keyword: fracture, title: desperados under the eaves in "the next big thing" flash fiction

“It’s like the San Andreas Fault,” the Amazing Mitzi told Frank the Yeti once, describing the way magic worked, “the more movement applied, the more violent the fracture.”

Simple tricks don’t even ripple the ether, that’s just moving stuff around, taking a rabbit out of the Northridge PetSmart and pulling it out a hat in the Hollywood Hills was nothing. Medium evocation might take sacrifices or bargaining with higher powers… in her case as a Kabbalistic sorceress, with the Ishim, the angels closest to mortal affairs. But when moving mountains or doing things magic isn’t supposed to do be able to directly do, like hijacking free-wills, it has lasting material consequences.

To manipulate complicated things like souls, it was more like going into the fabric of reality and reweaving its tapestry with brute force. “The difference between typing into a web-browser,” she analogized, “and rewriting its source code.” Even if you get those threads back together, there’ll always be frayed ends and loose strings, just like the pressure inside the planet can be managed by shifting tectonic plates but there’ll also be one hell of an earthquake.

“There was this guy…” a line that came up often in her conversations… when she was younger and less wise, when first trying to break in, she fell for an up-and-coming rock star. Frank forgot his name so I can’t say either. He appreciated Mitzi’s slight-of-hand but wasn’t attracted to her, as his tastes tended toward thirty-pounds underweight as opposed to twenty-over.

One night, overcome with bitter lust, she tried to enchant him. She toiled, hands wet in reality’s guts, learning how much grand design she’d need to Frankenstein in order to create an existence where they’d be together. Only when she saw old light-rail trains phase into reality, the Red Line commuter infrastructure L.A. had before oil-barons tore them up for highways, did Mitzi realize she couldn’t go through with it. She’d need recast sixty-odd years to get to where a man like him could love her and so much could go wrong in the upheaval. Once she relented, those trains all disappeared again, back to their own times, unable to undo this all just for her own happiness.

“San Andreas and the Hopi mage,” she concluded, “who hexed L.A. to see itself as it wants to see.” “What?” Frank asked, “did he trigger an earthquake as well?” “No,” she smiled, “before the curse, there was no San Andreas Fault, he rolled everything back seventy million years and gashed that occlusion into Earth-flesh retroactively. That’s how much he wounded reality in the act of cursing this town so powerfully.”

There’s a Warren Zevon song about how earthquakes will someday swallow California but not soon enough to get away with Warren’s own debts unpaid. Not “Werewolves of London”, not the one Frank thinks is about him, some less-famous one. That other song could well be about Mitzi, though, and this world that’s slowly breaking down but will make sure to break us first.