When our contracts expire, we hand over our pendants, our rain-warped armor, and the stones, too, of course—they were never ours to keep—then linger in the waiting room as we’re told to stand by for any additional offboarding needs.
No one comes to get us. Who’s gonna teach ’em proper technique? Kat grumbles as we hobble out of HQ for the last time, but we know better. The stones will go to the next batch of government-assigned magical girls, who, thanks to ChatGPT, will never call and will never panic when they realize swallowing the stone’s the easy bit; it’s getting it out that’s the real sonofabitch.
In the meantime: the job hunt. We dull our claws, practice pacing in heels, and pretend to be the kind of women who don’t get turned on by the hazards of pink mini-skirted vigilantism. The holes in our resume fill rapidly with water.
Just say you were taking care of loved ones, Kiana instructs when we call in a panic before our separate interviews. Mid-afternoon coffee shop chaos on the line, and of course the incorrigible showoff got a job first. But I’m not your leader anymore, she reminds, and maybe her mouth curls like her very own Starlight Sickle.
I SAID EXTRA HOT, someone thunders; it’s up to you now, girls, she says, something catching in her throat—a rasp after Magwayen crushed it into a new shape—and the call flatlines.
That leaves us in the world of the well-adjusted, blinking back garish fluorescents. The atmosphere doped by Pomodoro timers, small talk in the stalled elevator. Our coworkers trade traffic lamentations and not much else. And no one memorizes the anti-harassment training with the kind of laser-eyed devotion our Lira had at fifteen, unstitching a mambabarang’s spell by reciting it in reverse. The kind of attention that holds a world together. Anak yatamam anignat, Lira murmurs, as her boss circles her cubicle, scenting blood in the water.
And maybe it is a little weird to spend so much time with people we aren’t married to, so we rent separate apartments. It will be good for us, we say to each other, won’t it? Rebuilding our lives at an acceptable distance, as if we don’t ping-pong brightly in each others’ heads like the ball inside a spray paint can.
On the night Ava first brings a boy to her bed, her terror ripples through the mind-meld, and each of us start pitching in, as one does—wear your nice undies; god, not those, or light a jasmine candle! or can’t you snap his damn neck already, or remember saving St. Paul, all that burning ash in your lungs, remember how you sucked all that smoke and trapped it in a bubble, how I told you to imagine your mouth was a gentle vacuum? Can you do that again?—and Ava thinks, yeah, and Kiana thinks, attagirl, and when it’s done we stare up at our own ceilings, all winged, synchronized desire, and we do not fall asleep.
Then the days after. The geodes of silence. The years moving like resin around us, through us, when moonlight glints off of a building’s spine, and we remember our battles; our gilded bodies prisming, short bobs blooming into sea-green tresses. Can you imagine it? All that arcane rizz. Transformation sequence in the secret eskinita. And the four of us: forever young and touched by war.
Kiana can play pretend all she likes, but we know how she scans the sky for another calamity, another set of ancient stones to choose our sorry lives, to say, there you are—you’re up. She argues, we have to try—the same way she rallied us each time we faced brainwashed nuns and rampaging bakunawas and immortal, malevolent witches who could scatter our molecules across null space and time. Like we’ve ever been good at telling her no; denying her the bones of our devotion. So we try: hobbies, meal delivery subscriptions. Religion. We get scoliosis and bad haircuts. We get even worse marriages. We mind our business. We become bad witnesses.
And the most frightening of all: the ease with which forgetting comes, like slipping out of an old coat. Until one day a star comes smearing out of the atmosphere, drawing us out of our homes to chase its tail. When we reunite at the edge of the crash site, half of us are still in our desk job uniforms. The sight at the center that jolts us awake—a magical girl, one of the new ones. Brown knees streaked with blood and grime. Her hair a living brushfire.
Please, she says, and her voice is a charred husk. I can’t.
Always a step ahead, Kiana speaks first. You can’t what?
The girl’s fingers—she must’ve been thirteen, fourteen—claw at her stomach, where a blistering, iridescent stone must have burrowed. Can’t transform back. A crowd forms around us, lured in by her life-giving flicker. Alley cats, sewer rats, aging birds. All the forgotten dregs of this city, this city we guarded for so long. In the dark, the way Kiana seeks our eyes out is unchanged. Something inside us greens and films over. We’ll teach you, our leader promises, and wordlessly, we link our hands, that old dance. Remembering what we must do. What was once also passed onto us, a debt like stones in the blood. Into the smoking crater we go. Eyes on me. Do it like this. Our palms, wrecked by training and time, do not shake as we form a circle for a girl to hide away for a night.
About the author:
Andy Lopez (she/they) (@andylopezwrites) lives and writes in the Philippines. She was a 2021 fellow for the GrubStreet Emerging Writer Fellowship and the UST National Writers Workshop. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and has been published in The Best Small Fictions 2021, Split Lip Magazine, The Offing, and other magazines and anthologies. Write to her at lopezandreaingrid@gmail.com.
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