then

I pulled a sword from a stone when I was twelve years old.

A carnival had come to town, all lights and cotton candy and generators whirring in the summer heat, and Althea had given Kay and me each ten dollars to spend there. Kay, too cool and too old to be bothered with the rides, bought a soda and spent the evening flirting and showing off her new yarn braids, bright blue and just finished after midnight the night before.

But me, I spent every last dollar at the same booth. Sandwiched between the ring toss and the place where you shot metal ducks with cork guns was a small canopy strung with lights and carpeted by grass so trampled that the dirt showed through. It was a strength game, much like hitting a giant hammer on a scale—pull the sword from the stone and you won the blinking plastic crown hanging from the ceiling. If you could pull the sword up halfway, you won a stuffed animal.

The stone was, of course, molded concrete, and the sword wasn’t a real sword. Just a piece of stamped metal rigged with bolts and slides to keep it from moving up all the way out of the stone. It was a money trap, exactly the kind of thing my adoptive mother Althea would refuse to let me spend her money on if she were there.

But she wasn’t there, and for some reason I was determined. I think I had this idea that the crown would look good perched on my sister’s new braids. I’m sure part of it was an adolescent desire to show off. And part of it still lay beyond the realm of explanation; I couldn’t articulate why I wanted to do it, I just knew that I did. And so on a hot summer’s day, thunderclouds piling up like cars over the Missouri River, I spent ten dollars for ten tries at the sword.

I failed nine times.

On the tenth, the sword pulled free.

A bolt must have broken, something sheared loose with a rattle and a snap, and all of a sudden I was staggering backwards, holding a sword-shaped piece of metal too heavy to keep upright.

“Holy shit, kid,” the carnival worker said. “You broke that thing right off.”

I was too stunned to answer, holding the sword-shaped metal like it was the answer to every question in the universe. Up until that moment, I’d been a good but unremarkable boy—I got good grades, I played a decent game of baseball, I got along with almost everyone. But holding that rusted, dull metal, the hilt cool in my hand, the humid air hot on my face, I felt the thrill of possibility. The insistent tugging feeling that I needed to be doing something, going somewhere, finding someone. The enchanting itch that there was a better, richer world just out of reach, that I could stretch out my fingers and part the very air like a veil, and that behind that veil would be a place that was more than my own mundane life. The trees leafier, the sun warmer, everything just more.

Now I can look back at that tug or itch and call it destiny—or the beginning of my adult consciousness, depending on how pragmatic I’m feeling. But I had no words for it then. One moment I was an ordinary boy throwing his money away on a cheap carnival trick, and the next I was a young man on the precipice of something dizzying in its depth.

I’ve never told another soul what happened next.

The carnival worker, still swearing in a mixture of disbelief, annoyance, and admiration, reached up for the plastic crown and held it out for me to take…and someone else took it before I could.

It was a man—well, barely a man, really—early twenties and thin in a way that reminded me of birds or a sapling in winter. He had pale white skin and near-black eyes, and it could have been his sharp and delicate face or maybe his shabbily elegant clothes, but I suddenly felt very aware of myself. Of my youth, of my ordinariness. Of my well-worn T-shirt and jeans and church-sale sneakers.

He held the crown in his hands, studying the plastic as if it were finely beaten gold, his head bowed in thought. “Is this yours?” he finally asked, glancing up at me from under dark eyebrows. He had a lilt that I mentally fumbled to place; it was Welsh and I’d never heard a Welsh accent before. What a man like him was doing in a hot city park in Missouri, I had no idea.

“I, uh, I won that crown,” I explained lamely. I lifted the hand wrapped around the cheap metal hilt of the sword. “For pulling this thing from the stone.”

He nodded, looking down at the crown with something like reverence, and then held it out to me. “Then I suppose you should take it.”

There was a moment as I wrapped my fingers around it. Short, wordless, jolting. Like we’d done this before, this very thing. That I’d stood with a sword in one hand and this man had handed me a crown and I had taken it, knowing nothing would ever be the same.

But the moment blew away in the electric, pre-thunderstorm wind, and the man gave me a small smile and turned to leave.

I wasn’t ready for him to go. I felt a sudden anxiety I couldn’t name.

“What should I do with them? The sword and the crown?” I asked the stranger. It seemed so important that I ask, that I know, and that he be the one to tell me.

The man stopped, looking thoughtfully up at the dark, rain-laden sky. “The most important part of wearing a crown and using a sword is knowing when to set them down.”

It was cryptic. And yet perfectly clear, somehow.

“And until then?” I asked.

“Why, until then, you use them. Goodbye, Maxen.”

He knew my name.

He left, and I stood there with a fake sword in one hand and a plastic crown in the other. Then the storm broke and the rain started pouring down.