The Flare
A Perimenopause Adventure
The ancient grimoire was supposed to be in a climate-controlled vault beneath the Arcane Archives. Instead, Marissa found herself sweating through her sports bra in a subway tunnel that smelled like hot garbage and regret.
“Mom, are you okay?” Zoe’s voice crackled through the comm spell in her ear. “Your heat signature just spiked again.”
“I’m fine,” Marissa hissed, peeling her jacket off for the third time in ten minutes. The temperature around her shimmered, warping the air like asphalt in August. A rat squeaked and scurried away from the wave of heat rolling off her body.
Not a hot flash. A hot flare. That’s what she’d started calling them after the first one had melted her kitchen faucet.
Forty-eight years old, and her magic had decided to enter its rebellious teenage phase right along with her hormones. For three decades, she’d been one of the Midwest’s most reliable curse-breakers—steady, controlled, precise. Now her power surged and ebbed like a possessed thermostat, and she couldn’t remember if she’d taken her iron supplement or just thought really hard about taking it.
“The grimoire’s energy signature is moving,” her son Tyler said through the comm. He was topside with his sister, monitoring from the van.
“Thirty yards ahead, then down.”
Of course it was down. Everything was always down when you were chasing a stolen spellbook through the guts of Chicago at two in the morning.
Marissa pressed forward, her boots splashing through something she refused to identify. The Council had “strongly suggested” she let the younger curse-breakers handle this retrieval. Too dangerous, they’d said. Perhaps she’d like to take on more advisory roles?
Advisory. Like she was a piece of furniture they were trying to gently retire to the attic.
The grimoire wasn’t just any book—it was her grimoire, the one she’d compiled over twenty-five years of fieldwork. Her notes. Her breakthroughs. Her life’s work. Some trust-fund warlock with more ambition than sense had stolen it to impress his coven, and she’d be damned if she’d let the Council’s twenty-something golden boys retrieve it while she stayed home and took up pottery.
Another hot flare rolled through her. This one brought friends—a wave of irritability so intense she nearly blasted a support beam into powder just for being in her way.
“Mom, your power levels are all over the place,” Zoe said, worry threading through her voice. “Maybe you should—”
“I should what?” Marissa snapped. Then, softer: “Sorry, honey. I’m fine. Just... focused.”
She wasn’t fine. Her magic felt like a fire hose someone kept cranking on and off. One moment she could barely light a candle, the next she was a walking nuclear reactor. And the brain fog—God, the brain fog. She’d left the house with one sock inside-out and had only noticed when Tyler pointed it out in the van.
The tunnel opened into a maintenance chamber. There—a figure in a black hoodie, crouched over her grimoire, which pulsed with stolen light.
“Step away from the book,” Marissa said.
The warlock spun. Twenty-five, maybe. Smooth face, cocky smirk. “The washed-up curse-breaker herself. They said you’d probably send someone, but I didn’t think you’d be desperate enough to come yourself.”
Washed-up.
Something in Marissa’s chest ignited. Not a hot flash this time—something deeper, hotter, older. The air around her began to shimmer.
“Kid,” she said quietly, “you have no idea what you’re dealing with.”
He laughed and threw a binding hex at her—textbook form, decent power.
Marissa’s magic surged to meet it, but not the way it used to. Before, her power had been a scalpel. Now it was a tidal wave. The binding hex didn’t just dissolve—it evaporated in a blast of heat that sent the warlock stumbling backward.
“What the—”
Another hot flare hit. Marissa gasped as her temperature spiked, and with it, her magic exploded outward in a ring of shimmering heat-haze. The warlock’s shield spell melted like cotton candy. His hoodie started smoking.
“Okay, okay!” He threw his hands up. “Take it! Just—what are you?”
Marissa stood there, breathing hard, sweat running down her temples, magic crackling around her like a solar flare. For weeks, she’d been fighting this—the unpredictability, the loss of control, the sense that her body and her power were betraying her.
But standing here, watching this cocky kid back away from her in genuine fear, she suddenly understood.
She wasn’t losing her power. She was molting.
All those years of careful control, of being steady and reliable and manageable—that was the old magic. This? This wild, unpredictable, overwhelming force? This was what happened when you stopped apologizing for taking up space.
“I’m someone who’s done being underestimated,” Marissa said. She walked forward and picked up her grimoire. The book hummed against her palm, recognizing its owner. “Now get out of here before I have another hot flash and accidentally turn you into a pile of ash.”
He ran.
“Mom?” Tyler’s voice in her ear. “That was awesome.”
“Your heat signature was off the charts,” Zoe added. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
Marissa smiled, tucking the grimoire under her arm. Her shirt was drenched, her hair was a disaster, and she was pretty sure she’d have to replace this bra. But she felt more powerful than she had in months.
“I’m better than okay,” she said. “I’m just getting started.”
She walked back through the tunnel, and this time, she didn’t bother taking off her jacket. Let the heat come. Let her magic surge and flare and burn. She’d spent three decades being controlled and precise.
Maybe it was time to be a wildfire instead.
When she emerged topside, both kids were waiting by the van, looking at her with something between concern and awe.
“So,” Tyler said carefully, “does this mean you’re not retiring?”
Marissa laughed—a real laugh, the kind that came from her belly. “Retire? Honey, I’m just hitting my prime.” She tossed him the keys. “You drive. I need to sit in front of the AC and eat all the emergency chocolate in the glove box.”
“There’s emergency chocolate?” Zoe perked up.
“There’s always emergency chocolate. That’s the first thing you learn about perimenopause.” Marissa climbed into the passenger seat. “That and never trust a twenty-something warlock who thinks ‘washed-up’ is an insult instead of a warning.”
As they pulled away, another hot flare rolled through her. This time, Marissa didn’t fight it. She rolled down the window and let the power shimmer out into the night air like heat lightning.
Transforming hurt. But God, it was going to be glorious.
