Potty-trained iguana by Josh Sippie

Young minds mold around the magic of the moment but

maybe you don’t appreciate the magic because

magic is everywhere

and life is, itself, magical because nothing has ruptured this purity of the mind

until you start to see things that seep into the cracks in the façade like

little tendrils of smokey black menace, pealing back the shield to expose the soft

underbelly

of all you never thought was there.

But as an adult I see magic and I immediately seek to disprove it

because magic isn’t real

but I had a potty-trained iguana as a kid and

it was magic

so magic that I’m not even sure now,

as an adult,

whether it’s real at all because it’s fractured and broken by all the things

that I’ve seen

That aren’t magic.

All the things that one human will do to another, that life will do to humanity, that humanity will do to life, and the fault lines that shake you out of the mindset

you used to be in

when humans were just

funny shaped sacks of jokes and laughter and didn’t want to hurt you

but now clearly do.

Maybe my iguana wasn’t potty trained.

Maybe she was just an iguana.

But I’ll keep believing.

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Josh Sippie is the Director of Publishing Guidance at Gotham Writers. His writing can be found at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Writer Magazine, Brevity, Hobart, and more. When not writing, he can be found wondering why he isn't writing. Twitter: @sippenator101