By Tim Jones

It surprised Jack when Nora agreed to cut class and go to the beach. Nora was level-headed, with an increasingly annoying habit of summarily dismissing his best fun ideas. The two met at Nora’s dorm to catch the bus out to the state beach, navigating through a throng of kids dropping books and shedding heavy clothes on the college quad.

Once in a while, a perfect summer day shows up on a random Thursday in mid-April, a surprise gift, a fleeting, teasing, one-time-only reprieve from the season’s leaden skies, brown grass, and withering hope. This was that day. Like the old forgotten drinking buddy blowing into town unannounced, this day demanded reckless improvisation, free-spirited disregard, and an openness to magic. The sun and the air’s lilac hint declared nothing impossible, while an occasional sweet breeze brushed tender skin, assuring that nothing bad would happen.

Nora spread a blanket on the beach where other students mixed with lobster-skinned old men in stained ball caps and harried moms bribing antsy children with Freezer Pops. Jack watched as she fluffed her long, dark hair against the breeze, then twisted out of her T-shirt and shorts. He had imagined a demure one-piece underneath, something sturdy and practical, but she stunned him with a yellow bikini. His stomach tightened, equally strong currents of desire, affection, and uncertainty rushing through him. They weren’t an official couple, and Jack had come to see Nora as too conventional for him, though he harbored secret hopes she might come around.

“Aren’t you going to join me?” Nora asked, lying down and patting the blanket. The question, spoken against the day’s halcyon perfection, seemed to Jack to have implicit weight. He lay down, closing his eyes and watching an orange corona flit around a round, black void, the wave’s staccato rhythm and Nora’s Pantene and toothpaste scent cleansing his mind of worries.

Jack found himself telling her every unspoken dream he’d ever had, the words coming easy, seeming right. Nora laced her slender fingers together with his, the sensation like puzzle pieces clicking. “I’m a free spirit,” he told her. “Unconventional, a rule-breaker. I’m not wasting a minute after college. I’ll write poetry and seek Truth. Hike the Alps, wander Machu Picchu, motorcycle through Tibet, give voice to the oppressed.” He gazed nervously ahead, contemplating the beach’s foamy break between water and sand. “I doubt that’s what you want, though,” Jack said, terrified at hearing her answer.

She was quiet, propping herself up on her elbows and peeking at him overtop her sunglasses. “If we’re talking about a possible future together, there’s something you should know about me,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m a witch.”

Jack searched her caramel brown eyes. There was something different in them, a mysterious look both far-off and intimate, frightening but also inviting, those eyes seeing the future, Jack thought, or at least more than he ever could. “When…did…” he stumbled.

“I’ve always been a witch,” she answered, as if clairvoyant.

“Good or bad?”

“Just an ordinary one,” Nora laughed.

Afraid to look at the beautiful young woman beside him, Jack remembered beastly hags from storybooks and sullen girls from middle school with corpse complexions. “So, you could cast a spell on me?”

Nora bit her lip and toyed absently with the string tied at her hip. “It’s more complicated than that. Or maybe simpler.”

“I guess I’m in love with a witch,” he said, feeling an odd tranquility.

“And I’m in love with a free spirit,” Nora smiled.

The placid breeze quickened, conjuring sand into a soft vortex around them, sunlight glinting on the swirling particles as a mineral sweetness filled the vacuum inside. Jack and Nora were picked up and carried along inside the gentle hurricane, years evaporating to mist—ten, twenty, so many and so fast they lost track. They rode along in a contented, foggy drowsiness broken intermittently by vivid dreams: crappy one-bedroom apartment; garden wedding; baby’s first steps; chubby kid fingers stroking puppy fur; Saturday soccer and Tuesday gymnastics; Jack declared Best Dad Ever by unanimous vote of the kids. The fierce poems went unwritten. Truth remained elusive, though Jack almost unlocked the secret to a weed-free lawn. He never hiked the Alps, but the whole family rode the Matterhorn at Disneyland one summer.

The quiet tempest hurtled them over a long arc, setting them down on the quad where they had started. Jack looked back at thirty years, wondering if it had been a witch’s spell. Or something utterly…

“Are you folks here for Parent’s Weekend?” a whip-thin girl with ruler-straight hair and swollen lips asked.

“Our son is a freshman,” Nora said, this fact seeming a source of both great pride and embarrassment. “In fact, I lived in the same dorm he does!”

“Awe-some!” the pretty girl said with practiced vapidity, eyes moving to the next couple in line. “Lunch starts at eleven.”

Nora put on her reading glasses to examine the flier the girl had handed her. Their old quad looked to Jack smaller, a little less grand than they had left it. The weather was pleasantly unremarkable. “Don’t forget to take your blood pressure pill,” Nora reminded him.

“Remember when you told me you were a witch?” he asked.

“Yes?” She seemed to find the topic wholly uninteresting. “Always been. Though the correct term is enchantress these days.”

Jack unwrapped a Fiber One bar. “Time sped up,” he said slowly, trying to remember where the beach was. “Big plans forgotten like they never existed…”

“Spells only work on willing subjects,” Nora interrupted, as if she could read his mind.

“So, what kind of witch are you, anyway?”

Nora lowered her reading glasses to look at him with caramel brown eyes still delighting in a simple, but unsolvable mystery. “An ordinary one,” she said.