The Magnetic Girl. Jessica Handler

dirt on your clothes.”

      Fascinated, Leo reached for my hair. Besotted, I let him.

      On a beautiful, bright warm day when I was alone with him for the few minutes Momma stepped away, the urge to show off a bit of the world overtook me. A swarm of birds had landed like a glittering black cape on the field, their bickering as good as laughter.

      Want to see. My brother, five months old, spoke inside my ears.

      “See the birds?” I asked.

      Leo grinned, clutching at the motes of dust in the sunlight as he tried to seize something he couldn’t hold.

      I picked him up as easily as snapping a pea from a pod and lay him over my shoulder, so he could look out the window. His chin rested perfectly against my collar. I stroked his warm back and schooled him about how birds ate worms and insects.

      When they’ve had their fill, I said, they fly away.

      I lifted him then, my hands around his middle. I held my brother high above my head so he could thrill, like I did, at the sheath of wings rising past the window. My baby brother quivered, a movement so new to my hands that I pulled them away.

      Leo fell, alone, untended. He hit the kitchen floor with the sound a mattress makes falling from a wagon, a padded, simple, singular thud.

      I screamed and swallowed the sound at the same time, silencing my terror for my brother and the fear that Momma would come running before I could undo whatever harm I had done.

      Leo screamed, too, panicked from his fall, my childish arms no consolation. When I scooped him up, his face was wet with my tears and his own. I tried to look in his eyes and hold his gaze, but he looked away, furious and broken. I held him to my chest and rocked him. I rocked us both, six year old me and baby Leo, a single being seeking solace.

      And ever since that time, objects found their way into my palms, my pockets, and of them I made neat rows inside my wooden box that had once held the thread that stitched our clothing. With the very sharpest things, the hairpins with tops like jewels, the lone sliver of glass slim as a sewing needle, I pierced myself before I set them aside. I never felt pain when I slid a sharp tip slowly and carefully into the meat of my thumb. What I felt was satisfaction, a question answered before it had been asked.

      My father collected things, too. He kept stones in a pile on our parlor mantel. Before I was tall enough to reach them on my own, he would lift me and let me move the stones, reshaping the pyramid to a square and back again, or placing a black stone—hematite, he said, iron ore—at the top, then a milky-white one—quartz—in its place.

      The stones were cool to the touch in summer, so much so that I would drag a chair to the deadened fireplace to reach them. I held the flat ones to my face, closing my eyes against the bright sun flaring at the edges of the drawn drapes. Small round ones I placed in the V-shape between my fingers, spreading the skin and letting air into the humid spaces. The stones stilled my mind and gave me rest. When I heard Momma calling me, I arranged the stones back into formation before dismounting the chair and pushing it back into place, my heartbeat thudding in my ears. The stones weren’t to be touched unless Daddy was there. The stones and the furniture went back exactly where’d they’d been without my thinking about it. I always had a map in my mind.

      On a day when I was fourteen and loading kindling onto a cart, a fox ran toward me like a black-footed bullet. I didn’t shout. A fox will avoid people if he happens on them, but this one, hurtling toward me, had to be diseased. Leo lay in the shade on a blanket beside the cart. In a single motion I set the kindling down and pulled Leo onto my back, all the while holding the fox in my gaze. When I crouched, the animal was at my eye level. The fox froze, a front paw in the air as if he were about to speak.

      Which was what I wanted.

      I lowered my eyelids halfway. The sounds of birds and the rustle of leaves faded. The sunlight paled. The world closed in around me, Leo, and the fox. I felt my brother’s heartbeat against my own, and I patted his hand while I willed him to stay still.

      I counted my breaths, feeling my own bumping heartbeat. Not until it slowed and steadied did I stand, my gaze still linked to the fox’s. With Leo’s weight against me, I backed away from the motionless animal, stepping carefully until my heels touched the bottom step of the porch. Then I turned, my heart racing, and shut the door behind us.

      When I looked out the window, the fox was gone. Nothing out there but our mother’s purple irises, and past them, the half-filled cart of kindling.

      Back then I believed that I was magic. My power appeared as a bodily urge, like needing to use the privy or sucking in my stomach to button up a dress that no longer fit. I loved my secret talent so much that I gave it a name: captivation. I sensed more than most people, too, without using words. I was the only person in my family who understood my brother when he spoke, although Momma tried her best.

      Leo was my center. In his eyes, my most secret faults were forgiven. And I wanted to change his life.

      Not long before the incident with the fox, my body had turned into something I couldn’t control. My feet tangled when I walked. My bones ached in my sleep, thickening inside my flesh. Sometimes they scalded like steam, other times they cramped with ice. The easiest place to be was home, where I didn’t hunch my shoulders or bend my knees to keep boys’ faces from looking straight at my collar buttons or the dress seams at my bosom.

      Momma had quit seeing anything truly special in me by then. She went out of her way to remake me in her image. She’d wet her hands and make a hailstorm of little hits on the top of my head, trying to get my thick hair to lie flat and smooth. She tugged at my sleeves and my skirt, covering what my dresses could no longer hide. She wanted me to be someone I wasn’t. I had been big as long as I could remember. At fourteen, I could look my father in the eye, and he was six feet tall. Momma told me I was done growing, but I didn’t know how she could be so sure.

      “Be gentle, Lulu,” Momma said every day like a reflex, so often that I’d stopped considering the meaning. Collecting eggs from the chickens meant holding the warm shells in my open hand, my fingers curled up to make a shallow bowl of my palm before I lay the delicate eggs in a bucket. That was gentle. Cleaning house, I shoved the table to the wall under the windows, so I could sweep under it easily. I dragged it back into place with one hand. When Momma came in, she eyed me funny and fussed with the chair cushions like she was looking for something to do. And she scolded me to be gentle.

      When I started school, girls’ hands in mine felt insubstantial when we played Ring-Around-the-Rosie in the schoolyard, and I never was sure how tightly to grasp. One girl would wince and draw away from me, another kept her hands at her sides. Eventually that ring of girls no longer opened to include me.

      “Go with the fellows, you tall tree,” a town girl hissed. “There’s where you belong.”

      Across the schoolyard, the boys ignored us. That very minute, two boys were brawling in the swept dirt, dust swirling around their flailing arms. The other fellows circled them, shouting encouragement.

      I could win that fight without trying, but who’d ever want to sit with me in the schoolroom after I’d pushed one fellow onto his rear and pulled the other one to his feet?

      I had been a town girl once, when Daddy clerked at the hardware store. Momma and Daddy and I lived upstairs. Leo hadn’t been born. What I remember is that inside our home, the curtains fluttered in a breeze that I tried to catch in my hand, and when I walked on the sidewalk with Momma, the sun made the world too bright at the edges and hard to see. The fresh-cut pine smell from the boards in the sidewalk made me want to inhale all the air all at once.

      I taught myself to read before I turned four, pronouncing words from the sides of grain sacks and the labels on medicine bottles at the store. Saying the black and gold lettering’s alchemy aloud, I practiced my words. “Hoofland’s Bitters for the Liver,” I said. “We sell everything from horse shoes to hats.” For the longest time I believed the store only sold objects that started with the letter “H.”

      A few months before