All the local kids know what to do when you see The Skinny Wizard.

You can’t see him straight on. His face is always blocked somehow. Sometimes by his long, apparently dyed hair. Sometimes by his hood, which is always up. He has his gym bag slung across his Skinny Wizard shoulder. The gym bag is blue and sun-bleached and heavy looking. It squirms and bulges. It looks like it might burst its zippers.

When you see The Skinny Wizard, you stop whatever you were doing. That’s rule number-one. You don’t ignore him. He’ll know. You will want to pretend like you didn’t see him. Your brain will lie. It will say that wasn’t him. Or if I just keep looking forward, he’ll go away. A side glance won’t count. It will. The excuses you make up in your mind, the imaginary appeal process you gather evidence for, will not save you. All the kids growing up around here know. When you see him, you stop. You let him get as close as he wants. 

“How’s it?” he will ask.

You have to be polite.

“Howdy,” you could say.

You’ve got to meet The Skinny Wizard on his terms. As he adjusts the heavy gym bag on his shoulder. As the gym bag’s bulges rise and fall like breathing.

If you’re like most, you’ll try to see his face. His hair will whip in the wind that always follows him, and his hoody will seem a little short for his arms and spine, and when you get a better look at all that hair and fabric, you’ll be unsure whether you’re actually looking at the front or the back of him.

You don’t ignore him, you don’t pretend you didn’t see him. You try not to make a fuss about his face’s peculiar dimensions.

And most important: if you see him, you have to promise to forget. You have to mean it. He has to believe you.

He’ll ask, “What did you see?”

“I didn’t see nothing,” you might say.

Usually that’s enough. Usually, The Skinny Wizard believes and moves along.

Sometimes, though, when he gets especially close—for reasons that are known to only him—The Skinny Wizard will ask, “Don’t you remember me?”  

There is no right answer to this question. This question being asked implies a condition that cannot be altered by any conceivable response on the part of the ill-fated kid.

There are gaps all over this particular world, and you can fall into them if you’re  not careful.

The Skinny Wizard knows them all, and he will show them to you unless you can convince him of your capacity to forget. If you’re a kid growing up between Verdi and Fernley and you have the ambiguous luck to see him. He’ll get closer and closer to you until there is no difference between the space that he is and the space you’ve come to know as you, as your self. He will take you to the gap that best suits you, and maybe the body everybody associates with you will go fully in, disappearing, becoming part of a story people will attribute to the cruel luck of existence before they begin their own forgetting. Or, even worse: that body remains outside the gap, and it continues walking around, performing cellular regeneration, talking to its parents. But it’s not the same thing anymore, and whatever was there will go to a place from which there is no back, and people will say that the universe does not lose information, that nothing is ever really created or destroyed, but the Skinny Wizard knows better, and if you grow up, your adult brain will do its best to make good on its promise, but some things have a way of sticking, you follow?