Shit That I Love: My Bewitched Finger-Bone

These have been dark days for our country. Some sort of wild beast, with the reading comprehension of a wild beast, is the president. The major intellectual debate of our times seems to be whether racists are racist or not. A lot of apparently smart people seem to think enough free speech to give a well-reasoned rebuttal is the only defense we need against everything bad ever happening, apparently unaware that history, where a lot of bad things happened in spite of good arguments, exists. For every important office, our government seeks out the worst qualified human in the world for it, and if necessary, holds a talent show.

So what keeps me going? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s that no one knows where I’ve hidden my bewitched finger-bone, containing my life’s essence, so that I might live forever — or at least until my terrible secret is discovered. Whenever I think of that, it makes me smile.

Well do I remember the day I hid my bewitched finger bone where no one will ever find it. It was, I believe, sunny. I was a young wizard then, my beard in a kind of curly, spring growth, like a frolicsome lamb. The year was 2006. The Human Genome Project had just completed. My roommate, at Wizarding School — a young Colin Hanks — dared me to separate my finger bone from my body and enchant it so that it contained my life’s essence, so that the only thing that might slay me would be if it were discovered by some meddling kids, say in a bird’s nest, and broken — you know, wizard stuff. I’ve never said no to a dare, even that time ex-French-president Nicolas Sarkozy dared me to sneeze repeatedly in The Louvre — a faux pas they’ll be talking about on the Rive Gauche until the Eighth Republic.

And when life gets tough—when, for example, CNN decides to host a climate scientist and a space alien who hates and abominates human life to discuss the topic of whether we should do even the smallest thing to ameliorate impending disasters just a little—it’s still not too long until I have a smile on my face again.

I just sit back, relax, and remember that I am safe, until the eldritch power, drawn from the dark well-spring, hallowed by the tears of three hundred innocents should wane — forever, in other words. It’s likely that even a worldwide flood or boiling lava wouldn’t slow me down for long, not with my essence safe. My bones would reconstitute, my flesh would reknit, my beard would regrow, lustrous and strong.

Just so long as no one — not meddling teens, not a bold adventurer or two, not even a half-elven sorceress — discovers my finger bone, where I have left it, certainly not in the Ardennes forest, and snaps it. That is the only way I can be defeated, so I will not be defeated. It puts a spring in my step, a wind in my sails.