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eBook Category: Fantasy Nebula Award(R) Winner
eBook Description: "Basement Magic" is about power and how it is used and abused. It is a fairy tale, half-Grimm, half-Disney, set against the beginning of the Space Age.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 2003
Fictionwise Release Date: May 2005

19 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [279 KB], eReader (PDB) [46 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [34 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [31 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [87 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [101 KB], hiebook (KML) [135 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [59 KB], iSilo (PDB) [28 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [35 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [63 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [49 KB]
Words: 11298
Reading time: 32-45 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

"'Basement Magic' opens with Mary-Louise--a small six-year-old girl who lives in a huge, almost-empty house with her father, her capricious stepmother, and a series of housekeepers--reading her favourite book of fairy tales and desperately trying to avoid being noticed. In a sequence of note-perfect scenes Klages builds up the character of Mary-Louise and the housekeeper, all the while increasing the tension as it seems likely that some truly terrible fate is going to befall her. That Klages handles the whole thing without ever stepping into mawkishness or easy sentiment is a triumph. 'Basement Magic' strikes me in a sense as an archetypal Fantasy & Science Fiction story, and is definitely amongst the finest short fantasies I've read this year."--Jonathan Strahan

Mary Louise Whittaker believes in magic. She knows that somewhere, somewhere else, there must be dragons and princes, wands and wishes. Especially wishes. And happily ever after. Ever after is not now.

Her mother died in a car accident when Mary Louise was still a toddler. She misses her mother fiercely but abstractly. Her memories are less a coherent portrait than a mosaic of disconnected details: soft skin that smelled of lavender; a bright voice singing "Sweet and Low" in the night darkness; bubbles at bathtime; dark curls; zweiback.

Her childhood has been kneaded, but not shaped, by the series of well-meaning middle-aged women her father has hired to tend her. He is busy climbing the corporate ladder, and is absent even when he is at home. She does not miss him. He remarried when she was five, and they moved into a two-story Tudor in one of the better suburbs of Detroit. Kitty, the new Mrs. Ted Whittaker, is a former Miss Bloomfield Hills, a vain divorcée with a towering mass of blond curls in a shade not her own. In the wild, her kind is inclined to eat their young.

Kitty might have tolerated her new stepdaughter had she been sweet and cuddly, a slick-magazine cherub. But at six, Mary Louise is an odd, solitary child. She has unruly red hair the color of Fiestaware, the dishes that might have been radioactive, and small round pink glasses that make her blue eyes seem large and slightly distant. She did not walk until she was almost two, and propels herself with a quick shuffle-duckling gait that is both urgent and awkward.

One spring morning, Mary Louise is camped in one of her favorite spots, the window seat in the guest bedroom. It is a stage set of a room, one that no one else ever visits. She leans against the wall, a thick book with lush illustrations propped up on her bare knees. Bright sunlight, filtered through the leaves of the oak outside, is broken into geometric patterns by the mullioned windows, dappling the floral cushion in front of her.

The book is almost bigger than her lap, and she holds it open with one elbow, the other anchoring her Bankie, a square of pale blue flannel with pale blue satin edging that once swaddled her infant self, carried home from the hospital. It is raveled and graying, both tattered and beloved. The thumb of her blanket arm rests in her mouth in a comforting manner.