A few weeks before my grandpa died, he and I went for a walk around his retirement home. Technically I walked, and he rode in his chair. We stopped at a small fishpond a couple streets away, and looked at it, at the skin of green pond scum that covered it, and at the yellowing trees than leaned out over it, and at the eruptions of bubbles where bluegill nudged the surface hunting for insects. And my grandpa murmured something like, “Just think, Luke. In a few months, this will all be frozen over. Just think.”
Probably he was only talking, but to me it sounded like there was a sense of astonishment, even of wonder, in his voice—as if he could hardly believe that the world was going to keep spinning, that the seasons would keep turning, and that everything would continue on as it always had before, only that he might not be around to see much more of it (again, these are only my speculations).
Like most people, I process the world through stories. That moment planted the seed of a story in my head. It would be a couple years before I tried to write it down, and my first few attempts didn’t go well, so I set it aside.
Things kept getting added to it. I wanted it to encompass that moment by the fishpond with my grandfather, and a hint of the way I felt the first time I finished reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell—that sense that everything is part of a complete whole; that the vees of geese and the bare winter branches and the wind passing through them form a sort of black writing against the white winter sky, diverse components of a vast spell—and I wanted to reflect on creativity, and on grief, and on memory, and on the parts of ourselves and others that we lose by forgetting, and on the presentation of time in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and on the process of aging as narrated by the songs of Leonard Cohen and the essays of Ursula K. Le Guin. I wanted to structure the narrative according to medieval alchemical principles, the ideas of connection and crucible, purification and circularity, with allusions to Arthurian myth—which is a strange thing to want to do.
Usually when you try hanging that much on a story, it crumbles beneath the weight. This one didn’t. When I finally made my big attempt at writing/revising it in 2022 and 2023, the finished picture looked almost the way I’d first imagined in my head. Which is a rare thing, even for stories that turn out well.
The biggest problem is that it’s quite long—over 8,000 words—so I couldn’t find any market willing to publish it. I thought maybe this one would just be for me, and a little bit for all the people who’d kindly helped me revise it, including my wife, and several of my best friends, and an English professor who really looks out for his students, even the ones who’ve graduated years before.
But I’ve recently learned that this story has found a home. It feels almost mercenary, taking private moments like this and selling them, practically profane in an odd way, but I’m glad this piece gets to have more readers. “A Spell for Healing Death” will be published in The Seven Wonders anthology from Mirari Press (who really care about their authors and have been WONDERFUL to work with every step of the way).
The book launches on July 19, and September 2025 marks ten years since my grandpa left us. My grandpa didn’t read the sorts of things I tend to write (in fact, he’d probably be concerned that this anthology is about witches), and I’m the least handy person in the world, so there wasn’t much we had in common besides our last name, but grandpa was a craftsman.
I can’t help thinking he might’ve appreciated the almost-symmetry of this decade-long cycle.
Luke Wildman 