The hat had been a gift.

Andrew was the only child in his family. His father was an only child, his mother had one sister who travelled too much to start a family, and neither of his parents had any extended family with children “worth speaking to”. There was the odd cousin here or there with kids Andrew’s age, but neither Andrew’s mother, nor his father believed they were the kind of children they wanted Andrew associating with. Holidays were a difficult time for the family. It was easy to buy a baby a rattle for his birthday or a set of blocks for Christmas when he was a toddler, but Andrew was, well, almost a real person now, as his mother liked to say. What did you get an almost real person as a gift? Not clothes, not yet. Clothes were for the teenage years. And you couldn’t just write a check or get a gift card. Holidays were a time for one to display, through the purchase of a gift, that she really knew someone.

The trouble was no one did know Andrew.

A week before his ninth birthday, Mrs. Fields was flooded with calls from the lucky family members invited to Andrew’s party. What could they buy their young relative that didn’t overestimate or condescend to him?
Mrs. Fields wasn’t much help to any of them.

“I don’t know. Andrew’s been going through a magic phase lately. God knows how long it will last, but anything to do with magic will make him happy. Do something with that,” she said to each one in turn.

The advice Mrs. Fields gave to her family was in fact the advice she was taking herself. Though she loved her son and fussed and fretted over him like any other mother, he was an enigma to her. He had always been a darling child with golden curls and rosy cheeks. He had large round eyes, much like any other child’s. Though unlike most children, Andrew’s eyes would shine far brighter than was normal. He always had the angelic, yet sickly look of a child with a rising fever, hence his mother’s constant fretting. Mrs. Fields watched over her son as if she were watching a foreign movie with no subtitles. She understood the big moments, but couldn’t pick up on the details that made the over arching plot make sense. Mrs. Fields could never tell what her son wanted, what he needed, how he was feeling. At times, Mrs. Fields looked straight into her son’s eyes and felt the mystery had been revealed. At others, she felt more in the dark than ever.

Just two days before the party, as Mrs. Fields had walked down Main Street agonizing over her son’s present, her mind full of magic words, frogspawn, and witch trials, she saw it. Right across the street in the window of an old secondhand shop sat a pointed wizard’s hat. shiny silver brim, purple velvet body, and large metallic stars. The hat was unmistakably adult-sized, but it looked to Mrs. Fields as though it might just stay put on the slightly stuck out ears of her son’s head. Without a second thought, Mrs. Fields crossed the street, flung open the door, and purchased the hat. Andrew would be happy.

Whatever Mrs. Fields’ expectations were, she was sorely disappointed. Andrew received the hat as he received all of his other presents. He had trouble untying the ribbon, resulting in his mother cutting it off for him. He ripped open the wrapping paper, carefully opened the lid of the box, and smiled shyly as he unearthed the hat with one stubby hand. He looked down at the hat and back up again at the tight group of family standing around him. Aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers all loomed over him with expectant looks fixed upon their faces. He put the hat on, let it sit there for a few seconds, and took it off again. A new present was thrust into his waiting hands.

The hat lay forgotten on the suede ottoman in the living room for days after Andrew’s birthday. Mrs. Fields was perplexed. Was he not into magic anymore? True, his phases never lasted longer than a few weeks, but magic had just begun! The hat drew her gaze whenever she sat in the living room, listening to Andrew try, and fail, to shuffle his brand new deck of cards, a present from Grandpa. She wished he would pick it up again and embark back into the world of magic where she thought she had had him figured out. It was as if the hat was mocking her. Mocking her attempts to understand her son, mocking her fleeting belief that she had figured him out, and mocking her despair when she found out she had not. As it turned out, however, she didn’t have too long to despair.

Andrew was sick of his three-by-three Rubiks cube, frustrated by his fancy new deck of cards, and bored by his scented markers by the time he picked up the hat again, but pick it up he did. And when he trod into the kitchen with his hat perched upon his head, slow and steady as a funeral procession, his eyes shone like a new mother, holding her child for the very first time

From that moment forth, Andrew and his hat went everywhere together. They simply couldn’t be parted. He wore it to meals and to Grandma’s house. He wore it to the store when he accompanied his mother on errands and he wore it on the couch as he sat in front of the family television during the one show a day he was allowed to watch.

At first, Mrs. Fields was thrilled. She had predicted he would return to his hat, and return to it he did. But as time went on, the hat began to unsettle her. Andrew and his hat became an inseparable unit and the more time went on, the more intertwined they seemed to be. Andrew wore his hat to school, despite the teasing Mrs. Fields was sure he was subject to by his unforgiving peers. He wore it around the house, regardless of his mother’s constant suggestions to take it off “just for a bit”. He even wore it to bed, the tip of the hat crushed up against the headboard.

“Remember his cooking phase?” Mr. Fields asked his wife when she mentioned her concerns to him. “That one lasted almost three months!”

“That’s true, yes,” Mrs. Fields responded doubtfully.

“And the excavators?” Andrew’s impersonation of a bulldozer had been their wake up call for almost a year.
“Yes, I suppose you’re right,” Mrs. Fields said, though her husband hadn’t assuaged any of her fears. It wasn’t the duration of the phase that worried her. It was its magnitude and its nature. Andrew was no longer obsessed with magic, but with the hat itself. He had never gone so far as to insist on wearing his chef’s hat everywhere he went when he was into magic, or only speaking in the grrs and grunts of excavators while infatuated with them.

Mrs. Fields, always one to watch over her son like a hawk, began to watch the hat as well. To prevent the hat from toppling over, Andrew stood up straight, straight as a bowling pin. His posture was impeccable. He moved slowly, taking deliberate, measured steps. The hat never moved an inch.

         One day, as Andrew walked down the front porch steps toward the yard, he tripped on a step near the bottom and went sprawling across the damp ground. He had a scrape on his knee and a matching one on his elbow. His shorts were ripped, his shoe had come untied, and his normally neat hair was unkempt. The hat, however, hadn’t moved an inch. It stood straight and centered as ever upon Andrew’s head. Mrs. Fields gave him a look, half perplexed, half wary.

Mrs. Fields tried to convince herself it was a fluke.

The next incident with the hat happened in the car. As Andrew sat in the backseat, all buckled in, while his mother drove to the store, a car jumped out in front of them, forcing his mother to jam on the breaks. The car stopped in an instant. Andrew and his mother flew forward. Andrew’s neck was sore for days after, the whiplash was so severe. But, as his mother noticed, the hat didn’t move an inch.

  After what Mrs Fields thought of “the Signs”, Andrew turned into himself. He spoke quietly. The glow in his eyes was a constant, static stream. His mother couldn’t even judge his emotions from their dimming and brightening. He never changed. The hat never changed. They never changed.

As she walked in the door one day after picking Andrew up from school, she decided it was time, once and for all, to address the hat. She had suffered yet another silent car ride with an unmoving child and his a hat.
“Marble,” she had thought. “My son is marble.”

She dropped her keys on the table and turned to her son. His back was already facing her as he slowly marched toward his room.

“Andrew?” she called. She could hear the waver in her voice.

He stopped. Did not respond, did not turn around.

“Andrew, could you come here for a moment? Could we have a chat?”

The effect of her words on her son were not immediate. Slowly, he began to wheel himself around, methodically, as if by a motor. She watched the hat spin with him. It caught the light from the glossy bulbs and sent it crashing back through the room. When Andrew faced her, his eyes were dull, not looking at her, but past her. He moved forward at the same pace. Mrs. Fields’ eyes followed the hat’s progress all the way toward the kitchen stool where Andrew took a seat.

She took a deep breath.

“Darling,” Mrs. Fields began. And stopped. What to say next? “Darling, don’t you think you’re outgrowing that lovely hat?”

Silence.

“You’ve been wearing it an awfully long time.”

Nothing.

“Well, your birthday will be rolling around in only a couple months! Don’t you think it’s time to take the hat off? Give it a wash? Give it a break? We could go get you a new hat! One of those nice baseball ones the other kids wear at school? Hmm?” She had to keep talking. Either that or lose what little momentum she had gained.
“I know you love your magic hat, dear, but a new hat could be a great thing.” She fell silent again. She knew she sounded silly. Thank god no one was here to witness her rambling, to see her afraid of her nine year old son, afraid of a hat.

She pressed her eyes closed and held her breath. When she opened them again, Andrew’s eyes were slowly focusing from a point several yards behind her, or maybe another world entirely, directly into her own. When they finished, her eyes were locked on his. For the first time in many weeks, Mrs. Fields saw a change in those eyes. They weren’t brighter or dimmer. It was a different change than she was used to. They were deeper. So deep, she could see through them. This wasn’t her son she was looking into, but it was certainly her son looking back at her. And contained in his gaze--no--contained in the gaze reaching through him, was pure hatred.

She couldn’t look away. She was frozen. Power. Raw power, from a nine year old boy, no less, was all she could understand. That moment could have been fleeting or it could have lasted the entirety of the nine years her son had walked this Earth. Mrs. Fields didn’t know, nor did she care.

All she knew was the release she felt when Andrew was gone. She hadn’t seen him go, but there was no other explanation. Her eyes held only the beige of the kitchen wall.

She wasn’t worried about Andrew. Andrew was fine, Andrew was strong. What she was, was worried about herself. What had just happened? What would happen? She shook her head. There was nothing she could do.

Later that evening, Mrs. Field’s sat alone in the living room, where the hat had made its first appearance. She hadn’t confided in her husband any of the afternoon’s events. He wouldn’t understand. No one could understand without having been there, seen it, felt it. The funny thing was, the rest of the day had proceeded normally. Or, at least, what had become normal since the hat had come into Andrew’s life. He descended the stairs and ate dinner with his parents as if nothing had happened. Mrs. Fields couldn’t pretend the same. Before Mr. Fields had gone to bed, it wasn’t Andrew he asked about, it was her.

“Did something happen today, dear? You’ve been acting very strange.”

“No, nothing,” she had replied. “Just tired, that’s all.”

Mr. Fields gave her a wan smile and headed upstairs.

Now, she was alone, all alone, and it was her moment. All she had to do was wait, wait until she heard the slow and deep rhythm of mingling breaths, signalling that her husband and son were asleep. She wondered if the hat would be too.

As soon as she heard her signal, she took a deep breath to calm her nerves, and proceeded.

She stole upstairs, tiptoeing on the creakiest step, making sure she wouldn’t wake her sleeping husband, or worse, her son. On the right side of the hall, the door to Andrew’s room was ajar. She pushed it open and looked at the sleeping figure. His covers were pulled up to his nose. All she could see was the tip of a nose and the sharper point of a hat. She took several steps forward, across the star-littered carpet. She loomed over him.

Now was the moment.

She lowered her hands to the brim of the hat and tugged.

It should have been easy. The hat was too big for him. It should have slid right off. But it stuck as, deep down, she knew it would. Her son and the hat were simply too close.

She tried again, carefully still. Nothing. The hat wouldn’t budge. Reluctant as she was to harm Andrew in any way, she tugged harder. This was necessary. She had to free him, despite what pain she caused. She yanked and she pulled, frantic to free her son of the burden of the awful, frightening, powerful hat.

With an earsplitting tear, the hat separated itself from Andrew’s head. His mother looked down at it in horror. Clinging to its silvery brim were strands of Andrew’s shiny curls. Gold mingled with silver. She stared at the hat, tore her gaze away to look at her son, where the hair lay thin around a halo-shaped circumference of his head, and looked back at her hands again, repulsed by what she saw. An inexplicable laugh bubbled to her lips. She had to lift a hand to her mouth to stop it from escaping, lest she wake her ever sleeping son. Had she done it? Was he really free? Had she won?

She looked back at Andrew. He didn’t stir. He hadn’t moved an inch. Was it possible? It seemed as though he was dreaming.

“Let him sleep on,” Mrs. Fields thought. “In his dreams there may be hats. When he wakes up there will be none.”

She gave her son a final look and departed the room, the hat secured tightly in both hands. As soon as she crossed the border into the hallway, a frenzy over came her. She raced downstairs, no longer cognizant of the fact that the rest of her family was sleeping, a state she’d prefer they stay in.

Once downstairs, Mrs. Fields wedged the hat under her arm and wreaked havoc on the kitchen. She yanked open drawers and cabinets, clattering pots and pans, looking for the one thing she needed. Where was it? Did she not have a pair of scissors in the house?

Frustrated she abandoned her search. She didn’t have time. It had to be done now. Her hands would have to suffice.

She retrieved the hat from its nook under her arm and placed each side of the brim in both of her hands and pulled. As easily as a piece of aluminum foil, the hat ripped in two. Unsatisfied, Mrs. Fields pulled again. Quarters. And again. Eighths. And again. Sixteenths.

Why was it so easy? Why didn’t the hat put up a fight? Mrs. Fields didn’t feel as if she’d destroyed it at all, though it lay in ragged strips all over the floor.

She took a step back to admire her handiwork.

“I should clean the pieces up before morning,” she thought. But another feeling overtook her, tore right through her body like a flame. “Let them see.”

Let them see what she had done. The hat had caused destruction, but she could cause destruction too.
Let Andrew see the strips of hat. Maybe, then he’d know how much his mother loved him. She had saved him.
Mrs. Fields turned around and mounted the stairs once more.  She walked down the hallway a short distance to her bedroom, lied down, and went to sleep.

She couldn’t remember a time when she’d ever slept more soundly.