The Magnetic Girl. Jessica Handler

had taught him. Fold your right thumb into your right palm so it can’t be seen. Bend your left thumb so the nail touches your left pointer finger. Now press the back of your right thumb against your left nail, turn your hands around, pull them apart real quick, and presto! A thumb split in half!

      For an entire afternoon, Bill Lee and Harmony taught Will the game. Roll like this, light, like you’re letting a baby bird fly loose from your hand. Feel the dice under the tips of your fingers as you warm them in your hand: imagine they’re a lady’s titty. Look at him blush. He don’t know what that feels like! You’ve thought about it, for sure. When they’re ready to go you’ll know it, don’t think about it, just feel it—sling ‘em out there on the wood, easy does it. Don’t look away, watch how they fall.

      Will’s childhood attempts at prestidigitation came back, but he’d never been effortless. He had craved the attention, the winning and walking away with the secrets, the money, and the power. He’d never had the knack to master the trick itself. He lacked his mother’s patience.

      The three men played until it was too dark to see. Bill Lee could have gone for his lamp, but by then chow seemed the wise choice. Harmony leaned the plank upright against a dogwood tree and pocketed his dice.

      “I need to eat, if you’d call that shit food, pardon me,” Harmony answered. He made a show of rubbing his almost concave middle. His hip bones pushed sharp edges against his trousers.

      Like a father teasing a child, Bill Lee reached down and ruffled Will’s hair.

      “We’ll pick it up tomorrow. Looks like we still ain’t going nowhere.”

      Bill Lee and Harmony headed into the dark together, one of them hawking and spitting on the ground. Will smoothed his hair down, then flexed his fingers before he took three flat pebbles from his pocket. Practice makes perfect.

      The three of them played craps for a week. No orders came to move camp. Cannon fire shuddered in the hills. Refugees rolled by in a line of carts coming from one settlement, going to another. Children waved at the soldiers, who waved back. The soldiers with children at home went to their tents afterward, writing letters or staring at the grime of their canvas tents. Someone shod a horse. Someone else sewed torn trousers. They expected to pack up within a few days. In the meantime, Will’s throw got lighter and faster. Once in a while, he won a game, but his IOUs piled up quickly under the fist-sized chunk of stone by Harmony’s rucksack.

      While they played, Harmony tried to preach his beliefs to Will.

      “The human body is made up of fluids,” Harmony began one afternoon, watching Bill Lee prepare to roll the dice.

      “Fluids you piss out,” Bill Lee muttered.

      Harmony, entranced with speaking his catechism to Will, ignored him.

      “We have tides in us, rolling like the ocean. Magnetism is its name. Magnetic fluids.”

      “Seven,” Bill Lee said, a risky come-out. He shook the dice and looked heavenward. Bringing his gaze back down to earth, Bill Lee threw. Harmony was silent for the throw.

      The dice landed six and six up. No seven.

      Will held out his hand for the cubes. Harmony started up again.

      “The motion of the planets pulls our internal tide like the ocean’s tide. The planets pull on our fluids, and our nerves react. It’s science and nature combined.”

      “You yap this shit all the time,” Bill Lee said. “You’re getting on my nerves, and that’s my nature.” He worked this like a variety amusement act.

      “The body has its poles, oppositional. Fluid goes back and forth evenly if a man’s in balance.” Harmony stopped and looked at Will, who had not yet thrown.

      “You ever been sick?”

      Of course he’d been sick. Who the hell hadn’t?

      “What kind of sick?”

      “In the head,” Bill Lee said. He was drawing in the dirt with a stick, figure eights and waves.

      “I’ve had the grippe, I’ve had stomach trouble, I had an infected finger one time got drained and cauterized. I’ve been . . . ” Will stopped himself here, still surprised by his reticence. Ten years had passed since his mother’s failures.

      “What. Been what?” Bill Lee was interested. Harmony said nothing, patient.

      “Morose. I’ve been morose,” Will said. He’d slipped up and given Harmony precisely what he needed. Will could have kicked himself. “That’s a sickness,” Harmony said. “All these illnesses,” he pressed down hard on the word, making “ill” weigh more than the next two syllables—“are natural magnetic fluids out of balance in your body. Your magnetism was disturbed, and you were out of alignment with the planets.”

      “Roll the damn dice,” Bill Lee said.

      Will looked at his hand, surprised to find the dice still there. He hadn’t shaken or rolled or given a thought to what he’d call to try and take Bill Lee’s money. They were playing for actual dollars today. Confederate money wasn’t worth much, but the idea of it was better than buttons. Time passing without him knowing irritated him. Always had.

      “So how did I get better, then?” Will asked. “Planets come down and make me well? According to my ma they did, but she wasn’t one to allow a doctor.” That was more than enough said.

      “Somebody went and put some money on the doctor. I’ll bet he had a damn fine horse and lived in a mighty nice house.” Bill Lee surrendered to the conversation.

      “Your fluids got balanced,” Harmony said, serious as a preacher. “You’re a lucky man. Some people need help with that, but you can do it alone, it seems. Some got it, some don’t. People who’ve got it strong have been known to kill a rabbit just by laying their hands on the animal. Magnetism comes through them and kills the thing right where it sits.”

      “Sounds like an easy way to get dinner,” Bill Lee said.

      Will rolled the dice around in his hand. What was that riddle, what’s lighter, a pound of lead or a pound of feathers? A trick you had to think about. A pound of feathers would have to be so much bigger than a pound of lead. Everything you thought you knew could be an illusion, until you applied reason. The bones of a bird are hollow. The shimmer over a flame is a gas.

      “I have the gift of observation,” Will said, giving in to the litany he’d been raised with. “It’s the way to heal and to lead our lives. We spend our infancy and childhood observing. A babe does nothing but observe and learn from what he sees. Where’s Mama? Mama is the first planet around which the baby revolves. Our gift of observation, even if we are not sighted but can touch and smell and hear, allows us to make men of ourselves. That’s nature, as planets and tides are nature. Observation of our nature—our magnetic fluids conducted by our nerves from electrical pole to pole in our bodies—is the natural path to righteousness.”

      Harmony would be gaping, he knew, but Will wouldn’t let himself look. Bill Lee? Same, most likely.

      His mother had taught him this, and she was dead, and she had been dead since he was a boy. He’d quit fantasizing about her alive somewhere, having merely run off to avoid what she called the death-like appearance. Her patients came to her looking that way, she said. And she cured them, one or two uncertain visitors in a month at first, then twice that many in a day, every day. Even Sunday. You want to thank God for your pain, she would tell them on those days. God’s given you a message and brought you here.

      There had been an earthquake when she was a baby, she’d told him once. All the world shaking as if Cerberus, the dog of hell, held our planet in his mouth. And look what came of it. Nature’s magnetic fluids scattered and sprayed and came to rest in her, bringing with them the gift for healing.

      Her health diminished until she died. That was the simple explanation in this real world. She didn’t go to Summerland, the afterlife from