"You ate too much chili last night. The cook used the hottest peppers imaginable, and things are on fire down there."

That's always what I lead with. It scares off most every visitor I have when their colon suddenly lights up. Once in a while, someone's able to resist, throw a monkey wrench of their own back at me. It often ends poorly for them. It ended poorly for me too, when I came before the very stoop I stand on now, and said those same words.

All of my friends liked to play with magic when we were young. We were a rambunctious group, constantly challenging random people to magic duels, whether they could cast or not. We tore up the country side on more than a few occasions, always chased off the land by one magician or another. One day, I remember one of my friends scored an apprenticeship with a famous magician by playing a well-timed prank involving a carnival game. The magician found the darts he was throwing would boomerang back around and land in the meat of one of his butt cheeks. Most people would be off-put by that, but magicians are a bunch of tricksters by nature. My friend went off in their caravan to learn from the master and we never saw him again.

After that, any time we found a magician we'd assail them funny magic, assault them with undue ferocity, or try our most creative tricks to get someone to take notice and teach us what they knew. There was one magician none of the others would mess with though. Everybody back then knew about the lady on the hill with the power to make your magic fizzle out with nothing but a word. We tried her exactly once. Well, all my friends tried once. I found myself drawn back, time after time, and I saw her magic often enough that I thought I might try the same trick. When I spoke those words aloud, cursing her with last night's evil chili, and the tears came down her face from the pain, or the laughter, and she could hardly breathe a word I knew I had her beat. That was, until she caught her breath, and a combination of orange juice and toothpaste started pouring from my nose.

Afterwards, she made me her apprentice, and taught me the extent of a power like the one we shared. It was a small secret that everybody else refused to believe. That anything you wanted could come true as long as you had the guile to just make it up. Maybe it was good thing nobody really believed it. When the other powerful magicians dotted around the country found 'laws' and 'patterns' and 'restrictions' in the magic they had at hand, it kept them safe. When people believed things like 'my magic can't penetrate the skin' or 'I only have control over fire' it was usually better off for them. Simpler. Not like how things are for me, or how things were for my master. They don't understand our magic, and so they're afraid of it. Like my friends, other magicians stayed away. Hateful from afar.

But she was good to me, and I her, so when the time came, I inherited her little house on the hill. I haven't been around other people for years, much less other magicians. This kind of power is disastrous in the wrong hands, or even in the right hands, so we made a pact to stay on the farmland the house sat upon, far from anyone we might do harm. She made the same pact with her master, and her master before her. Magic words spoken aloud so they could never be broken. Nobody ever said anything about turning away people who show up at the doorstep though.

Now I'm the one people tell stories about, the old guy on the hill that people come to test their magic against. Some copy a powerful magician's best spells, or try something uniquely their own. Others, braver, but sadly lacking in imagination, try my tack. It doesn't matter, because most of it doesn't even phase me. I just tell them their magic doesn't work here, and suddenly its true. Then the ol 'too much chili' sends them packing, or they remain, and the next words out of my mouth send them to the hospital. Assuming they draw first of course.

I've just cursed my latest visitor with the chili. Standing just beyond the stairs of my porch is a boy who looks an awful lot like I did once. I'm waiting patiently to see what he's going to do.

"Maaaan," he says, drawing the word out. "That's not even fair."

He's bent over, holding his stomach and grimacing through the pain. I'm surprised he can still talk.

"Yeah well, life's not fair." I may have gotten a little crabby in my old age, I admit. I never thought that cliché would cross my lips, but it's true, and it's one of those things I don't have to say out loud for it to be so.

"Oh yeah?" the kid says, face all screwed up against the spicy chili. "Well you're ma was so fat that you were born with encephalitis."

"Jesus Christ, kid!" I say through thick lips.

I feel of my head and it's completely misshapen, and my thoughts are like molasses all the sudden. This is bad. Brain damage is a bitch to deal with, and I doubt this kid knows exactly how much of a bitch it is. In fact I know he doesn't because he's laughing his ass off at the new shape of my skull. I'm ticked off now, and also a little amused. I won't let him know that though.

"Too far! You'll get somebody killed like that. And my mother was not fat, rest her soul."

The kid was laughing too hard to retort, thank goodness. My mom actually had been fat for a moment there. I remembered her being so. She was restored to her regular form in my mind, but I still couldn't think straight.

"It's a damn good thing I have a separate body stored in a pocket dimension that I can swap into like this," I say, and snap my fingers. I feel of my head again and let out a breath. Good as new. I knew it would work of course. I have to, otherwise it won't. The held breath just happens on its own now.

"Hey!" The kid says. "Cheater!"

"How is that cheating?" I retort.

He thinks about it for a second and then sticks his tongue out at me. I shake my head and hit him with my best 'grumpy old man' look.

"It's a good thing I actually didn't eat any of the chili last night."

The relief on his face is palpable. I can tell he hardly believes that it worked, and for a second he's just standing there beaming at his own power, glad to have his intestines back to normal again. I let him beam. For a moment anyway.

"We done?" I ask after a minute. I'd be happy to let him leave without going any further. Mostly to spare myself whatever pestilence he'll come up with, but also because if he keeps going then I might just have to let him stay. Can't have people going around giving other people fat mothers and encephalitis.

"Not yet!"

He's obviously looking for something good to hit me with, so I prepare for the worst and whisper a few protective wards. There's no guarantee they'll work, but I doubt he'll have the forethought to counter them.

He gets a look in his eye, a look I know well enough. He thinks he's won. That he has an undefeatable sentence. I wonder if it'll be something else about my mother, or if I'll suddenly have some kind of disease. Maybe even something advanced, a trap that's impossible to escape, or an opponent that's impossible to defeat. Any of these things can be circumvented. In fact, there's only about one thing he could say, and for a second I'm confident he won't come up with it.

"You lose!" he shouts, and falls on his ass laughing again. I can't help but smile. Maybe I could go on arguing, but I don't believe it'll work.

"Not bad, kid," I finally say. "Not bad."