She stuttered around a moment as if not sure what to say. Then she finally whispered, “Does it hurt?”

I shook my head in answer.

“Can you do anything else?”

I shrugged.

My momma gave me a little shake and said with a harsh tone, I’d never heard her use before, “This is serious, Cash. Can you do anything else?”

She was scaring me. Her grip on my shoulders tightened. I felt my eyes burn and fill with tears. I wasn’t sure why she was upset or even why I was crying.

“I don’t know. Is it bad what I can do?”

She let go of me then and used her hands to cover her face. “I don’t know what to do,” she said.

It didn’t seem like she was talking to me, though.

I looked down at my hands again, expecting to see something more than I had a moment before, but there was nothing extraordinary about them. I put my palms against each other and rubbed them together as if to warm them.

I wasn’t cold, not really, but I felt a chill of fear in the air.

When I rubbed my hands back and forth, sparks of white shot out in a bit of an arch and dropped toward the ground. I watched fascinated as one little white light stayed bright, as it fell on the edge of a red autumn leaf. Before mine and my mother’s fearful eyes, the little light ignited into a flame, as red and as yellow as the leaves on the ground.

My mother jumped to her feet and stomped down on the flames, effectively putting them out quickly and with little smoke and fanfare. One moment there was a small, barely-there fire, and the next, there was nothing to show for it but a few blackened and curled leaves.

She grabbed my arms again and, this time, shook me hard and ferocious. “Don’t ever do that again! Don’t let anyone see what you can do. Do you hear me, Cash? This did not happen.”

She didn’t even wait for me to answer her, which was probably good, as I was frozen in shock from what I’d just done, as well as my momma’s reaction.

She dropped to her hands and knees and began swiping left and right and making circles of the leaves.

She was very effectively erasing any evidence of the fire that had been there moments before. My mother jumped back to her feet and inspected her work. “There. That’s looks normal, right?”

My momma took my hand, and we marched back to the quilt. Together, we crammed all our stuff back in the bag she’d brought it all in and hustled us to the car. The whole way home she talked. Not so much to me, but to the air around us.

“We have to keep this a secret. They can’t know. We can’t tell anyone. What are we going to do? Your father, he can’t know. Oh, God. It’s a secret, Cash. You have to keep it a secret. Do you understand?”

She swiveled her head around to look me dead in the eye and said, “Do you understand Cash? No one can know, ever, what you can do.”