Emotionsmith
I had walked the same route to and from work every day for three years. Everything in that little blip of nothing in southwest Ohio was always the same, it seemed—the people, the scenery, and most of all, me. Routine was god, and Everett Turner was its most faithful adherent. That day began like all the others. I woke up, I showered, I changed, and I walked to work, only stopping to get coffee at that place on the corner. Eight hours later, I walked home. That’s when I saw the sign. “EMOTIONSMITH,” it declared in bold letters. No hours, no “Come on in,” just that word printed on an ordinary sheet of paper taped to a door. I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. The building was crammed between an antique shop and a Chinese restaurant. It had two stories, a brown brick exterior, and only two visible windows, both on the second floor. It was completely unfamiliar to me. I glanced around. A balding man carrying a briefcase brushed past me, his eyes locked on his phone screen. Two college-aged women were walking in the opposite direction while discussing something in bored tones. No one paid any attention to the building or its sign. I considered that maybe I had just missed it before; maybe it had blended in with all the other brick buildings and dreary storefronts. Or maybe I was losing my mind. Either way, I was curious.
When I opened the door, an old bell announced my arrival. As my eyes adjusted to the sudden dimness, I decided that it was some sort of shop. In the far right corner was a counter. Behind it, four wooden shelves lined the wall. The lower two were populated with a myriad of vials of colored liquid. Each of the vials glowed softly as if someone had killed a rainbow and put its blood on display. Scattered across the upper shelves were a variety of objects that defied classification. There were several framed photographs, each featuring a different person. In the center of the top shelf sat a tattered Raggedy Ann doll whose eyes seemed to follow me as I cautiously approached the counter. Next to it was a butterfly with iridescent pink wings pinned in a display case. I saw jewelry boxes, action figures, record sleeves, notebooks, and even an old Game Boy Color. I saw a scientific-looking contraption holding glass flasks at strange angles. A shard of metal twisted like the plaything of some great beast. A dagger with wild, spiraling symbols on its sheath. The purpose of these things evaded me.
Something in the back of my head urged me to stop, to turn around and walk out. I ignored it. A few modest pendant lights hanging from the ceiling were burdened with the impressive task of illuminating the whole room, which was larger than the building’s facade suggested. The only other light spilled out from the open doorway in the back. About halfway to the counter, I ran into something. It was a dark brown rocking chair. There were a dozen or so chairs and benches scattered around, some wooden, some plastic, some cushioned, and some that looked like they belonged in a museum.
An elderly man with silver hair emerged from the back room, rubbing his leathery hands together. He was tall—at least six-foot-five, I figured—and sported a wide, muscular frame. He leaned against the counter and smiled at me.
“What can I do for you?”
I realized that I must have looked like a fool, standing in the middle of the room and gawking about like a tourist. I cleared my throat and approached him.
“What exactly is it that you do?”
“I’m an emotionsmith.” He gestured toward the door.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “What is an emotionsmith?”
His smile widened. “Ever heard of thymurgy?”
I blinked.
“I take emotions and turn them into something else. Like blacksmithing.”
“Something else?”
The emotionsmith pushed off the counter and turned toward the shelves. He stretched out an arm covered in gray hair and grabbed a small, black felt box.
“See for yourself,” he said, laying it in front of me.
Inside was a silver ring adorned with a diamond that glittered strangely in the dim light.
“You made this?”
“Not quite. Look closely.”
I carefully removed it from the box and held it up. Along the ring was a subtle, elaborate engraving.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“It’s written in the language of the birds. Something to the effect of ‘May you both live a fulfilled life.’”
“Hold on.” I placed the ring back in its case. “The language of the birds?”
“It has many names. The twilight language, the Adamic language, the green language, celestial speech.”
I stared at him. He had a glimmer in his eye and he was still wearing that smile.
“What does it . . . do?”
“It’s a luck charm. Or a love charm, depending on how you look at it. Imbued with sentiment, trust, and devotion. Special order.” He perked his head up suddenly. “Is it March yet?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Not for a couple of weeks.”
“Right, right. Of course.” I handed him the ring box and he put it back on the shelf.
“What about those?” I pointed to the vials of color.
“Elixirs. Tonics. Salves for sleepless nights, broken hearts. This one can help with writer’s block.”
“So, what—herbal remedies?” A grin was beginning to tease the corners of my mouth.
He frowned. “Like I said, I make things with emotions. This pink one was mixed from intimacy and excitement. This one has optimism and pride. I needed the breath from a sigh of contentment for that cloudy one.”
“You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?”
The emotionsmith sighed. It was certainly not a sigh of contentment. He took a step back and folded his arms over his chest.
“What is it that you really do?” I said.
“I help people.”
My shoulders relaxed for the first time since entering the shop and I laughed. “That’s an interesting way of putting it.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, apparently lost in thought.
“Well, it’s getting late,” I said.
The emotionsmith opened his eyes and looked directly at me. “Not sleeping well?” he asked, lifting a finger to the wrinkled skin around his temple. “I can see it here.”
I had already begun to turn away from the counter, but I stopped when he said this. He retrieved a vial of deep purple liquid from a shelf.
“Drink this just before you go to sleep tonight.”
“Listen, I—I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m not interested.”
“It’ll help you dream.” He put the elixir in a brown paper bag. “Consider it a free sample.”
The emotionsmith held out the bag and I looked at him. His green eyes were steady and serious. If he was lying, I thought, he was a very convincing liar. Perhaps he had been lying for so long that he had deluded himself into believing it.
“If it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work,” he said.
I took it and left without saying a word.
It was dark when I returned to my apartment. I tossed my keys and the paper bag on the kitchen table before sinking into the cheap leather couch in front of the TV. Staring at nothing in particular, I let my consciousness drift, replaying the conversation with the emotionsmith in my head. I could not decide if he was a con artist or a confused but harmless old man. The third possibility occurred to me, and I quickly pushed it away. I wondered what the language of the birds sounded like. The words engraved on the ring had appeared little more than scribbles. My eyes threatened to close, but I forced them open. I wondered if the room had always been so empty. Then I remembered that all the posters and decorations at my last apartment had not belonged to me. My stomach growled.
I had planned on making tacos that night, but as I soon discovered, I had forgotten to buy tortillas. It was already half past eight. I halfheartedly chided myself for my carelessness and found what was left of the pizza from two nights prior. As I watched the plate spin listlessly in the microwave, I felt my phone vibrate. My father had sent a text message asking about work. This was his way of checking up on me, something he did once or twice a year. I told him in as few words as possible that everything was fine, that life was good, then shoved my phone back in my pocket. While I ate I watched a documentary about Ted Bundy on Netflix.
“Life is good,” I said to no one.
My phone vibrated again. My father had sent a message so long it had been broken into three parts. Countless typos made it nearly unintelligible, but the gist of it seemed to be that he was lonely and the woman he had been seeing was a whore—his words—and he missed my mother. “It’s been years, Dad. You have to move on,” is what I wanted to say, but even in my head, it sounded false and hollow. Instead, I asked if he was drinking again. His reply was almost instant. “Whens the last time u cryed.” I frowned. He was usually more of an angry drunk than a sad drunk. A few moments later: “Still dating that girl??” I turned off my phone.
The paper bag on the kitchen table haunted my peripheral vision. It was a grain of sand in the oyster of my mind. After finishing my meal I hesitantly walked to the table and removed the vial from the bag. The purple liquid inside still glowed faintly as I rolled it back and forth in my hand. I think some part of me hoped it would slip from my palm and shatter on the floor. I carried it into my bedroom, where my laptop was charging on the nightstand. Setting the potion down, I sat on the edge of the bed and opened my laptop. I took a deep breath, opened a browser, and typed in “language of the birds.”
“Holy shit,” I muttered.
The first result was a Wikipedia article. It described a mythical, secret language used by birds to communicate with humans. There were mentions of Odin and his ravens, Solomon and his wisdom, and the alchemists, who called it the green language. Some identified it as Enochian, a divine language used by angels. Others believed it to be the language spoken by Adam. Without thinking, I opened another tab and typed in my next search query: “thimurgy.” Frowning, I tried “thymurgy.” Then “thymergy.” No matter how I varied the spelling, Google offered no relevant results and always tried to correct the word to something else. Finally, I typed in “emotionsmith.” At first, I found nothing promising. I was about to give up altogether when a link on the third page caught my eye. It was a forum thread on a website that looked like it had not been updated since the 1990s. Somebody was asking about a shop that had suddenly appeared in his middle-of-nowhere town in Minnesota run by a guy calling himself an emotionsmith. The thread was started almost twenty years ago and nobody ever replied. I closed the laptop.
I always went to bed at ten o’clock to get eight hours of rest. At least, that was the idea. In reality, every night there was a period of at least half an hour during which I would be unable to sleep. As soon as I turned off the lamp on my nightstand and closed my eyes, pain, regret, and guilt would materialize in the darkness like ghosts. The memories I suppressed during the day would exploit my sudden weakness and force themselves forward. Memories of my mother and father. Memories of high school and college, of friends that grew distant. Memories of June. That night was no different. After nearly two hours of tossing and turning and burying my head under the pillow, I opened my eyes and found myself staring at the glowing elixir, a delicate purple beacon.
I stood over my bathroom sink holding it, looking at it for a long time. It smelled vaguely of lilacs. If I had tipped my hand slightly to the left, the glowing liquid would have flowed harmlessly down the drain and I could have forgotten about the whole thing. But I didn’t. Muttering “Oh, what the hell,” I tilted back my head and drained the potion. It was thick and had a consistency not unlike jelly, but lacked any distinct taste. I set the empty vial down and watched myself in the mirror, waiting for something to happen. When nothing did, I went back to bed with a sigh.
That night, I saw her.
“Hey, Everett.”
She blew a strand of shoulder-length black hair out of her eyes. She was wearing tattered jeans and that old Wonder Woman shirt I bought her.
“Hi, June,” I said. “It’s been a while.”
“And whose fault is that?” Her voice always gave me the impression she was simultaneously happy and annoyed to see me.
“Yours,” I said flatly.
She cracked her knuckles. “What, you haven’t missed me even a little?”
“Where are we?”
“Where do you think, jackass?” She laughed.
We were in the woods; I realized it was the place where we used to go camping. The trees were bare and the ground was covered in a sea of red and orange. We liked to camp in October to avoid the summer crowds. There was a slight, cool breeze.
“Aren’t you cold?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Is that really how you want to spend this conversation?”
“No.”
I noticed a squirrel perched on a nearby tree, watching us. The sound it made gnawing on its acorn was like a ticking clock. The sun was setting. Its dying rays burned pink. It looked like one of her paintings.
“This is a dream, isn’t it?” I asked.
“You never were a dreamer, were you? In either sense of the word.” She smirked.
I laughed. “Dreams are overrated.”
“Maybe.”
The leaves beneath our feet began to turn shades of brown. I looked at her. She was wearing an unfamiliar gray overcoat now and staring at something I could not see.
“I am glad to see you again,” I said.
“Yeah.” She shoved her hands into the pockets of the coat with her thumbs pointing out.
“I’ve been thinking about the last time we spoke.”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course you have. You think about it every night. You wonder what your life would be like if you had just said yes.”
“You were asking for a lot.”
“Was I?”
The sun was setting faster.
“When you start using words like ‘destiny’ it seems fair for me to be skeptical,” I said.
She looked through me. “You always walk with your head down.”
I bit my lip.
“Clearly you aren’t ready for this,” she said, stretching.
“June, wait.”
“I’ve waited long enough.”
Darkness descended. I felt myself being pulled away. I was hanging from a cliff, then lying in a bathtub, then I was above it all in the wintry air where no one could see me. The smell of sweat on a summer night. The taste of her on my lips. The ringing in my ears as everything crumbled around me. It was her ringtone.
The emotionsmith was waiting for me. He was smiling again as I walked in and placed my hands on the counter.
“I think I owe you an apology,” I said.
“How’d you sleep?”
In truth, I felt better than I had in a long time, like a fog had been lifted from my mind.
“What was in that potion?”
“Serenity, nostalgia, a hint of euphoria. One of my most popular items. The exact effect varies from person to person, though usually it’s lucid dreams.”
I scratched my head. My brain was swarming with questions, but I could not seem to put any of them into words.
“Oh,” I said suddenly, “I’m Everett by the way.”
“Gabriel.”
The emotionsmith extended a large hand over the counter and I shook it.
“You still don’t look convinced,” he said.
“It’s a lot to take in. I mean, yesterday you were talking about luck charms and broken hearts, and it all just sounds like bullshit. But that . . .”
I lifted my hands in some vague gesture. Gabriel nodded.
“Almost makes you believe in miracles, huh?” he said.
“I don’t know if I’d go that far.”
“I would.” A dark expression passed over his weathered features. “I’ve used that elixir before. It has a very specific strength.”
I said nothing.
“I don’t know who or what you saw, but it was no coincidence.”
“What, then? Magic?” I said.
Gabriel laughed. “Don’t believe in magic?”
“Not exactly.”
“Fair enough. Believing in magic requires a little faith.”
“I prefer scientific fact to blind faith,” I said unconvincingly.
“Who said anything about blind faith?”
The emotionsmith briefly vanished into the back room. When he returned, he was carrying a rose and a vial of transparent liquid. He laid the flower down in front of me, then carefully tilted the vial to allow a few drops of its contents to spill out onto the petals.
“Tears,” he explained.
After setting the vial aside, Gabriel arranged his hands such that they were hovering less than an inch above the rose. For a moment, nothing happened. His eyes were closed and his mouth was open slightly as if he was remembering something. Then he began to chant. I could not understand the words he was muttering, but there was a cadence to them, a hypnotic undulation, like waves on a beach on fast-forward. I found myself lightly bobbing my head. A few seconds later, he stopped and opened his eyes.
“This is one of the first things my grandma taught me. Here, smell it.”
He handed me the flower. I hesitated, turning it between my thumb and index finger. The petals glistened, but it appeared otherwise unaltered.
“A rose is a rose is a rose,” Gabriel said with a wink.
I brought it to my nostrils and breathed in. It smelled like my mother’s perfume—a simple but graceful, flowery aroma. My mother rarely wore perfume, so when she did I always noticed. She wore it when we went to church on Sundays. She wore it when my father made reservations at a nice restaurant. She wore it the day she explained to me what stillbirth was. I was seven. We had just returned from a day trip to my cousins’. I suddenly became curious as to why I had no brothers or sisters—my cousins had a family of five, after all—so I asked. My mother, still wearing her wine-colored dress, knelt down and looked me in the eye as she explained that I did have a sister. Her name was Ruby. My father looked at us, then left the room. Confused, I asked where Ruby was. In Heaven, she said. I remember how rigid her expression was, as if she were to permit even the slightest amount of slack in her jaw, her face would fall apart. I remember how the wind chimes outside tolled like bells. I remember how the color of the water in the bathtub when she killed herself that winter matched her dress. That was the day I began to understand the cost of living. That was the day I stopped believing in God.
I breathed out.
“I prefer the sleeping potion.” My voice was unsteady.
I handed Gabriel the rose. He nodded sympathetically, then carried it into the back room with the vial. I noticed a single tear was sneaking down my cheek and swiped at it.
“You mentioned your grandmother,” I said when Gabriel returned.
“I did.” He chuckled. “Thymurgy is passed down from one generation to the next, but my parents didn’t want to be thymurgists. My older brother didn’t either. So that duty fell on me, or at least that’s how Grandma saw it.”
I cleared my throat. “Is a thymurgist the same thing as an emotionsmith?”
“A couple hundred years ago, someone realized that ‘thymurgist’ didn’t sound very pleasing to the ear, so we . . . rebranded, so to speak.”
“Just how long have thymurgists been around?”
“Don’t know. Long time, that’s for sure. A lot of our incantations come from ancient Norse, Greek, and Egyptian rites and beliefs, not to mention witchcraft.”
“Witchcraft.”
“Witchcraft. Grandma said that thymurgists were often confused for witches, even though thymurgy is more like alchemy. Probably because thymurgists are usually women.”
“Really? Why is that?”
“Tradition, mostly.”
“Men and women do process emotions differently,” I said.
“That’s true.” Gabriel rubbed his chin. “But I feel like emotion transcends sex. It transcends almost everything.”
“What do you mean?”
He stopped to collect his thoughts. “When I talk about joy or anger or sorrow, I don’t have to explain what it means to feel those things. Your age, your sex, your race, your religion—those things don’t matter. Hell, I don’t think I could explain them. It’s beyond language. It’s human truth. And the strangest part is that we all have our own unique image of each emotion. When you smelled that rose, you felt something different than what I would have felt. But we both would have described it as grief. Crazy, isn’t it? It’s like color. How do I know my red is the same as your red? I don’t, but we still both call it red.”
“I guess I’ve never given it much thought.” I was thinking about the bathtub again. “How much for another one of those elixirs?”
“Fifteen dollars. But you shouldn’t rely on those too much. The more you use them, the less effective they are.”
I slid the money onto the counter. Gabriel raised a hand as if to say “I warned you,” then placed a purple vial in a bag and handed it to me.
“Thanks.”
That night I dreamed of roses.
Stopping by the emotionsmith’s shop after work became a part of my routine. Each visit consisted of a brief conversation with Gabriel that I rarely allowed to venture beyond pleasantries, followed by the purchase of a purple elixir. Every night I drank the elixir and every morning I woke up well-rested, but I rarely remembered my dreams, and when I did it was just flashes. There was never anyone else in the shop, and after a while, I started to think that Gabriel’s business was subsisting solely on the fifteen dollars a day I provided. Then, on the first Friday in March, I was surprised to find a teenaged girl with sandy blond hair leaning across the counter when I walked in. She only gave me a cursory glance.
“What you’re describing is a love charm, more or less,” Gabriel was saying.
“So you can make it?” she asked.
“Yes, but I don’t know if it will work how you want it to. Love charms are most effective when everyone wants the same thing.”
“Don’t worry about that part.” She smiled slyly.
I sat down in one of the eclectic selection of chairs available: a blue-green recliner with a faint coffee stain on one of its armrests.
“Okay. I’ll need a few things from you. Why don’t you find a seat?”
The girl chose a cushioned bench on the other side of the room. Gabriel sat beside her.
“Tell me about him,” the emotionsmith said. “What’s his name?”
“Johnny.”
“Johnny. A good name. A strong name. Is he strong?”
The girl shrugged. “He’s nice.”
Poor Johnny, I thought.
“How is he nice?”
“He holds the door for people. He’s always polite. He listens when I talk.”
“How long have you been dating?”
“We’re not dating. Not really.”
“Do you go on dates?”
“Yeah.”
I smirked. She reminded me of a friend from high school. He was always going out with different girls. We made bets about how many people would ask him to prom. In the end, it didn’t matter; he turned them all down.
Gabriel tilted his head back and looked up at the ceiling, then back down. “Do you love him?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you love most about him?”
She paused, looking at the glowing elixirs. “He cares.”
“What do you mean?”
“He really cares, you know?”
The emotionsmith nodded, then stood and walked into the back room. The girl leaned forward to look at the shelves with earnest eyes, lightly swinging her legs beneath her. I found myself thinking that there was a wall between us, a fundamental difference in how we viewed the world. Gabriel returned holding an empty vial and a familiar black felt box. As he sat down, he handed her the ring box.
“How does this make you feel?” he asked.
She opened the case and inspected the ring, murmuring something I could not hear. She was quiet for a while before putting it back. When I looked at that ring, I saw metal. I knew then that she was seeing something I didn’t, feeling something I couldn’t.
“Is Johnny special to you?”
“Yes.”
She gave him the ring box, and he handed her the vial.
“Spit in this.”
I averted my gaze. On the highest shelf behind the counter, I saw a photograph I had not noticed before. It was of a young couple, somewhere in their twenties, smiling innocently and holding hands. The man looked somehow familiar.
“Bring a necklace or a bracelet. Something you wear when you’re with him,” I heard Gabriel say.
The blond girl thanked him and left.
“Young love, eh?” Gabriel lowered himself into the chair beside me, grinning. He was holding the ring box and the vial of spit.
“I’ve been meaning to ask—Why do you have so many different chairs?”
“For people to sit in,” he said.
I looked at him. He snickered.
“You look like you’re troubled by something other than my chairs, Everett.”
I thought about it. “Is there an elixir for happiness?”
Gabriel’s smile faded somewhat. Wordlessly, he went into the back room. I followed him to the counter. It took a little longer than usual, but he eventually reappeared holding an unopened bottle of whiskey. It was the kind my father drank.
“This is the closest I’ve got,” he said.
I could not help but laugh.
“Want a glass?” Gabriel asked with a chuckle.
“I don’t drink.”
He set the whiskey aside. “What’s on your mind?”
“June.” I regretted saying it immediately. It was true, she had been on my mind since listening to Gabriel’s conversation with the blond girl—no, since I saw her in the lucid dream. I clenched my teeth and looked at the wall behind him like a guilty criminal.
“The month?”
“No. A girl.”
“Ah.” Gabriel nodded. “Girlfriend?”
I scratched my head. “We dated for five years.”
“No wonder she’s on your mind.”
“We broke up three years ago.”
“Oh.”
Gabriel was quiet for a while. He was watching me, expecting me to continue.
“We met in college. She was an artist and I was studying business.” I spoke slowly. Each word was pried from my tongue like a Band-Aid that was not ready to be removed. “I loved her passion. She wasn’t afraid to speak her mind about the things she cared about. I guess she found me endearing. She liked that I was into researching religious cults or listening to true crime podcasts in my free time. The point is that we were in love, and that was enough. For a while, anyway. After we graduated she got real pushy about starting a family. She said we were meant to be together, meant to get married. Said she wanted two kids, a boy and a girl. She thought it would work out as long as we believed it would.”
“And that scared you,” Gabriel said.
I became very interested in the texture of the counter. “She was always so . . . independent. She marched to the beat of her own drum. That worked for me. That worked for both of us, I thought.”
“Seems like you were more in love with an idea than a person.”
I said nothing.
“You see her when you dream?” He asked as if he already knew the answer.
I hesitated. “I did. The first night.”
“And you keep buying the elixir to try and see her again.”
I nodded slowly. “Is there a problem with that?”
Gabriel sighed. “Have you heard of the elixir of life?”
I shook my head.
“It’s also called the cure-all. You probably would know it as the philosopher’s stone.”
“I’ve heard of that one.”
“Thought you might’ve. It’s able to cure all diseases and grant immortality.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Do you sell it?”
“It’s a myth. It doesn’t exist. There’s nothing so convenient on this side of heaven,” Gabriel said. “There is no elixir for happiness, no cure-all, no secret trick or potion that can solve all your problems.”
I could not meet his gaze.
“The things I make here are bandages. I told you that the day we met, didn’t I? I sell tonics and salves. I can’t make a potion that solves your problems any more than I can make a charm that makes that girl’s relationship successful.” He jabbed a finger toward the door. “What is it that you want, Everett? You can keep drinking elixirs every night and hope June shows up in your dreams. But for what?”
“I just want to live my life.” I shrugged.
“Is that enough?”
“What?”
“You’re just running away. Until something changes, you’ll be miserable.”
Something flared up within me. “What do you know?”
“This is my job, Everett. No one who’s content or fulfilled ever comes in here. It’s all loneliness and unrequited love and relationship troubles. I’ve spent practically my entire life watching people struggle. I know how these things go.” His eyes were murky green pools. “When’s the last time you talked to her?”
“She lives three hours away.”
“You have her number? Call her.”
“No.”
I had not meant to say it like that. My fingers tingled as if I had just slammed them down onto the counter. Maybe I had. I looked up at Gabriel, expecting to see him scowling at me. His eyelids drooped slightly and his lips were pressed together. The way he looked at me, he might have been a monk or a prophet. I felt naked, stripped down to my very soul.
I did not buy anything that day.
Later, while sitting idly on my couch, I received a call from my father. I let the phone ring a few times before deciding to answer it.
“Hello.”
“Everett?”
“Yeah.”
“How are you?” I half-expected him to be drunk again, but his voice was calm and clear.
“Great.”
“Good, good. Hey, I’m sorry about those texts I sent a couple weeks ago. I had a few drinks, and—”
“It’s fine, Dad.”
“I forgot about it until today when I was looking through my phone.”
“Don’t worry about it.” I was tired of hearing his sober apologies.
“I couldn’t help but notice you didn’t answer my question, though.”
“Which question?”
“About your girlfriend,” he said innocently.
I drummed my fingers against the cushion. “I don’t make a habit of answering drunk texts.”
“So? Are you still seeing—What’s her name? Jane?”
“June. And no, I’m not.”
“Oh. Sorry.” He paused. “What happened?”
“I don’t really want to talk about it right now.”
“Shit, you’re right. Sorry.” It was the first apology that sounded genuine.
Neither of us spoke for a while. I began tracing the spiral pattern on the ceiling with my eyes.
“That’s how we deal with things, isn’t it?” He had lowered his voice.
“Dad?”
“Everett, can I give you a piece of advice? As your father?”
“Um . . . yeah, sure.”
“Be better than me.”
My routine returned to normal. I still passed by the emotionsmith’s shop every day, but I no longer went inside. I wanted to change. I really did. But I was frozen in place, cursed to repeat the same day over and over. Every time I passed by that sign, I only grew more depressed. Then, one day after winter released its bitter grasp on the town, the sign was missing. A U-Haul truck was parked outside. I should at least say goodbye, I decided. The doorbell was gone. Gabriel was packing the items from the upper shelves into large cardboard boxes. The rainbow of potions was already packed away, along with the chairs. The shop was left barren and colorless.
“I didn’t expect to see you again,” Gabriel said when he noticed me.
“Are you closing down?” It was a stupid question.
“I move every few years when business gets slow.”
“Where will you go?”
“One of the Carolinas, maybe. Somewhere warmer.”
I nodded.
“I’m glad you showed up,” Gabriel said. “I never got to apologize for last time.”
“That was my fault. I was being stubborn.”
“No, no. I was prying. I guess that’s what happens when you spend your life studying emotions. You get nosy.” He chuckled.
“You were right, though.”
He stopped and looked at me. “Did you talk to her?”
I shook my head.
“Well, it isn’t that simple. It never is.” Gabriel sighed. He turned and picked up the photograph of the young couple from the top shelf. “I want you to know, I was being so insistent because I’ve been through something similar myself.”
“That’s you, isn’t it?” I pointed to the picture.
“Forty-five years ago, if you can believe it. This was taken just after we were engaged. I was so sure I was ready for a family.”
I noticed he was not wearing a wedding band.
“Grandma was in a coma. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel like I had to be a thymurgist anymore. I was free and young and in love.” He brushed the photograph with his thumb. “Then Grandma died, and suddenly I was the last emotionsmith in the world. That kind of burden does things to a young man’s head. I forced myself back into it. I convinced myself that thymurgy was more important than anything else. I didn't realize until it was too late what I was doing to my fiancée. She was always patient. One day in September she asked to call off the wedding, and that was it. Two and a half years, then nothing. I tried to change her mind, but I had already made my choice and she knew it.”
“Wait,” I said, “you’re the last emotionsmith?”
“The one and only.” He offered a sad smile. “The other families all gave it up or died out.”
He carefully tucked the photograph into a box.
“What about me?” I said, surprising myself. “I could learn.”
Gabriel laughed. “I wouldn’t do that to you. It’s for the best if thymurgy dies with me. There’s no room for it anymore.”
I could only stand and watch as he finished packing.
“How did you move on?” I asked.
“What?”
“When your fiancée left you, how did you move on?”
“Alcohol. Work. Isolation. Pretending it never happened.”
“Then what?”
“Then I forgave myself,” he said. “Help me carry one of these, will you?”
We did not speak as we lugged his things to the truck. When we were done, Gabriel grabbed something out of one of the boxes. It was a bright red elixir.
“You know what the hardest part was?” he said. “Admitting there was a problem I couldn’t solve. Realizing that some wounds leave scars.” He handed me the potion.
“What is it?”
“Your very own philosopher's stone.” His eyes twinkled. “Though, the best I can do is make things easier. I’m glad I met you, Everett. Good luck.”
We shook hands, and then he left. I never saw the emotionsmith again.
When I got back to my apartment, I pulled out my phone. My father answered after three rings.
“This is unusual, you calling me.”
“Hi, Dad. Sorry to bother you.”
“No, it’s not a bother. Not at all. What do you need?”
I looked at the vial of crimson in my hand. “Do you blame yourself?”
“What?”
“For Mom’s suicide.”
He was silent for a long time. I could almost feel myself growing older with each passing second.
“Even if you do,” I said, “I don’t.”
More silence. I thought I might have heard a sniffle. I realized I had never once seen my father cry. Then, in a voice so small I could barely hear it over my own heartbeat, “Thank you.”
“That’s all.” I hung up.
I was standing in front of my kitchen sink, phone in one hand and red elixir in the other. I laid the phone on the counter before unscrewing the lid of the vial. I hesitated for a moment. The potion smelled like roses. Taking a deep breath, I mouthed a wordless apology to Gabriel and poured the liquid down the drain. Setting the empty vial aside, I picked up my phone again. I had one more call to make. I found her name in my contacts and dialed.
“Hello?”
My voice caught in my throat. The scripts you write in your head always turn to dust when the moment comes. I thought about Gabriel and his fiancée. I thought about my mother and Ruby. I thought about my father’s words. Be better than me.
“Hi, June,” I said finally. “It’s been a while.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“Yours,” I said. “But mostly mine.”