#mmwe

They're stretched long every minute, every hour, as if piano keys are knitted to the ends of her fingers. Her hair has long since been cut, grown, twisted and straightened in the varied years that have decorated her eyes like glow-in-the-dark stars in a hospital room, once upon a time. She's changed from dresses, to shorts, to trousers and skirts and once, a grass skirt. But the only thing that's stayed the same were her hands.

Those same hands brought her to her own sparkle, to little Martya, with the drawl of her country's accent slathered on her tongue when she mispronounces 'Miss Mahoney.' Martya is fitfully pressing her fingers to the keys when Mahoney, with the grace of the planes that stutter above her head in her knees, drops beside her and fits her hands on the teeth of the piano, sitting Martya's above hers.

"The trick is," she murmurs, and as Martya places her hands hesitatingly above hers, sitting them gently, Mahoney moves her fingers down the white eyes that stare up at her, music fluttering from the open mouth of the piano, "is to learn the keys before your fingers do."

But Mahoney trails off when she peers towards the Polish girl, with her wide brown eyes that seemed to put her own large heart to shame with their size and her mouth open in a trilling, shocked laugh as she watches her fingers beat out a tune she'd thought impossible. She lights up with the sound of the music in her veins, with the sudden movement of her hands and Mahoney pauses around the edges.

A sparkle. Martya looks up to her, brown eyes wide with the sparkle that Mahoney had been looking for for years.

From then on, whenever Martya entered the store, a sparkle filled the room that instantly dragged Mahoney towards her like magnets finding each other through a piece of paper. Once, as wrinkles marred Mahoney's once youthful features and her hands, Martya had grabbed one of her hands and pointed, balancing on her toes in her fluorescent shoes that Mahoney commented on every other Wednesday.

Mahoney's gaze tipped upwards, like water in a glass jar and her breath caught on something splintered in the hollows of her chest. Martya staggered forwards, murmuring in Polish until Mahoney caught on, when her fingers brushed the glass box that held an item that Mahoney had kept dear to her heart for years, for decades. The child gurgles around her words, trying to fold her limited English carefully.

"Miss Mahenno, the box?"

Mahoney, with patience granted from a man long gone, folds her fingers beneath the lid of the box and pulls it open, dipping inside and her fingers fold, over square corners and wood that has gone soft from age. No dust sits on it - of course not, it's hardly ever resting - and she lowers herself to be eye-level with the child, twisting the block like a ribbon between her fingers.

"This block is very special to me, Martya," and she can hear the creak in her voice that age is granting her, and the familiar grooves in the block still her when she counts back the decades she's lived, long past the normal rate of humans. She can feel the magic pulse from in it, and it pulls and tweaks itself, for the first time, away from Mahoney towards Martya, who stares with hungry, wonder-filled eyes. Mahoney presses it towards the girl, who furrows her brow. "The reason it is very special to me is it can do things I can't - it can fly, it can climb walls and it's probably once of the most magical things in here."

"But it is just a block."

"We don't use the word 'just' here, remember? Nothing is 'just' anything."

Martya blinks around her confusion and she holds the block like it holds the same, fragile structure as her mother's dinner plates, as if she dropped it, it would smash to pieces and Mahoney would transform into something monstrous. But Mahoney knows monsters live in closets, and Mahoney only goes into the closet for clothes, and sometimes, not even that.

It takes a second, but Martya's hands twitch with life and the block is suddenly showing itself in slow, hesitating movement - the embodiment of Mahoney's personality. Then, when Martya encourages it with stardust in her throat, the block suddenly starts arching up her arm, flinging it's around her shoulders, down her other arm and it zips around the store, peeling off the encouragement in Martya's laughter.

She hadn't even told her to take it for a spin.

The years grow, Mahoney collects years like fireflies in a jar and Martya grows like a vine, twisting until she's irrevocably tied up in everything that happens in, around and concerning the store. Eric has taken a liking to her and as Mahoney's fixing his newest hat, Martya is bounding up to her, dressed in an apron and her eyes are wide with fear. Suddenly, Mahoney knows.

Mahoney's hands ghost like china doll fingers over the grey of the walls, her mouth fitting a line instead of a smile and the wall returns to the bright, crimson red it's always been. She sighs around her disappointment and she hooks her hands under a teddy bear's arms, smoothing back some errant fluff on his head, which he preens into.

"You know, I understand," she says, turning her gaze to the planes that still in the air and the books that crinkle around the edges, "you did this last time you lost an owner, and I know, but you should have learnt from the last time. You know Martya, she's going to take care of you now and you're in the best hands possible, my darling. I've taken care of you as long as I can, but even the greatest minds need to clock out. I'm not saying I'm the greatest, because I knew the greatest."

She hadn't been expecting the storm that had exploded out of Martya when she'd learned the store would be hers, because sweet-tempered Martya had never rose her voice until that moment. Mahoney had placed the book in her hands and had pressed her toes to the dark-eyed girl's bright pink trainers, that were most certainly not in style, and smiled. "Books hold a thousand minds and it's your turn to try and find yours."

Martya didn't come into work until she positively had to, and then, Mahoney was paused on the counter, waiting for her, swinging her feet with toy soldiers clinging on the strings. Martya huffed around her words and tossed her bag unceremoniously behind the counter. Dark brown eyes followed her as she moved to walk further into the store to start her work for the day. "Oh, my dear flower, you mustn't be so angry."

"Why? Why not!?" Venom spat liked acid from a soft voice and Mahoney curled her fingers deeper into the overhang of the centuries old counter.

"Because it is my time."

"Are you sick? Have you been sick this entire time and just not told me?"

Mahoney slips and her knees click and she wanders towards the girl, pressing a kiss to her hairline when she shakes and places her hands on her cheeks. She's so young, just finished college with the world at her back and she's scared because the one, unmovable thing in her life is slipping away. Mahoney knows the pain, she felt it too. "No, my flower, I am perfectly healthy."

"Then why," she sobs, her voice thick and the Emporium visibly cringes around the crack in her words. "Why do you have to go? You need to run the Emporium, I can't do it."

Mahoney smiles around her pain - she remembers a man with salt and pepper hair, eyebrows like bramble bushes and hands that smoothed her hair just like she does to Martya when she shudders around her sadness. She'd said the exact same words, decades ago. "Martya, my darling, there's not many words I can say to ease the tidal wave in your heart. But I can comment on your lovely shoes, and that sparkle I've seen everyday since you were nine years old."

She brushes the tears away from her eyes, and she remembers the words of the salt and pepper man, with a heart as wide as the Emporium itself. "I was your age when I inherited the Emporium, maybe a bit older, and someone once told me, that in Shakespeare's play, when King Lear dies in act V, Shakespeare simply writes, 'he dies'. There isn't a hoo-ha, there's no-one grasping his body in the middle of the room screaming, like you've seen in those horror movies you love and I simply abhor," and Mahoney smudges her nose against Martya's in an Eskimo kiss, it's simple and gentle when she laughs, just like Mahoney wanted, "Shakespeare was a genius, Martya, and he finished one man's literature life with 'he dies'. That's all I want, that's all I ever wanted - because it's natural to be sad, my love, not because they've died, but because they lived."

"But, it is not fair," she murmurs, shaking her head out of Mahoney's hands and fixing her hands through her caramel-colored hair - something comforting, she supposes. "I love you, you can not...finish the story here."

"My acts are done, my love. The story has reached it's end and therefore, I must end as well. But you must continue, for the Emporium, for me, because your story is not over yet, and that sparkle cannot die out," and from behind the counter, Mahoney pulls the book - quiet, gentle and sweet, just like Martya - from beneath it and presses it into shaking hands that do not still. "Keep reading and believe in this book."

To Martya, when she leaves the story for the day, she wonders if that means, believe in yourself and the next day, the book replaces the block.

When Martya pushes through the door, Mahoney's shoulders deflate and the store turns quiet, almost in expectation of what's to come. And Mahoney pauses next to the glass box and pulls the block from it, and it lifts slowly into the air and speeds round the room, creating a ripple of space and time that decorates stars like children's eyes on the walls. Mahoney drops to her knees, and then folds into crossed legs as she stares towards the door, watching as it slides from view and it's decorated with space instead when the block lands in her lap.

Then, there's a pair of hands, hands that have not changed over the last one hundred, two hundred years she's been alive. She didn't live as long as Mr Magorium, but when he smiles down at her, she places her hands in his; and she can see, her hands have not changed since the last time she held his, years, decades, centuries ago.