Magic

Note that there is a graphic description of the death and butcher of animals contained herein.

Above us a chandelier of light arching from the walls of the canopy to the ceiling. Around us a curtain of light and other dancers swaying, swishing, spinning to the music. Against me a woman made of pure magic. I feel everything in me falling, falling falling. Chest rising as she echoes everything that  I am.

I’ve had my eye on her all night. She is not so pretty as to destroy me, only to allure me, and I can already tell she shines. When I ask her she accepts easily, we cycle through partners constantly here, always looking for someone we have not danced with before, yet not so picky as to leave us without a partner when the music gets good again. She falls easily into close embrace, body tight against mine.

Earlier today I took a hip hop class on this floor. He taught us isolations, something I know from belly dance - but to practice it we chose a partner and held each other close, mirroring our isolations back and forth between us, leading, then allowing, in the flow of the music. I had never been comfortable dancing close, never knew what to do except sway, but now!

As we settle in I begin moving muscles in my chest, one by one. This is what I feel. This, this, this. She gives me back each one, rocking against me. I hear you, really hear you. Saying this, this, this. I’m taken aback by the tender listening of it. Yes! And this? She rolls herself towards me, away - yes, even this.

Behind us the song echoes our dance

“Birds flying high

You know how I feel

Sun in the sky

You know how I feel”

I give her a little space, And who are you? Who can listen to me so beautifully?
She replies, hips now against mine, legs squeezing in. I am this, and this and this.
I try and echo it back. This, and this, and this? Yes! I feel it.

“Fish in the sea

You know how I feel

River running free

You know how I feel”

We ebb and flow in the listening and the telling of it. You know how I feel. This, this, this. We never speak a word from start to finish but I have never felt so heard. Our bodies rock against each other like the ocean and for the first time ever in a dance, I find myself growing hard, semi erect against her, truly male in my dance.

“It's a new day

It's a new life

For me

And I'm feeling good

I'm feeling good”

---

They lay sprawled across the chicken house floor. High Rhulain is still thrashing, little death jerks. There are feathers everywhere. An endless soundtrack of squawking is on repeat around me, high and frightened. One rooster and two hens are on the ground. Wings out, ready to fly at the slightest provocation. Fly for the ceiling and come crashing down again without anywhere -to- fly. Two birds sit huddled on the roosts.

I assess the damage, five dead. Not Sophie, not Ashanti! Only one of the roosters dead, why couldn’t there have been more - I might have to kill another eventually. Only one Rhode Island red down. Gyulub by the looks of her. Not one of the two I can’t tell apart.

It does not yet smell like chicken blood. My eyes go back to the corpses, steeling myself. Settling into the rhythm of trauma. Step one: identify the predator. Make sure everybody is safe.

I see a little furry face poke out of the straw. Lightning fast it darts out and I move to intercept. There’s a flutter of feathers, and it retreats back behind the straw bales without damage.  Door open I herd everybody into the yard. Back in I see it trying to drag one of the dead chickens into a crack between the straw bales. Weasel.

I have chunks of firewood blocking off spots in the coop I don’t want my chickens to go. I pick one up and try and slam it down on the weasel's head. It’s too fast. Back and forth we go, it running around the back of the bale to the other side, trying to grab a chicken corpse to drag it into hiding. Me trying to hit it. Realizing my block of wood is definitely too slow, I grab a knotted stick from outside. I still can’t hit it.

All around the mulberry bush the Pan chased the weasel . . . sings a little sing song voice in my head. I shut it off.

It ducks outside, edges the side of the pen where the alive chickens are, goes inside again, and then finally vanishes into the bushes. I go out and count: five dead, six in the yard, one missing. I find her completely silent and still behind the jar of sunflower seeds. She doesn’t even struggle or squawk, frozen in instinctive silence. I put her out with the others

Then I pause. Feeling at the edge of my slow thinking brain. Pouring everything into options. Maybe a minute goes by, empty minded. I catch maybe a flicker before I make a decision. Standing there watching the flock I call the neighbor who helped me raise the chicks. No answer. I leave a message but I know as I’m leaving it that it won’t work. On to another neighbor, this one picks up.

“Can I leave my chickens with you?”

She just integrated her chicks with her larger flock, doesn’t want to stress them more - but she has an old raven cage they could stay in. “How long?” she asks. I admit that it might be the rest of the week. I have a summer camp to help teach until Friday. It’s Monday now.

She assents. With difficulty, as all the chickens are spooked and nobody wants me to catch them. I stuff them into a cardboard box, load up the food and water, and drive them over. Before I go I take the dead chickens and put them in a bag to be cleaned when I return.

---

The eating area of the Renegade cafe has tables made of old spools, of the sort found in lumber yards to hold metal cable or shipping rope. There are enough tables for all of us here at the dance camp, but never enough chairs, and this morning Eithne sat under the table back to the rounded interior - now everybody is doing it.

Eithne is sitting next to Maid Marian at a spool all their own. As I approach, some part of my mind tells me I must not be a burden - I have been sitting too much with Eithne, and she will be tired of me - so I circumnavigate and sit on the other side of Maid Marian instead. Eithne is out of sight around the bend, but I can hear her.

Last night, lights arching overhead, Maid Marian and I danced imaginative delight. We started out as birds, and afterwards I asked her what kind of bird she was.
“A woodpecker, you?”
“A rooster I’m sure.”

Next we came together in a song with trains, and mirrored it, her hand on my back as I chugged around the dance floor.
“What kind of train car are you?” I asked.
“I don’t know trains!”
Neither do I, “There’s the engine, and the caboose, and the passenger cars, and the coal cars. . . “
“I’m probably a coal car.”
“Hey, me too.”

It is not then, so strange this morning that I turn to her and ask “Do you believe in magic?”
“How do you define magic?” She asks.
“That’s usually my follow up question - Eithne wrote a great poem about it, I wish I had it, but oh, I define magic as . . .”

We talk late, long after everyone has cleared away and I’m needed to help clean up. By the end we’ve gone into gender, hula dancing, and herb lore - and I am excited to know that I define magic differently than before.

The day passes in its whirl of workshops. When dark comes and we dance in earnest again, the bottoms of my feet are hurting, and I actually have to sit some dances out. Once I ask Eithne to dance and she jokes, “Only if you carry me,” so I scoop her up, and spin around the dance floor with her literally in my arms until she stops hanging on and I have to let her down. Another woman and I have been finding the strangest dances we can, and finally find our edge when I make a dance of running my beard down her arms. We’re giggling and can’t stop as we spin out into the normal dance, tinted with where we’ve been.

So when I am sitting and a woman approaches me and says “Tell me everything,” I am ready.

“Magic, is the state of deep listening,” I tell her. “It is knowing that the world will respond to your will, but trusting that you do not need to change the world, only yourself to match it. A noticing of what is going on around you. Aligning yourself with it. It is seeing the pattern of all things, acknowledging how much you cannot see, and fostering good relationships with the other threads of the tapestry.”
“I think that just about covers everything,” she says - laughing. We go deeper. Magic to her is the belief that everything is inherently good. She won’t acknowledge the existence of evil, or even that it might be more practical to see some things that way. In contrast I discover that aligning with the pattern is sometimes aligning against an element of it. There is light and dark in this dance - the story always has tension.

Then I am dancing again. Caitie lets me try out all my new lifts on her - she’s ninety pounds, and it’s a delight. Maid Marian and I dance being the wind. One woman tells me she will always want to dance with me, and I return to her again and again as we build vocabulary together, but there is never a lack of good dancers here.

At three in the morning Eithne and I walk back towards our sleeping quarters. As she’s about to head her own way I call her back.
“Eithne?”
“Yes?”
“I love you.”

It is not the first time I’ve told her, but it is the first time in those words. Direct, looking into her face, and in the dim edges of the moon I watch her face become hot with the glow of it.

“Why are you being so sweet tonight?” She asks me.
“I’m always sweet.”
“Bullshit,” she says, turns to go “I love you too.”

---

I’ve never processed a chicken completely on my own before. Always with Mama or Papa beside me. I roll a round out to the driveway. Grab some plastic bags, pull out my pocket knife, and begin.

Plucking a chicken is only really worth it when you’re butchering a lot at a time. Maybe five counts as a lot, but I’m not in the mood to do something completely new. I start with High Rhulain, cutting off her head as an offering to the weasel inside a live trap.
“What are you going to do if you catch it?” Papa asks.
“Kill it.” It’s that simple.

It humors me that High Rhulain, named after the otter queen who fought ferrets, weasels, and stoats, should be the bait to this one’s death.

After her head is severed, and the trap set in the now abandoned henhouse, I return to her, cutting her open from cloaca to breast bone, softly separating her entrails from the lining of her ribcage. Careful not to nick an intestine, I pull out her gizzard which I think is her heart for a while until I discover it’s full of little stones. The outside is shiny, an inflorescence of silver rainbowing across both sides and it occurs to me that it is beautiful, and I would prefer not to see this beauty.

Her feathers come off cleanly with her skin. I chop off her wings and put them in their own pile, clean the liver and deposit it inside a bag with the actual heart, and even slice off the edges of the gizzard painstakingly for the little bits of rich organ meat.

By now, flies have gathered all over the unuseable guts, and I shoo them off my meat and cover the guts with plastic best I can to keep them away. It’s no good. The inside of the bag becomes a buzzing black mass of flykind.

The cleaned corpse gets stuffed into another bag.

Sophie is next as I know she has to be. She was the first I grew attached to. The only chick I could reliably tell apart. The one yellow one - the woman dipping them out grabbed her and added her to my box ,“these ones grow up so beautiful,” and she was.

As I work I begin to sing softly under my breath

“Breeze driftin' on by

You know how I feel

Blossom on a tree

You know how I feel”

It seems appropriate as the breeze ruffles the scattered feathers at my fingertips.

Next, Ashanti, bravest of my hens. The only one I managed to get to look up at me when I said her name. Her butcher goes quickly, and soon I cannot tell her apart from the others in the bag.

Ondori, the only rooster. Named after the japanese word for rooster, did he Kamikaze himself to save the hens? I wish my roosters had more fight in them. I hope this one did.

Last, little Gyulub - smallest of the flock. She was always the hardest to pick up, but by the end I had her flying onto my arm to eat. Each one’s head comes off with a hatchet. The legs get the same, set aside in a separate pot for soup.

Then I’m washing the bodies, and making breakfast, sprinkled with gizzard meat - and stripping the meat off the carcass. This goes in a plastic yogurt container to be frozen. The bones go in a pot for stock on a low simmer on the stove.

“Sun in the sky

You know how I feel

Fish in the sea

You know how I feel”

Half the meat goes into the soup along with a bit too much barley, some nettles, and a full bok choy left over from the dance.

Papa, thinking I needed more freezer space, had taken out a chicken and roasted it for his own dinner. I look at it, a clean, white facsimile of my own chickens - storebought, normal - roasted as we always roast it. He has only a bite of my soup, loading up instead on chicken and gravy from his alternate reality. It’s only when he goes to turn the music off to eat that I realize how drunk he is, holding onto the bookshelves to walk. He sits down to eat, tries to say something, chokes up, can’t.

“I can’t,” he finally says in a slur. “Can we go our separate places, you do you, I do me?”
“Of course,” I say easily. He gets up and staggers off to his room, leaving his plate piled high on the table. I cover it with a lid to keep it warm in case he comes back. I forget sometimes, I think, that while Mama is more sensitive - he is perhaps the more empathetic. He feels my pain more than I do.

But as I sit and eat alone at the table I wish that he were stronger. That I could be the one to escape, and not the one holding space. I put away his food and mine, to the sound of him throwing up somewhere in the distance. He’ll call me if he needs help - right?

I go up to my room and light candles, sit for a while, and then call Eithne.

“Hi,” she answers.
“Hello.” I say.
There’s a long pause. “Can I call you back?” She asks.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Talk to you soon.” She says, and hangs up.
I’m thinking that I should have told her I’d call her back because I so rarely get service here, when my phone pings with a text.

Are you okay?
Of course, I never call. She knows something is wrong.

No, I text back, but not in an acute way. Call me back when you have time.

Like half an hour,  she texts back, adding a heart.

I put my phone in the one spot in my room where it gets service, on my altar nestled between Quan yin and the horned god who stands behind her. I clean my room as I wait, folding clothes, rearranging my table, and pulling everything out of my backpack to decide what really needs to stay. It’s a therapeutic half an hour.

She eventually calls back and I explain what’s going on. I find, as I always find with phones, that there is nothing said that I could not have said later. That the telling means less than a hug or a gesture made in person, but it is good at least to know someone cares -  it is good.

---

Dance camp comes down faster than it came up. Monday it’s just us volunteers and a couple teachers left. We take down the canopy, clean the kitchen, move the hay bales under shelter - when it comes time to move the speakers I ask Eithne’s help. Another man says we should wait for him, doubting Eithne’s strength - but I know. We hoist them into the car and wiggle them around until they fit - Eithne, angling them and me providing the brute strength from behind. As the gods intended.

After I’ve enlisted her again to move a solid oak table though - she announces she’s done - ready to leave - and I’ve been grasping at things to do for the past hour. It’s mostly sorting, and I know I’m not needed.

We get donated most of the leftover food, and carry it to her truck. The coordinators thank us again for all our hard work, and I thank them for being so good to  work under. I felt well used this weekend. Then Eithne drives me home.

She doesn’t want to go work today - wonders what she was thinking, scheduling work the day after dancing all weekend. She wants to stay and visit with Papa.
“Take care of yourself,” I urge. She says she’ll call her boss and see. When we arrive home I bring all of my food inside past Papa sitting on the porch. He reminds me he has a doctor’s appointment today and was going to pick me up. He’s leaving in about an hour. Oops.

I go and check on the chickens, and let them out of the coop to wander free. Refilling their water, letting the twelve of them individually eat grain from my hands. I come back to find Eithne and Papa have found each other and sit and listen as she tells him about the dance camp. “Some of the best nights of my life.”

She gets a callback just as she’s packing up to go. Her boss gives her leave to stay. We’re all delighted and settle onto the porch, she and Papa on the chairs and I on the steps until she, tearing up, obliges me to move close and put a hand on her foot “You don’t have to come comfort me every time I cry,” she protests - but I do.

Papa is wonderful - asking questions I hadn’t thought to ask, and drawing her out into telling the whole story, much of which, despite being there with her, I hadn’t heard or didn’t know. When Papa leaves we carry it on, laying on the grass, migrating with the sun - as I try without success try to convey how male emotion differs from female, and that this is a good thing. She’s not buying it.

We go inside, she to write and I to eat chia seed pudding, in silence. Then I go out to the chickens again. She finds me to ask “Is Pan the same as Pantheon?”
“A Pantheon is a family of gods, not a specific one,” I advise. “They come from the same root though. Pan meaning all. Theon-gods - All gods.” And they named him Pan for all the gods loved him and rejoiced. She nods.

I sit, then lay down in the sun. I become conscious when her shadow falls over me  - a playful goodbye kick. “I just wrote a poem - and I can never share it with you,” she confides.

I kick back, she kicks again, I execute a perfect leg sweep and topple her ontop of me. We lay there for a minute, enjoying the feel of each other, and in that moment eveything is perfect. Something has shifted in her being and I can’t quite place it, but here, now, laying in the sun on the grass with bees buzzing all around,  I am content.

---

The day after they died, I just want to work on weasel proofing my chicken coop, but I’ve promised to help Mama with her summer camp. I take the remainder of my chicken soup, and a cardboard box of chicken feet, with us as I drive Papa into town for a doctor’s appointment. As I wait in the hospital parking lot, eating soup for breakfast, and checking in on hospital wifi, I decide that today is not a day for gaming, and that I’m going to try and have a Lughnasa celebration instead. This being one of my most holy days.

Eithne said last night when I called that she’d come if I did it, and she reaffirms this now. Freeze says he can come. My gaming group are all iffy, but make vague promises. Mareimbrium says she’s down.

After Candlemass six months ago, a bonfire on the beach to which none of the promised four or five came - I promised myself to never hold a last minute celebration again - yet here I am. I invite all the same people, and get most of the same no’s and maybe’s. Eithne couldn’t come last time though, she at least shows up when she says she will.

After summer camp is finished for the day - Crewel cake camp, a combo of embroidery and frosting that brings out the shared patterns in each, I begin pulling the pieces together. Leftover gingerbread cake goes into a container to come along. My soup gets jarred and Mama finds me a tray that will be okay over a camp fire. I message everyone to let them know to bring their own bowls and utensils and specifically ask Mareimbrium and Freeze to bring their guitars.

As the time comes closer I get Mareimbrium telling me she’s had a bad day, and doesn’t want to come,  Freeze informing me he’ll be late, and Eithne not knowing what to bring. “Take care of yourself.” I repeat my mantra. “Take your time.” I tell him.  “Harvest food, it doesn’t have to be fancy.”

I leave late, walking the beach with the tide almost all the way in. When I arrive at a fallen tree with a polkadot bra hanging from it, I know I’ve found the spot. I build my fire but leave kindling it till Freeze comes, from the opposite direction of what I expected, without his guitar. He lights it for me, and points out that I’ve set it too close to the fallen tree and helps me douse it with seawater so it doesn’t catch fire.

We note then that there’s another fire, closer to Fort Warden, and still within the range of where I said mine would be. I hope nobody will be confused.

Eithne comes late, leading tall Goliath with her who I would have invited if I’d thought of it. It’s just starting to get dark, and nobody sits on the logs I set up as seats until I complain about it, and they all inform me that normal people sit further from fires. The benches are moved, food is introduced. Goliath brought corn, Eithne cheese balls and tomatoes, the basil she informs us, vanished between one sighting and the next, her voice going high with the incredulity of it - laughing and setting all of us at ease.

“I may have done something stupid,” she announces, when we’re all settled in.
“Oh?”
“I might have invited Jay,” she says sheepishly.
“I had a fantasy about you doing that, but thought - no she wouldn’t be that stupid,” I say, emphasizing stupid. She laughs.
“Jay - is a friend of Eithne’s who I recently wrote an entire piece about how I don’t like.” I inform the rest of the group who are looking on in curiosity. This leads to all sorts of suggestions. “Tell him it’s on North beach.” “Have him turn left at the stairs.” I subtly put up a ward - a Jay, you don’t feel like coming, more than a desire to get him lost.

When he calls, Eithne gives him accurate directions though. We joke about mean things we could do. “All the guys could flirt with him.” Goliath suggests. Eithne says she wants to see this - and I explain that he’s very homophobic and it actually would be quite mean, and then say I’m in - with a cruel smile. There are very few people I get to unequivocally dislike.

A lot of dudes.” He comments uncomfortably when he arrives, and sits down next to

Eithne. I decide my wards didn’t work because he’s never comfortable but comes anyway. We offer him food which he refuses except a little gingerbread. Then he stays quiet the rest of the evening, and while he doesn’t add anything he doesn’t detract either.

We eat, laugh, flirt, play. Freeze was interested in Eithne a long time ago, Jay, Goliath, and I express current pursuit - but she doesn’t seem to care and we’re all easy. I teach them a round and everyone but Jay sings the return of elements, staggered so that we line up and alternate in turn. Nobody brought bowls so they take turns eating from mine, except Freeze who’s uncomfortable eating chickens with names. The tide is coming up and he stands sentinel against it, threatening to just sit there without warning as the water rushes over him until it reaches us. He’s quiet but present, mask up, but not so far. I’m glad he came.

Eithne brought fire hoops, and when we’ve eaten all we can, and I’ve told the stories of Lugh and Tailtiu and how this festival came to be - she hoops for us. Ringed in light it looks effortless as she institutes her flaming boundaries to the world, up and down, she even gets on the ground and hoops with her toes for a tad until rising and spinning her fire into spirals that echo across the night, and it’s only when the fire has burnt down and she has dropped the form of a flaming angel that I can hear her heavy breathing.

“Anyone else want to try?” She says, perhaps joking, but I say “Yes!”
“Maybe practice unflamed,” she suggests. “This hoop is weighted differently from the ones you’re used to.”

I go off, practice, notice all the things I can’t do, that I normally can. This hoop never stays at my knees, but goes towards the call of gravity far too fast. When I feel as if I know my capacity, I call her and have her guide me in dunking the torches that extend from the hoop,  and spinning off the gas, a light mist of it settling over me, before inflaming it in the fire and beginning.

“Keep it moving.” Eithne advised, and I do. The fire spinning around me roars so that I can hear nothing else but dragon’s breath. I feel like I did the first night I came partner dancing - the roar in my chest that told me that this was right, but a vocabulary so small as to feel like I am repeating myself too often.

Keep it moving. I am not afraid of the fire. I have never been afraid of fire. When I burned my belly on the woodstove I didn’t feel pain until they pointed. When the oven mit on the stove top burst into fire, and my housemates were yelling in fear, I watched wondering why they didn’t just let it burn its course. Reaching in to smother it with a pot lid and bare hands, knowing fire needs to fuel to take hold, and I take time to burn.

Keep it moving. I remember Eithne saying how easy it is to impress when your hoop is on fire. How impressive a little head hooping, so I bring it up and stay there, hoop a fallen halo - on fire I forget and try and bring it to my knees again and again, scooping it as it falls, relishing its weight, until one by one its torches sputter out.

“I’ve been wanting to do that since I was thirteen,” I tell them. “Ten years to realize that dream.”

When we decide to end, Eithne explains that when she is leading girls initiations in the Olympic mountains, they end their fires with each singing a single thing they are grateful for, until they are a chorus of voices.

“I’ll start,” She says, then sings. “Fire and friends. Fire and friends,” each iteration, like a birdsong, is iterated with a pause. “Fire and friends.”

I add in “Harvest.” setting my beat slightly off hers so that we overlap and sing individually in turn “Haaarvest.”

Goliath begins “The cold, cold ocean. The cold cold ocean.” His voice is deeper than mine. “The cold cold ocean.”

Freeze hesitates unsure, then leaps with humor. “Dirt!” he sings “Dirt!”

“Fire and friends.” The cold cold ocean.” “Haaaarvest.” “Dirt!” We wait for Jay to join us, he never does, but he stretches our song out to contain him. “Fiiiire and Frieeeends!” “Harvest, harvest, harvest.” “The cold - the cold - the cold cold oceaaan!” “Diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirt!”

---

Mama’s summer camp ends with her so exhausted she resorts to paper plates and cups. When the last child leaves I tell her to go sit down while I commence clean up. She sits and embroiders by the door, and I am in the back room when Eithne knocks, and they meet each other for the first time. I come out, finally packed to find them sitting and talking poetry with one another.

“Clever,” Mama murmurs when she’s hugging me goodbye. “If you’d have warned me I would have gone the full nine miles for tea.”
“I love that woman.” Eithne mouths to me as we walk out the gate.

She drives me home. We don’t talk - a habit born of preservation given how loud her truck roars - instead listening to music from her ancient ipod. We’re just turning onto Berry Hill when the song comes on again.

“Sun in the sky

You know how I feel
Oh freedom is mine

And I know how I feel”

When we arrive she says hello to Papa, then comes out to help me work on the chicken coop. “This place is full of holes!” she exclaims. A weasel burrows into mouse holes, meaning it can easily fit through chicken wire, and anything smaller than an inch and a half. We have mesh to staple over the smaller things, but I discover the bottom of the wall is rotten, and have to replace it.

Eithne works on rehanging the door so there are no gaps, then goes in to close the gaps against the walls.
“You’re missing some hot hay bale moving action in here,” she teases me. I’d admitted at dance camp that watching her move hay bales was hella sexy - I find the most femininity in physical strength.

Papa comes out and admits a grievous error, that he says he’ll tell me at dinner.
“You caught the weasel and then lost it,” I suppose.
“Aah! - my guilty conscience can neither confirm nor deny!” He says and flees. It is, of course, exactly that. He dropped the cage in instinctive fear of the weasel inside. This I find understandable, an honest mistake - he is unrepentant for baiting the trap again with my chicken livers I’d left in the fridge rather than the freezer anticipating I’d make pate shortly after my return.  The thing I find angering - no recognition that maybe I might be irrational concerning this meat.

“Stars when you shine

You know how I feel

Scent of the pine

You know how I feel”

After dinner, a little more work, and a dance to strange music, Eithne and I make our way up to my room and pull out the foam mattress that I keep for guests, to lay on and talk for lack of a couch. At midnight I offer that if she would like to stay the night she is welcome to do so, either here or in my bed - with me either here or in my bed.

“I’ll sleep here. You can sleep wherever,” she says, as if there’s a question. She’s expressed earlier that she doesn’t want me to blow out the candles - but I’m too well trained to fall asleep with them on.  We finally compromise with having a flashlight beside the bed in easy arm’s reach.

“Are you afraid of the dark?”
“I’m uncomfortable with men in the dark.”
“Fair”

It makes me proud that she’s comfortable enough with me to hazard it. We snuggle up, talk a little, and then sleep the remainder of the night without incident.

“It’s a new dawn
It's a new day

It's a new life

For me”

---

As we walk back from our fire, we stumble into the other one, lured by the guile of guitars creeping out into the night. I recognize more than half of them when we come close - and they’re singing, taking turns improving off the melody that improves off them, weaving in and out of the night.

They’re celebrating Lammas - what the rest of Europe calls Lughnasa - and the departure of one of their number upon the morrow. We find ourselves captured. Standing, then sitting, behind them, just listening and soaking in the warmth that seems to emminate from this tight knit community. I have years of beach fires to go before I reach this I realize.

But they’re losing one of their own, and that’s a part of it. He reads us some of his poetry and speaks animatedly in gibberish - telling a story with his whole body until we are enraptured in a way nothing intelligible might have done, each projecting our story on him and watching him play out against the dull orange of the fire. We are just resolved to finally go, when they say they are planning on going skinny dipping. We urge them on.

We had talked about it at our fire, but decided it was too rocky there, but here there’s nothing but sand, and a larger community to take away our shyness. Freeze and Jay can choose to sit out, and the rest of us strip and join them, holding hands in a line and singing as we walk into the water.

It’s cold as I knew it had to be cold, but we are holding hands, Eithne on one side, Goliath on the other, and there is no wavering. Four feet in there is a drop and we all go  down to the groin together in one great outrush of breath. It’s cold!

Then we’ve dropped hands and Eithne is rushing forward and dunking under and I’m hanging back sputtering until I can find the courage to dunk myself to the neck and come up again. Everyone else is making the same decisions - how far to go.

I had noticed the bioluminescence earlier, tracing runes in the sand to see them lit up briefly in the night, but out here in constant motion we are alight  with it. Eithne is swimming now, and her entire body is again on fire, lit up with the ghostly glow of the cold cold ocean and her children. Others are diving now, submerging under water, wreathed in light. The departing friend and guitarest, dive under water together, man and woman winding past each other underwater with the water sparkling into light around them.

And it is pure and utter magic.