Thanks for the great comments thus far. To clear up a few gray areas wondered about…
There was no explanation with regards to the girl's songs. Was she singing in a long forgotten language, or communicating with beings living in some nearby Lovecraftian dimension? Or was there nothing mystical about it at all, but seemed magic because it caught the ears of the love-smitten boy?
No reason to overthink this. She's just making shit up.
Roni too is an imaginative kid, and I figured that, given her background, she'd be the type to retreat to her own fantasy world when it suited her.
As for the singing, in this aspect of Roni I thought of her as a kind of proto Liz Fraser (of the Cocteau Twins) or Lisa Gerrard (whom I saw perform with Dead Can Dance a couple nights ago). That is, she sings in glossalalia … made-up words and syllables to convey feeling and emotion rather than any specific linguistic meaning. And then, of course, to seem more sophisticated than she really is, she mythologizes it to her admirer.
Did she so quickly accept his explanation of his powers because she knew magic herself, or was it just that she was so desperate that she'd grab onto this possible escape without question?
She's still young enough to be open to the possibility.
And why didn't he just draw a bridge across their two windows instead of breaking her into pieces except to freak me out? … Because his power was very specifically limited.
Right you are, Unblinking. In a way, this is an echo of something in an earlier novella called "As Above, So Below":
Let me tell you about hope, middle child in a family of bastard triplets, trapped between faith and charity.
Hope is the carrot of many colors, dangling from the stick before us, and we terrestrial mules plod diligently along after our goals only occasionally wondering why we’re no closer. A good day is when we look up high enough to still enjoy the sun. A bad day is when we look lower and see how much the carrot has rotted.
Hey. Hey. Let me tell you what magick isn’t. It’s not the conjuring of carrots out of nothing. It’s learning how to bend the stick.I don't think I really get the ending. I guess he drew her parts within him, a kind of pseudo-cannibalism? Weird.
Some things just work better when they're left open for interpretation rather than spelling every last thing out verbatim, and to me, this is one of them. Did he shrink her down? Did he take her to another dimension within himself? Did he recombine her with himself on the quantum level? That's up to you.
In the end, what it really comes down to is the loss of childhood's magic.
And, wait, why does cutting the heads off of people in the park kill them, but not the girl?
I saw this mostly as a distinction of time, care, and intention. With the people in the park, he did it quickly, crudely, and out of anger, or at least resentment. With Roni, he's doing it with great care and affection.
It's also a matter of duration. With Roni, he's putting her back together again right away. The park people aren't getting that courtesy!
His dreams of the magic show were the creepiest part for me,especially how his victims would dance at the end to show how everything was happy and awesome.
That segment was the first part of this that I wrote. It just sort of happened, and it was only later that the rest of the story grew around it.
Again, thanks for the feedback!