The first time I found out about magic, I was eighteen. My parents were both in europe on business, staying over the holidays, and I needed somewhere to stay. I had come to be good friends with one of the girls in my dorm, wonderfully named Lila Yllyanych, offered to let me stay at her place. It was a few hours up the coast, deep into the redwoods and far away from any major towns or even highways. It sounded like a great place to have a relaxing holidays, although I wasn’t sure how well I’d deal with being so isolated. Still, Lila was such a lively figure that I couldn’t imagine boredom would be my problem, rather, trying to find the energy to keep up with Lila. She was someone who brought unmatched zeal and optimism to every part of her life, even when things didn’t go her way she found a way to stay positive, and above everything, active. At school, captaining the soccer team, editing the school paper, all while making A’s, seemingly without ever breaking a sweat. I hadn’t yet learned her secret for “impossible” time management, but I soon would, and I would soon learn a great deal more about Lila and her family’s background than I ever imagined.
I was there, breathing hard even just from the hike from the car to the cabin, the smell of burning cedar logs and coffee, so warm and inviting. She got to showing me around. The place was not very big, a two-bedroom cabin on a thousand acres of woodland, a wood-burning stove, a small kitchen, a single bathroom. Her parents were out, I suppose, thought I would soon learn that they spent most of their time in the city as well.
“Oh and the shower is haunted.”
I assumed she was joking. It was foolish, yes, she was never the joking type.
And it’s not to say I didn’t get any more warning than that. It was about thirty minutes later, that I was unpacking and something just … flowed into and out of me suddenly. I don’t know how else to say it, and I’ve never been sure. But it was there and then just not there, a something and then nothing. And when it was something there was a deep sense of foreboding, not necessarily of danger, but a sense of fatality almost, and in that instant, I surely knew that the shower was truthfully haunted, and also at the same time knew I would ignore this and take a shower anyway, as a kind of challenge, or faith perhaps, a kind of un-faith or certainty that only what I knew to be real was real.
But yes, I knew it. And went ahead anyhow.
I felt it again, once the warn water was flowing over me. The something and nothing, but in this moment, instead of a preeminence, a reflective moment. Of course she had told me, and that in itself was enough to draw me into it. She could have said broken, and it would not have happened, but she said haunted, and in that word suggested, or mandated really, that I would go and find out how haunted. And so of course, the question of danger did not even occur to me.
And the feeling passed, and I doubted, then, decided for at least a moment, that I was thinking irrationally.
Of course, then I opened my eyes and rubbed the water out of them. I looked down to pick up the soap.
My head was on backwards. The thought occurred to me, not all at once, but like a ship coming slowly out of a fog, the whole of things becoming clearer and clearer. It did not seem more than an inconvenience, and I did not panic or fear, but only felt a kind of reassurance, a redeeming, even, of the ghost or haunting, or whatever.
I finished the shower and carefully dressed myself again. It was awkward, to say the least, but I managed to slowly get downstairs, walking backwards.
“Ohh,” beamed Lila, “I see you decided to test it out.”
“I didn’t think you were serious.”
“Oh, well, now you know, I guess. My parents, they do magic for a living.”
“Like on a stage?”
“No, no, nothing like that. More like a service. If you need to, you know, turn somebody into a statue for a while, or maybe they want to put their heart in a box and give it to their lover, or all sorts of things really.”
“And do you know magic?”
“Oh, some. I’m not licensed though.”
“Show me something.”
“Poof! Your heads on backwards!”
“Very funny. I mean, I get it, you really do magic. How, by the way, is the shower haunted?”
“Oh, it always was. Some ghost, he thinks its funny. I guess he died in the shower, maybe. I don’t know when Dad got the cabin, he sort of always just had it.”
“Well, how does it go back.”
She gave me a sad look. “It doesn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, not until tomorrow.”
“I’m stuck like this until tomorrow?”
“Yes, that’s when it usually wears off.”
“It’s not even noon!”
“Well, you’re lucky then he didn’t do anything else.”
“More than this? He doesn’t just turn everyone’s head around backwards?”
“Oh, no, he likes to do that. Sometimes he’s nice and it’s something little, like he switches your right and left hands, and you don’t even notice until later. Or sometimes, he makes your whole head just poof! Gone. You notice right away then.”
“So I guess I’m lucky I still have a head then.”
“Well, he’s nice at first. But later on. He gets bored. The cabin, it’s been empty for a while, so maybe this is like a little ‘Hello.’”
I waved upstairs, and said “Hello,” then started laughing, realizing I was facing the wrong way.
Lila handed me a cup of still warm coffee. “Okay,” she said, “I think it’s my turn.” She winked and went upstairs.

While I heard the shower running, I tried to amuse myself by just exploring my new condition. The more I looked around, and thought about Lila in general, the whole thing started to make sense really. I mean, first of all, she always had a weird way of looking at things, and by that I just mean she never seemed overly concerned about much of anything at all — only boys would set her off, and there were usually one or two crushes going, though she seldom did more than obsess over them, and rarely did anything ever pan out like she expected.
There was one moment, a few months ago, that stuck out in my mind. Lila and I were supposed to be going out to dinner with some friends, but she hadn’t shown up. Her room was just downstairs, so I went to get her. The door was open a crack, so I went in — I saw she was sleeping, the covers pulled up to her chin.
“Lila,” I said, pushing the blanket. Curiously, I didn’t feel her under there. I started to push again, when one of her eyes opened, and she looked at me.
“We’re going to dinner, are you coming?”
“Sure. One moment. I’ll come over when I’m ready.”
And it really only bothered me for a moment, but once I left her room I realized I hadn’t even seen her move under the blanket. All she’d done was open an eye. When I’d seen her a few minutes later though, I’d dismissed the whole thing from my mind.
And reflecting on it, I suppose having my head on backwards wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I sat at the kitchen table with my chair turned around, eating potato chips and sneaking glances at my reflection in the TV. Thinking I’d watch something, I got up to look around for the remote. I tried shuffling around backwards, which was marginally easier than trying to walk forwards and look over my shoulder. After a few minutes though, I wasn’t having too much trouble at least just moving around.
“Sybil!” I heard Lila shout. I tried to turned towards the noise and almost tripped over the ottoman. Apparently I wasn’t as graceful as I’d given myself credit for, but I managed to get back upstairs pretty quickly.
“Help!” Lila said from in the bathroom, but then started laughing again. The shower was still running. I opened the door to see her head peaking out from behind the shower curtain, steam filling the room.
“Oh good,” she said. “Can you turn off the water please? I don’t have arms today.”
I came in and shut off the water. Lila was right - now only was she armless, but there really wasn’t any trace of arms at all - her shoulders rounded off quite smoothly. She seemed to find it quite funny, and was grinning practically from ear to ear.
“For five minutes, I was trying to turn the knob with my foot, but every time I almost slipped. Can you dry me off please? Thanks. And so. Now you see what it’s like here. Usually, I take showers before bed here, that way if I need to be a regular girl in the day, I can do that.”’
“I can’t even believe this. It’s just so crazy that this can happen!”
“Oh, I know, they always say, ‘No such thing as magic,’ and so on. But if you know they’re wrong, then what do I care? They can say whatever they like, meanwhile, I’ll have magic every day.”
I helped her dry off and get dressed, though she seemed to manage balancing without arms far better than I did with a reversed head. I suppose she had a good deal more practice.
“So now that we’re here, you want to go out for a walk?”
“What if someone sees us?”
“Who cares!”
I started to explain, but then really, I couldn’t. So my head was on backwards. So what? I wasn’t going to let that stop me. But as we got ready to go out, I thought some more about what might be in store. If the shower had already spun around my head, while leaving her armless, well, what else was there?