“Magical Thinking” by Janci Patterson

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When she was young, Olivia danced in a world of magic and wonder.  In the woods beyond her family’s garden, she battled giants between the reaching trees and glimmered with fairies among the ferns.  She danced a song of magic, and watched it sparkle a trail behind her when she returned home to dinner, filled with thoughts of wonder and a light that gleamed in the corner of her eye every way she turned. 

In the evenings, when the world grew too dark for her to wander, Olivia’s mother told her stories of magic, of giants and fairies, yes, but also stories of a Heavenly Father who loved her, who watched her dance always, even when she was alone in the woods. One who loved her even when she snuck out of bed and stole candies from the cupboard and ate them up.  A father who knew she stuffed the wrappers in the bottom drawer of her dresser and didn’t brush her teeth after and loved her and loved her and loved her still.  And still more stories of the brother she had never met, who had once healed beggars and blind men and cared for Olivia no less, so much that he died for her. As she listened, Olivia’s heart shimmered with the same forest magic and moved her to dance.

As Olivia grew, the wild fields of magic dwindled like wildflower petals as the wind grew chill, rare and sparse but no less wonderful, and she remembered to watch for the glimmers wherever she went.  She found a petal of magic in the tingle of her first kiss and a burst of blooms in the moment the man she loved knelt down and asked her to marry him.  At their union, the scent of magic filled the air, overpowering even her wedding bouquet.  And Olivia found magic’s softest grace in the touch of her newborn’s skin against hers, softer than the softest rose.  The magic danced in him as he grew, each smile, each laugh, each word a new burst of magic so precious that Olivia longed to press it between pages. She didn’t try because she knew in her heart that this rarest kind of magic wouldn’t keep.

There was a magic, too, in sitting beside the hospital bed, watching her son breathe, knowing each new rise and fall was a tenuous gift.  Olivia held his hand, still savoring the comfort of his skin against hers, and prayed and prayed for the magic from the stories of her youth, for the father and brother who loved her so dearly to fill him with their magic, to lift him out of the bed and restore him to her arms whole and healed.

But this last bit of magic did not come.  There was no magic in the final fall of her small son’s chest, in the leaden silence that echoed through her own body like a falling tree. The only petals were those thrown on top of the too-small casket, and there was absolutely no magic in those.  

In the days that followed, the forest beyond Olivia’s childhood garden burned until nothing was left of the giant trees that had towered over her in her youth. And though Olivia now lived far away, she felt the razing of the trees as if it scorched her own skin from the inside out. She cried, not only for the loss of the magic, but for the creeping knowledge that there had never been any magic at all, only magical thinking. Only a mirage imagined and followed, never to be grasped or held, because it had never been real.  This new awareness smoldered inside her, the smoke soaking into her bones until she felt as dry and empty as the husks of the trees, hollow and blackened and charred.  

For a time, Olivia thought that was the last she would see of the magic, the end of her illusions about a father who loved her.  When the first glimmer of a magic began to sparkle in the corner of her eye, she turned away.  But seeds lay fallow in the forest bed, so deep beneath the ashes that they escaped the heat of the flames.  And as the trickle of her endless tears reached them, they sprouted and grew.  At first, Olivia stamped out the tendrils of the stalks as they sprang up around her feet.  She shut her eyes tight against the shimmer in the air when she remembered her son’s laugh, his smile, when she moved a couch and found his grubby fingerprints still smudged along the wall.

She told herself it was only magical thinking, but something about those words together felt wrong.  Magic did not come through the banal words that drifted in and out of Olivia’s mind.  She could not think her son back to health, nor herself back to hope.   

But yet the magic had not abandoned her.  The tender seedlings continued to stretch up through the layers of ash, forging the way for other plants to follow.  The forest of her youth grew over the fire scars and returned green and lush, the fallen trees becoming part of the wondrous landscape, a blending of renewal and loss.

Magic had never been for thinking, but magic was for surviving.  For a healing that came, not for her son as she’d prayed, but for her own soul as she lived every day with his loss.  Magic was for dancing, yes, but sometimes magic was also for screaming, for crying out in anger to a father who had not given her what she most wished for, but who had also not abandoned her to the aftermath.  Magic was for clinging to the the stories and the songs, not in innocence as  she had in her youth, but with a tenacity taught only by grief and loss and pain.

Magic, Olivia decided, was for living.

This piece was published in 2025 as part of the 14th Annual Lit Blitz by the Mormon Lit Lab. Sign up for our newsletter for future updates.