Here is a fact about my family that I have never once had to explain to a stranger before today, because it has never once come up in a context where I needed a stranger to believe it fast: we do magic, it runs on feelings, and none of us can turn it off once it's out, which meant that somewhere in my apartment, forty minutes after the incident, I was sitting on my bathroom floor with a Pomeranian in my lap and my phone on speaker, explaining to my mother, in a whisper, why I needed her to stop asking if I was drunk and start telling me how to fix this.

"Say it again," my mother said. "Slower. And stop whispering, you sound like you're hiding a body."

"I turned my boss into a dog."

"Sabrina."

"Mom."

"Sabrina, you have not lost control since you were fourteen years old."

"I am aware of that, Mom, I was there."

There was a sound on the other end that I recognized as my mother pressing her palm flat against her own forehead, which she does when she needs a full three seconds before speaking, a habit I inherited and have used, conservatively, four thousand times in my adult life.

"Put him on the phone," she said.

"Mom, he's a dog. He doesn't have a phone voice. He has a bark."

"Not him, obviously, I mean put the phone near him so I can hear his — energy. I need to hear the shape of it."

I held the phone six inches from Julian's face. Julian, who had spent the car ride home alternating between furious silent staring and an undignified amount of scrabbling against the inside of my tote bag, looked at the phone with the specific contempt of a man who has never once in his professional life been asked to participate in a call he wasn't running.

My mother made a low humming noise, the kind she makes over soup to check if it needs more salt.

"That's a containment hex," she said finally. "Anger-based. Big one. You really let it go, huh."

"I really let it go."

"Good for you," she said, and I want it on the record that she meant it, which is its own separate problem I am not equipped to deal with today. I want to note, for context, that this is a genuinely strange thing to hear from your mother forty minutes after learning you have permanently altered another human being's biology out of pure, unfiltered rage, and that I have spent more than one subsequent evening wondering what it says about my family that "good for you" was anyone's honest first reaction. "Okay. Anger hexes at that intensity, cast without a focus object, they're reversible, but the reversal takes time to brew properly. Fourteen days. Rare ingredients — I'll need to call your Tita Fely, she still has the good dried yarrow. And Sabrina—"

"What."

"You know how this works. A hex that size doesn't just cost the target. It costs the caster too."

I want to describe, accurately, the specific quality of dread that moved through me in that moment, because it was different from the dread of the previous forty minutes, which had been sharp and immediate and mostly about human resources. This dread was slower. Structural. The kind that tells you the ceiling is about to be a floor problem.

"Costs me how."

"Containment," she said. "Same reason the reversal takes fourteen days — your body's locking down so you can't do it again by accident while it's out there loose in the world as a dog. No magic. None. Not a spark. For fourteen days, you're going to be exactly as magic as your downstairs neighbor's cat."

"I don't have a downstairs neighbor with a cat."

"You know what I mean."

I did know what she meant, and I sat with it for a second, on my bathroom floor, forty-one minutes into what I was already, privately, thinking of as The Situation, and understood with total clarity that I had, in the space of one performance review, managed to remove both of the tools I had spent my entire adult life relying on: the tight, careful control that let me pass as normal, and now, as a direct consequence of losing that control exactly once, the actual magic underneath it. I would be doing this — whatever this was going to turn out to be — with nothing but the ordinary, non-negotiable, fully mundane resources available to every other single person on the planet who has never once set anything on fire with their feelings.

"There's one more thing," my mother said, in the tone she uses right before the thing that matters most. "The reversal potion — once Fely and I brew it — it has to be administered by you. Specifically you. It's keyed to whoever cast the hex. Nobody else can do it. Not me, not your aunt, not a professional, if such a person even exists, which I doubt."

"So it's fourteen days, no magic, and only I can fix it."

"That's the good news version, yes."

"What's the bad news version."

"The bad news version is you also have a job, and I assume that dog still has one too, and I don't know how you're planning to explain any of this to Human Resources, and I would very much like to not find out my daughter is going to prison for workplace transfiguration on the same week I'm hosting book club."

Julian, at this point, had gone very still in my lap, in the specific way that meant he was listening with everything he had, which was, currently, very little — a five-pound body, a bark, and whatever was going on behind two very dark, very focused eyes. I looked down at him and felt something I did not have room for that day, which was a small, unwelcome flicker of guilt, because whatever he'd done to deserve this — and he had, I want to be clear, done things — I was the one who'd actually done it.

"Fourteen days," I said, mostly to myself.

"Fourteen days," my mother confirmed. "I'll call Fely tonight. And Sabrina — feed him something bland the first few days, dogs get funny stomachs under stress, and don't let your Tita Carol hear about this until it's over, she'll want to help and her version of helping made your uncle's toolshed collapse in on itself in 2019."

"Understood." I did not, in the moment, ask for details about the toolshed, mostly because I already had them, having heard the story recounted at every family gathering since 2019 with the specific relish my family reserves for disasters that happened to someone else. Carol had tried to help my uncle waterproof the roof with what she'd described, afterward, as "just a little encouragement," and the encouragement had, apparently, taken the form of enough concentrated hopefulness that the whole structure had simply given up trying to hold its own weight, gently, almost politely, folding itself into a pile of lumber and paint cans while my uncle stood in the driveway holding a mug of coffee and saying, repeatedly, "well, that's new." Nobody in my family does small magic. That is, I understood, sitting on my bathroom floor, the actual root of the problem — not that we were dangerous, exactly, but that none of us seemed to have access to a volume dial, only an on switch and an off switch, and the on switch, once flipped, apparently did not come with a way to specify just a little.

"And one more thing."

"What."

"Get him a collar. If animal control finds an unchipped dog wandering around looking like that, you're going to have a very different, very much worse problem than the one you have right now."

I did not, in that moment, take this advice as seriously as I should have. I want that on the record too. I am trying, in general, in this account, to be honest about the places where I failed, because I have a feeling — call it a hunch, call it fifteen years of pattern recognition about my own life — that the next thirteen days are going to be full of exactly this kind of thing: a piece of good, clear, simple advice, handed to me directly, that I am going to fail to follow at the worst possible moment.

I hung up the phone. Julian looked up at me, and made a sound that was not quite a bark and not quite anything else, low and strange in his throat, like a word trying to happen in a body that didn't have the right shape for it yet.

"I know," I told him, and I meant it, in a way that surprised me. "I know. Me too."

Then I picked him up, put him in the emptiest tote bag I owned — not the good one, the good one still had matcha stains from that morning and this felt, somehow, like a day that deserved a fresh bag — and carried him out to my car, where I sat for a full minute before starting the engine, running the numbers on fourteen days the way I run numbers on everything: quietly, alone, and with the growing, sinking understanding that I did not, currently, have a plan.

I want to be honest that the fourteen days landed differently once I actually sat with the shape of them. Fourteen days is nothing, in the abstract — two work weeks, a long vacation, the amount of time it takes most people to forget they ever meant to start a diet. Fourteen days is also, I discovered, sitting in a parking garage with a curse in my lap, an almost unbearable length of time to hold a single secret completely alone, hour by hour, with no magic to smooth over the parts where the ordinary world refused to cooperate. I did the math on meetings I couldn't reschedule, a lease renewal I hadn't signed yet, a dentist appointment I was, apparently, still expected to attend as though nothing about my life had changed, and understood, somewhere around minute four of sitting in that garage, that the hardest part of the next two weeks was not going to be the magic at all. It was going to be everything else — all the small, ordinary obligations that did not care, even slightly, that I currently had a Pomeranian where my manager used to be.