There’s a support group for everything these days. Even for a Cantomancer whose boyfriend just ascended into the Invisible Clergy.

The dumb fuck ascended.

I just drive on in a dirty but servicable Cadillac, heading toward Venice, steering clear from any dingy cars. Every crackpot in LA and elsewhere will be looking for me. I was the last one to see Sam Lundell back when he was a man, and not some image.

I remember him when I was Danielle Sinofsky, heading an jug band and making my own music in a makeshift studio. He wanted me to score his first movie. Bug eyed with blue framed glasses, tousled brown hair, beaver teeth. Sexy in his obsessiveness.

We were two independents, two collegues. Then he kissed me in the studio, I grabbed at his shirt and it was all over.

Maybe I just wanted to be desired. I am a skinny red-head with librarian glasses, pale and awkward in the land of blond, tan and poised. Oh, fuck the self-pity. He was hot.

I know somewhere in the afterglow of so many nights fucking on the apartment floor, I told him about it all. Babbled about the Invisible Clergy, about people who just fit roles, who even play them until they become that role. The cosmic equivalent of typecasting.

I shouldn’t say that. This is LA, and some people want enlightenment as well as a three-picture deal. All I know is that his last film had the new kid from school, the desert and lots of horses. Herds of black horses.

He is no longer Sam Lundell, he is the Dark Horse, the one who came in from behind and took it all. I know when the footage is edited, it’s going to do very well. Not just because he disappeared, but because he was a good filmmaker who disappeared.

LAPD cleared me of any involvement. I was in my apartment, making dinner for my sons and recording parts of the score. I can’t go home. I can’t tell my parents why I’m not picking up the boys just yet. I can’t tell them anything.

Oh, maybe I could talk to Mikey. Yeah, get him on his cell phone and tell him “Guess what, the love of my life ascended?” Mikey taught me belief, taught me rituals, taught me that I could make up my own rules on how my life will go. He liked acting, but I loved music. I met people who taught to use it to change my life.

Sam and I had a sweet deal. I made the sound to his vision; he got accolades, I got charges. Sam never asked me anything I didn’t want to do, and he was good at what he did, so I never felt cheap working for him. I turned down better movie offers to work on his projects for exactly those reasons.

I could talk to Mikey, but Mikey might not be around. When your magick depends on lying, and you’ve lied to the wrong sort of people, it is a prison stronger than any place a human can build. He can’t talk to me, because he might get scared in public, and fuck knows what happens to his powers if anyone sees him as he is.

I feel a nicotine fit coming, so I pull over a small grocery store, advertising cold drinks and halal meat. I get my American Spirits, trying to convince myself getting ‘natural’ cigarettes makes it all better.

I jump at the tap on my shoulder. “You’re the composer, for that director who disappeared.” I spin around and see she didn’t look like a tabloid reporter. Dowdy, sure, in a Knotts Farm t-shirt and jeans, but clean and unassuming. Her face was round and a soft bronze, with Aztec cheekbones, her dark hair pulled back.

If she is not grungy looking and mumbling, and she knows who I am, she is either too naive to know what is really going or so clued in she can play dumb. “Ma’am, whatever you have to say to me, I don’t want to hear it.”

She shakes her head and smiles soft, like she knows better. “I think you do.”

She holds up a card. I glance at it. Support Group for Widows and Widowers of the IC. “Is that what . . .you know what it means, right?”

She nods, with that same smile. “It’s not easy to talk about, honey. Not here. Not anywhere. You’re not alone, though.” I take the card from her hand and turn it over. 3rd Tuesday of the Month. Coffee served. Bring refreshments, with a LA area code number.

“You serious?”

“I’m as serious as cancer, darling. We’ll see you, then?”

I nod. I ought to, but it would feel good to talk to someone. I am not a serious introvert like Sam was, and I am not as good a liar as Mikey. I decide to say something, but she isn’t there. All there was me, a woman in a hijab wondering if I needed anything else, and a pack of cigarettes.

You know I’ll be there.