Like Borrowed Magic

The sound of our bellies forming a chaotic orchestra in the echo of our home was laughable. Sometimes not. The things my family did not have had a way of keeping us up at night. Like food. You couldn't buy food without magic and if you didn’t have magic, you had to wait until someone wanted to be kind, or the charity shops were open. That was how we lived. You could tell who had magic not just by their robes but also by how they walked and talked, unhurriedly. Then you had people like us, queuing in the charity shops for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Always running to the next location because if you get there last, you get nothing- not even a crumb where bread may have been. These days the more I needed to eat, the more I considered the alternative- to borrow. The consequence of borrowed magic was you aged by a few years when using magic that did not belong to you. Your lender would get younger. For some, it didn’t seem like a real sacrifice. They would live short years but very good years. The real problem was finding a lender in a small town where everyone now looked like children, who indeed would want to take it further? I did not know but I would find them this very day. I had had enough, technically speaking I had had nothing at all.