"Magic"

A word that means nothing to him.

Uterine wall. Haemostats. Müllerian ducts. Those were words he knew.

The words adjacent to his own identity; surgeon, scientist, husband.

And white the walls in his operating room.

Red. There had been much red. Red on the tiles in the bathroom, flooding from his mouth and into the sink. Red in his chest and in his eyes and filling every fibre of him with its venom. All of his red on his father's fists.

By the time he was handed a scalpel he had seen enough of his own blood to know what it would look like welling out of an incision. By then, it was common place.

But blue...

The car filled with it. Soft with it. The tan leather dissipating into a pale mist, nearly glimmering, and sweet to breathe.

Children snoring in the back seat. Engine humming. His jaw began to loosen.

Underwater, cool and silent, the sapphire street lamps glowing dimly, swimming like shy fish over the dashboard. The air thick, hanging heavy like hyacinths in rain.

Then her house in the distance.

A shark whipping its back fin, tasting familiar colors in the stillness of his being, something red stirring. Then a wave swept it away, her soft celeste palm covering his hand. Some quiet reassurance by her, that there would never be any red on his knuckles.

And though he has promised himself not to turn his head, his eyes find hers.

Eyes gazing up from 20 000 leagues under the sea, reducing him to shallow water.

"Thank you," she says when he parks the car.

The children shimmy out of the cadillac and into her arms. He watches her disappear into the black, and then the black come pouring into him.

The night again, just the night. The car just the car. Nothing magical about it.

Standing outside his own front door. The hyacinth garden grey. The red churning.

"This woman is magic," her grubby ex-husband repeats into the tape recorder mike.

But that word means nothing to him. There is no such thing as magic. Anybody can do magic. It has no colours. Blends in. Fakes itself. Ends up covered in red.

Magic is a trick.

He wants something real. To be cleansed in the water, to dive bellow the waves.

Into all that blue.