George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

So whenever he was weak, they would try to pull him back into the spirit world. When the chickens had attacked, he’d had malaria. When the goat attacked, he’d been deeply depressed because his dog had died that morning. When the horse attacked, he’d been weak from not eating for two days. Since he’d found his calling, the day of the spectacular accident, he could not remember when he’d last been sick, depressed, or deeply distraught. It had all been good. Until today.

Nkem glanced at the crowd. Then at the emus. Then at his beat-to-shit car. “Jesus.” He licked his lips. He couldn’t believe what he was thinking but there it was.

He and Ogaadi spoke at the same time: “You want to leave your life for a while,” she said, as he said, “Can… can you change me?”

Again, they spoke simultaneously. “I can,” she said, as he said, “You can’t make me do anything.”

She held a hand up. “Listen for a second,” she said. “When we reach a certain age… ”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“People like me, amusu ,” she said. “We take on one we will teach. We have a stone that changes when we meet our student.”

“And I’m your ‘student’?”

She nodded. “The stone changes to gold when it is touched by the student.”

He laughed hysterically. “You’re barely older than me,” he said. “Look at you.” He gazed up at her. Her skin was smooth and her thighs were firm and muscular and she smelled like grapefruit and flowers. Suddenly he had to get her off him. He glanced at the crowd. There had to be close to fifty people now. He sat up but she didn’t move. “We need to get out of here,” he said.

She climbed off of him and they both stood. All Nkem had to do was look at the crowd and his growing erection disappeared from whence it came.

“I thought you wouldn’t be so…. old,” she said.

“Hey, I’m only twenty-five!”

“Students are usually only five or six! I was only under that spell for twenty years!”

“Maybe time works differently for birds,” he said, then frowned, wondering where he’d come up with the idea.

She turned away from him. “Twenty years trapped and I have no time to be free before a student is thrust on me. Nonsense,” she mumbled.

He heard a woman chuckle and say, “I wonder what his wife will think of this. Na wow.” He wanted to pick up a stone and throw it at her.

Ogaadi looked at the woman, bent down, picked up a stone and threw it at the woman. It landed right at her feet. “ Chineke !” the woman exclaimed as she jumped back and bumped into a man beside her. Several people beside her all exclaimed at the same time, “Heeey!” But none of them moved to leave.

Ogaadi made the deep booming sound in her chest and all the emu stopped pecking at Nkem’s car and instead ran at the crowd. People screamed and ran, losing shoes, net phones, and purses. They hopped in cars, SUVs, and trucks and screeched away. Others ran down the road pursued by the large birds. Soon Nkem and Ogaadi were alone.

“Don’t mind them,” she said.

He chuckled. “You don’t know who I am. All of Nigeria will know about this in an hour.”

She waved a hand. “Nonsense.” She looked him up and down. “So did you mean what you said?”

Nkem walked over to his car and ran his hand over the scratches and dents. No one would believe this. Even with all the pictures and live footage. The emus had even cracked the glass of two of his back windows and windshield. Still his wife would be on the war path. He turned to Ogaadi. “Can you protect me from my spirit ‘friends’?”

“Only if I am there.”

Well, I’ve escaped them four times so far, he thought.

“What exactly… ”

“I can’t tell you until you accept,” she said.

He looked at the now empty road. “How long will I be… gone?”

“That depends,” she said with a sigh as she looked at her jagged nails. “You’ll return to acting in your movies when I finish with you and your movies will be… something else.” She paused. “You said you needed some free time. I could use some, too. Do you still want that?”

“Yes.”

She laughed and nodded. “Ogbanjes are all the same. Irresponsible as hell.”

Even before the word escaped his lips, he felt his body changing. Pulling in on itself, shifting, breaking. It hurt but not in a terrible way. He felt like sobbing but soon he was not able to do even that. But on the inside, he cried; he was leaving all that he held dear behind: his wife, his family, his career, the goddamn gossiping crowd. He was leaving them all behind. He was leaving the road full of congested traffic to sneak down a side road. For a while.

Ogaadi’s voice sounded sharp and full. “You come back to me when I call you. Then we’ll get started.” She laughed. “Today is a good day. We’re both free! But beware of your spirit friends.”

Nkem knew.

When Nkem flew into the sky, it was like flying over a fence. She’d turned him into an eagle. He’d been afraid she’d turn him into an emu. She must have read his mind. The eagle was a creature he’d envied since he was a boy. They made meals out of chickens and easily soared above even the most insane goats and horses.

She was a powerful amusu , indeed. He was so elated that he opened his beak and shrieked with joy. He flew higher and higher. And then Nkem flew away.

Krista Hoeppner Leahy’s fiction has appeared in Writers of the Future, Vol. XXV, Shimmer, and flashquake . She has an MFA in Theater, and is a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. Her poetry has appeared in Free Lunch, Raritan, and Tin House .

The Odyssey is one of the great stories of Western civilization — an epic tale of one man’s determination to triumph against all odds. By the end of the saga, it’s apparent that those odds are steeper than he could have imagined. After all, Odysseus sets out on his journey with a full complement of warriors and shipmates, but he is the only one to arrive home.

Our next story digs into the untold life of Elpenor, a figure best remembered for his untimely death on Circe’s island. As the author says, “Elpenor, in my opinion, gets kind of a raw deal. Through the ages, his death has been held up as an example of the recklessness and drunken foolery of youth. I asked myself, what might have driven him to drink, to lose himself so completely that he would fall off the roof?”

Her answer to that question takes us into the heart of a man haunted by his experience of war’s hell — and tormented by a sorcery that made his ghosts seem only more real. This tale will make you wonder: What does it really mean to be a beast?

Being a pig changed me.

The smells like fists punching my snout, the pent-up power in my haunches, the ground right there, inches from my chin, begging me to plow it with my snout, to dig to find its treasures, now and now and now . Wood mushroom, cheese, acorns, dried honeycomb, apple cores, corncob, I can’t remember all that I ate that one transporting day, but everything tasted like hot, fresh now . Such immediacy, right there, under me, hot and sweet and begging me in all my pigness to devour it, consume it, possess it, eat it up, snort it down, roll around in it until I smelled like it and it smelled like me and we were one as we had always been meant to be, me and this earth, this earth and me.

Most of the crew shrugged it off, like a dog shaking dry after a swim. Some of the dafter ones, well, I don’t think they even noticed.