"Reunion at Stonehenge," by Janet Chui (to see the full-size version, you'll have to visit my home office!)
Over the course of two cold November days in Dubuque, Iowa, Kelley Strickland learns that you can get infected by magic, easy as catching a cold.
And learning to do magic?
Way funner than having a runny nose.
The Contagious Magic trilogy is about the way magic finds people, even those who aren’t looking for it. And once magic infects you, the sky’s the limit as to where to go next…
I’m currently working on this trilogy, which includes the following books:
- A Sudden Outbreak of Magic
- A Wild Epidemic of Magic
- No Cure for Magic
I originally began work on this idea back in 1993 or so, back when I was teaching junior high English and Reading. I wrote a mini-scene about one of my characters for an exercise in descriptive writing. I guess the character and situation just got stuck in my head, though it’s taken me over 15 years to get the story right.
Further, my story “Coal Ash and Sparrows,” which was published in Asimov’s, takes place in the same setting as this novel.
The Book
While you’re waiting for this book to come out, you can read an excerpt, below, and check out some pictures of the setting I took in 2008.
The Excerpt — from Chapter One
Black girl on the streets. Better keep an eye on her, if you can.
Kelley Strickland felt like everyone in Dubuque was watching her today, thinking suspicious thoughts. Shivering inside her heavy winter jacket, she walked past yet another mound of gray snow piled on a street corner in this cold and dull place, in search of her trouble-making brother.
Her family had only been living in this whitebread city on the Mississippi for three and a half months, and Kelley wanted to move back to their real home — Chicago. She used to be happy there, with her friends and all their favorite places to go in the city. But of course Kurtis had messed all that up with his hoodlum friends and their little stunts.
And now he was starting that garbage again here. Already.
Which explained why Kelley found herself out on the streets on a frigid Tuesday morning in November instead of sitting next to the dripping radiator in Mr. Mottet’s Freshman Language Arts class.
Earlier that morning, she’d intercepted Kurtis’s emails and his text messages to one of his new white buddies about cutting classes. The last straw. Kelley bundled up, left home, and started to track him down before he embarrassed her again and ruined her chances of ever making friends here.
As if I care about having friends here, she thought, bunching herself up tighter in her coat as she walked down Main Street.
Plus, she had to admit, she had a bit of revenge tied up in her plan today. Kurtis deserved to get punished for all his little schemes and lies. The little turd never got caught, but if Kelley so much as looked at someone cross-eyed, Dad grounded her.
She shuffled past the clock tower on her left and got hit by another cold blast of wind. An old gray pickup truck rattled past, reeking of manure, and the driver lifted a hand, waving at someone. Kelley looked around, breathing from her mouth to avoid the stink, and realized that Farmer Joe had been waving at her.
That’s the whole problem, she decided, adjusting her lucky black cap against the cold. The people here were just too nice. They said “Hi” to you on the street, for crying out loud. Complete strangers. If you did that in Chicago in her old neighborhood, someone would pop you in the nose, and that’s if they were in a good mood. You definitely didn’t want to draw attention to yourself or stand out in the crowd back there.
She looked up and down the quiet street surrounded by brick buildings and icy parking lots full of pickups and SUVs and rusted-out compacts. Across the street sat the office for the local news station, its glass windows almost hidden behind a big monster of a satellite dish. She could almost feel the radio waves — or whatever they were — humming through the air around that rusty old dish.
Flecks of snow swirled in the air, and she fought the urge to sneak back home, crank up the heat, and go back to bed. She hadn’t found any other signs of Kurtis all morning.
Kelley really wanted to track him with the snazzy phone Mom and Dad had bought her the day before they started their new school here. One of the few benefits of having lawyers for parents — they usually had money for stuff like that. Even if the parentals didn’t have time to show her how to actually use it, or time to even hang around long enough to see her and Kurtis open their gifts.
As usual, Kelley had made a point of reading the manual cover to cover before she ever turned it on. She liked knowing all the secret, special features, just in case. Their phones came loaded with a video camera, an MP3 player/recorder, GPS, SMS text, a pedometer, a compass, wireless Internet, and a million other features Kelley knew her brother would never figure out. Kurtis didn’t read the instructions, ever.
But Kelley didn’t think she could find him this morning with her phone. He must have been too far away to get a reading from the tiny little GPS locater she’d convinced Mom to secretly sew into the lining of his coat.
So she had to search the old-fashioned way, without any of her best tech tools. Just walking around downtown and looking for clues and hoping to catch a break. Kelley hated the old-fashioned way.
She hiked down another block of Main Street, her breath puffing out in front of her as she hurried past a coffee shop and a brewpub just opening its doors for the day. Her phone gave off a soft beep, and then, after a few more seconds, beeped again.
“Now that’s what I’m talking about,” she whispered to herself as she slid closer to the brick wall of the store on her right. Kurtis had moved into range.
Three blocks ahead of her, on the other side of the road and walking away from her quickly, sauntered a pair of boys. One black and one white — Kurtis and one of his new friends.
The beeping continued, each one a tiny bit faster. She pulled out her phone and hit the Mute button. She glanced back at the satellite dish a block back and fought the urge to stick out her tongue at it. Fooey on old tech. Pressing a few more buttons, she keyed up the video camera tool. Gotta love the eGadget’s gadgets.
She aimed the phone in front of her, squinting at the small image taking shape in the camera’s rectangular viewscreen, and waited to hit Record (she only had so much battery and disk space on her do-it-all phone, so she couldn’t be wasteful).
She fiddled with the touchscreen on the phone to get a better angle on Kurtis and his buddy as she followed them down a side street. They were heading toward the railroad tracks and big, brown river beyond that.
Black girl with a camera, Kelley imagined the small-town Iowans whispering to each other. Watch her closely! She’s surely up to no good.
Continued…
