I did not get the biscuits while they were hot. First I stared at the metal band on my finger, wondering how that little thing was going to bring me a heavy covered tray, a knife out of the drawer, and butter from the dish. My childish mind hadn't even understood all that Maman had said, but she always spoke to me like that. Not only as if I were an adult, but a bright one. A scholar or a scientist.

So circles were perfect, eh? Not this real-world one on my pointer finger, but circles as a concept, an idea. That was the only information my teacher had given me as if the only instructions I needed. The rest would come from within me? Was that it?

Tapping the ring against the knotty pine tabletop, I sat and thought. Not much else I could do. In my head, I begged the biscuits to come. Heeeere, biscuits. Please come on over here and let me eat you.

I visualized them coming to me, using all kinds of methods of transportation. I pictured them flying, floating slowly like a cloud out of the tray Maman had set them in to keep them fresh and warm (though every moment that passed they lost heat). I pictured them just appearing out of thin air as if teleported. Scrunching my eyes shut, I wondered if they would come to me if I just wanted it badly enough. If I believed hard enough.

For minutes at a time, I would focus my entire mind on one idea only — bringing the biscuits. I meditated hard. I forced my brain to believe they were coming. The thought of them getting cold made me whine. Minutes turned to an hour, and I just needed to cry out my agony to the empty kitchen. I mewled in frustration, slamming my fists down, kicking my legs, which I was allowed to do except when I tried to get up from the chair, when they would become heavy and lifeless as stone statue legs. My chair snared me like a heavy-duty magnet. A full-on tantrum overtook me as hunger began to set in, the sun coming through the window slicing a noontime arc and afternoon shadows, and still, I had no biscuits — I hadn't eaten a bite that day. It wasn't fair! Ma didn't tell me what to do, and now I was starving.

I was starving. Maman hadn't given me proper instructions. Was magic even real? How was the cheap old ring going to help me?

I thought of the summer before, when I learned to swim in the indoor pool for "colored people" only. When I was a child, pools weren't always necessarily racially segregated, because most pools were already segregated by gender. It was when thousands of pools were built in the 20s, and men and women wanted to enjoy the big outdoor pools together, that "whites only" signs appeared everywhere, and no one going to build a pool in a Black neighborhood. Mostly to keep men like my Papere away from the white women, as if he ever had eyes for anyone but my maman. We couldn't swim at the all-white beaches, though, nor could we afford the usage fees for the floating baths on the Mississippi River. This bathhouse for Black people only, and not segregated by gender, had been bequeathed to us to keep us all from storming the big outdoor pools.

Learning to swim didn't come easy to me, even when the other boys and girls my age alternated between rough-housing in the deeps and swimming like fishes. For days, I walked in the shallow end and watched the other kids enviously. Mon papere had tried everything to teach me a breaststroke, backstroke, back float — anything to get me starting swimming competently. I didn't know it then, but young boys who didn't learn ended up drowning every year; sinking ships in the Mississippi River, or poorly thought out dips in Lake Portechain. I learned the breathing, blowing bubbles from my nose, and the stroke, which I practiced with both feet trawling across the pool floor. I tippytoed as far in as I could, my toes lifting a little as the water gave my body buoyancy, my head tilted back, neck scrunching, to keep my mouth and nose out of the water so I could breathe. I enjoyed the diminishment of gravity. If Pere would hold my belly, I could kick my feet and windmill my arms.

I just couldn't get all of it going at the same time. I couldn't crawl the length of the pool like the real swimmers — not unless Pere held me up.

Hanging off the side of the pool in the deep end, I liked to flutter my feet and hold on with one arm or both. Maman sat on a chaise lounge with a dozen other women, all of them encouraging me to cross with warm endearments and cooing.

One afternoon, I was hanging off the side in the deep end on the opposite end of the pool from Maman, when she pulled out a basket of snacks. I saw the distinctive yellow wicker basket she'd only fill with one rare treat she made and called Pomme de Terre frites. They were thin, fried potato chips, soft and warm if she made them right before we came, with salt and freshly dried herbs.

No way could I actually smell the thyme and rosemary over the briney smell of the pool, but I imagined I could — and the greasy oil. My mouth watered. It was an automatic response before I even knew I was doing it. Maman wasn't even looking as I pushed off from the ledge with my feet, windmilled one arm and the other, kicked my legs, and puffed up my chest like a big balloon filled with air. None of the stroke or the kicking were as elegant as my mind's eye had pictured, and my progress was slow, but I kept on kicking, wailing my arms, holding my head high — and even if it was a sorry doggy paddle, I made it all the way across the pool, lifted myself out with my arms, and ran to my mother's chaise lounge, falling onto her, hand outstretched for chips.

"Did you see me? I swam. It would have taken too long to walk around the pool, Maman."

She had seen some instinct take over as the pieces clicked into place, and when I really needed to, I sure did swim.

The same instinct did not take over now.

It was nowhere to be found. My anger and frustration brought on the temper tantrum, but when I burned out on that fury, all that was left was sad defeat and a rumbly belly.

I slouched in my seat. So hungry. A cherished little prince of a boy, I had never gone so long into a day without being fed. Most days I woke at sunrise to piping hot beignets, waffles or calas, the old New Orleans traditional creole sugar rice fritters. That or spicy boudin sausage, or veal grillade in red sauce with buttery grits. Not to speak of the eggs — oeufs Sardou, poached in sauce hollandaise with artichoke bottoms, and oeufs Hussarde in wine Bordelaise sauce, and creole rum omelettes. Not to mention the 'pain perdu,' — lost bread, known to the rest of the world as French toast.

I had never known want — but I was learning that afternoon. It's worse when you're pampered. An hour of hunger is unfathomable, though now I wonder how many hours of toil and hardship and dare I say it, rumbly bellies, my parents endured so that I could grow to be a chubby little prince.

Somehow the cooking took a group effort in our boarding house, the women storming the kitchen yet conducted in a surprisingly quiet dance that didn't disturb the sleep of the men and children. I'll get back to that later.

As visions of tureens of poached eggs in rich sauces with salted, fatty meats swam through my head, I hoped that the secret maman was trying to teach me was that if I wanted something badly enough — even the impossible — I could have it.

Unlike learning to swim, however, I hadn't been given the first lesson about conjuring sustenance. No stroke had been taught to me; I hadn't practiced any skill as I had breathing underwater, or floating or kicking; I hadn't spent hours in the figurative waters of magic, getting used to the lack of gravity or the bending of rules that bound me on mundane land. I had been taught only two facts: circles are perfect, and the ring, while necessary, was just a ring.

At the peak of my desire to fill my hunger, desperate to try anything at the same time I was surrendering, giving up, I closed my eyes and did the opposite of begging, wanting, believing, praying. I wanted to forget how hungry I was. I put my attention on my breath, the way maman had taught me to calm down when I was anxious.

If I put my attention on every inhale and held it there from beginning to end, I could stop thinking about my agony. I calmed down, though part of me rebelled against any such thing — I wanted to be angry, I wanted to stew in my sense of betrayal and injustice. Yet with each passing breath, I began to forget a little. I forgot my fury. Forgot my goal, the insolvable puzzle. Forgot to beg the biscuits to come to me. Forgot the chair beneath me, the kitchen around me. I forgot me. Myself.

The only thing left on my mind was how my lungs felt each time they took in air. Each time they released it. My mind relaxed and I forgot the distraction of hunger and the entire quest to bring my biscuits. When thought returned, as if I were waking from a nap, it was unbidden.

The thoughts didn't feel like my own, they seemed like a voice speaking to me. They came from my subconscious, it seems to me now. When I relaxed, the work my brain had done in the background came to the surface.

The thoughts were apart from me. Like voices in my head, the thoughts talked to me about circles. Supposedly the shape was perfect. What does that even mean? A circle is a round shape that has no corners or edges, and every point on its perimeter is equal distance from its center.

When my leg moved itself, my mind was blank. I wasn't thinking about it, but my leg started to bounce. As long as I didn't try to get up, I could move. Unbidden, the visual memory came to me — the ring of light maman had called 'byproduct' when she bound me here.

Maman had allowed me to see it — the blue circle.

Eyes snapped themselves open. As if my body knew what to do, my mind was devoid of thought, a blank space. It was like that moment of innate instinct that cannot be taught, like the second all the lessons come together and you just swim, your body knows how but your mind can't describe or explain it. Suddenly your body knows how to swim, when a moment before it didn't. My eyes looked at the ring, the imperfect circle that represented a perfect circle, and my legs kicked, perhaps just to be dramatic (my spellcasting ability today does not require any flutter kicks) and my mind's eye pictured a band around my hips — a perfect, ideal circle.

A circle that need only be bent out of shape to lose its power.

As if my mind had pincers, and was becoming a utilitarian body part more akin to a functioning limb, it pinched one point on the invisible circle and pulled. Pinching away one single point on its perimeter even a fraction of a decimal point was enough to shatter the perfection — to break the spell. Maman's bind became powerless.

I leapt from my seat to stand only momentarily before I felt the numbness in my legs, the pinpricks of a dead limb waking from sleep, and fell into a crawl that was not unlike a sorry doggy paddle across the kitchen to the biscuit box.

The second my hands touched the lid, my entire body froze in place. "One more moment." Maman came back into the kitchen. "Cheris." No light byproduct this time. "Your reward should be hot," she said briskly.

Steam buffeted and swirled from golden brown biscuit tops glistening with hot oil, and her bind let me free to grab one. It was about exactly the ideal temperature for human consumption. Wolfing six down like an underfed stray, I still burned my tongue, and my fingers.

"Now you know how the cooking gets done," said Maman. "You think I wake up every day BEFORE YOU, and before the sun, to make beignets and ouves Sardou?"

She chuckled and patted a spotless apron, as if to point out that the costume was for show. Her daily dusting and housework went on with enchanted mops and brooms she only half-heartedly guarded while she devoured books from the common study.

Teaching went on like that. Maman said the important thing about magic was learning how to learn. One had to discover the spells for oneself. It was almost impossible to teach — and good thing, too, she would say, because most magicians would have no access to a teacher.

In those days, any act of magic was a crime that provoked immediate witch burnings and executions.

What I learned that morning, that I had never noticed before, was that our boarding house was something of a communal safehouse. For magicians.

Thank you for reading Frost and Fog. What did you think of Prospero's Story? Did you enjoy this part of the book? Prospero will have more stories to come. Please leave a 🌟 on your way to the next chapter. Cheers 💖