Magician

Day Ten of A Dozen Days of Magical Realism

We are almost through our dozen days, but don’t worry! Last call isn’t for another week and a half yet. Entries for all prompts will stay open until Saturday night, July 12th. Then the fun part— party favors will be handed out at the afterparty at The Wood Between the Worlds. Favorite stories will get a featured post on their substack!

Magicians. Are they simply tricksters? Or are they more liminal kinds of personas, in touch with something chthonic? Maybe they are both—perhaps the practice of deception with the intent of delight is such a fine subtlety, we can’t help but be fascinated by their ability to walk with a foot in each world…

Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

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The Power of Innocence

A magician lies in a pool of blood on a brightly lit stage in a jewel-painted theater. There are burn marks in a twelve foot radius around him. There are no footprints and no weapons, but there are alchemical symbols in the ash and chemical vapors in the stifling air. An empty seat creaks as if someone has moved, and the cherubs carved in relief on the ceiling seem to wave their gilded wings in distress.

The detective is stumped by the locked theater, crumples his bowler hat in his hands, and calls in a strange assortment of consultants.

The scientific criminologist arrives first, sniffs the sulfur, and describes a disaster of pyrotechnics.

The bespectacled physicist arrives next, feels the clammy chill in the air, and speaks riddles of quantum mechanics and dark matter.

The priest intones a rumbling thunderstorm of words and covers the murder smell with the resin of burnt roses.

The painter tears his hair and rails at the desolation of the human spirit. He traces his finger in the red stain on the floor when he thinks no one is watching.

The detective rolls his eyes and lights a cigarette. What use are these epistemologies—logic, science, religion, art—if these tools resist the work? He puffs and ponders. He will have to do the heavy lifting himself, as always. All those theodicies have left his queries unanswered. He needs something practical this time.

Then the detective’s son, who has come to find his daddy, walks onto the scene, lifts the line of police tape above his head and cries, “Abracadabra!”

There is a pulse of inverted hue and the sound of a needle ripping on spun vinyl. The body drops through the floor and the magician enters, stage left, clothed in scarlet silk dripping with red rhinestones that catch the light like drops of blood.

The experts on the global and the human stand silent, faces vacant. The child erupts in applause.

“Do it again!” he cheers.

The detective snuffs out his cigarette and slowly smiles.

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