Brigits_Flame April Entry 03 - Flourish
Hannibal McCrae, the finest magician this side of the Mississippi (the bad side) gives me a long, slow, disapproving look.
“Sugarcube,” he says, “How do you ever expect to convince anybody that the apricot is gone?” I’m trying to palm small fruits while we sit on his front porch. His front porch in East St. Louis, on the Illinois side of the river. I am not doing too well.
“Well, Mr. McCrae, I could make it actually -”
“No, no, no, Natalie,” he says. “Don’t you get it? Magic done without style is magic done poorly. But. But go ahead, nonetheless, Nat. Show me what you’d do.” He puts a long, brown finger aside his nose and rubs it, which is what he does almost every time he’s about to illustrate something. Today I will learn another lesson through my errors. You see, while I may be a real sorceress, it is Mr. McCrae the stage magician who knows precisely what I am doing, and, more to the point, what I am doing wrong.
I put the apricot squarely in the center of my palm and stare at it for a long, hard moment. I concentrate on the fruit, and then I close my eyes, and imagine my apartment in Clayton, seeing the little wicker basket on my coffee table, away from McCrae’s safe corner of this semi-rural slum, away across a river and a world of difference. In my mind, I plop the apricot into the basket. I open my eyes. The apricot’s gone. But McCrae isn’t satisfied.
“Nope,” he says. He rubs his sinuses. “See, it’s gone. Sure. But who’d believe you? Magic done too well is magic done unbelievably.”
This is something I still don’t get. “You want the apricot back?”
“Yeah. Let me show you what I mean.”
I squint, clench my stomach very slightly, and I feel the weight of the fruit in my hand again; it’s back. I offer it up to Mr. McCrae, and he takes it, peering at it over the rim of his tortoise-shell hornrims. And then he holds it up with both hands, and, crying out, “By the ears of Publius!” the apricot disappears in a sudden puff of fire and smoke.
Now. I know and he knows that the apricot’s up his sleeve or in his breast pocket. But I didn’t see him put it there. He looks at me.
“There, you see?” he says. “Now whose trick was more magical? Whose will misdirect and make the mind to twist at angles?”
“Yours, Hannibal,” I say. “By a country mile.”
“And yet,” he says, pulling the apricot out of his pants pocket. “And yet.” He places a finger alongside his nose again, and I think I get it. I’m not sure what I want to use this magic for, yet, and I’m a philosophy major; bedamn if there’s much call for them in this economy. Could I be a parlor magician like McCrae? I don’t know. He says I don’t have the proper showman’s flair. But he doesn’t want me doing what he’s doing. He’s only agreed to teach me proper showman’s style because I’m helping him file his taxes.
“Okay. So it’s not that I’m doing the magic wrong, but that it doesn’t have the right frills on it?”
“The only time where you wouldn’t put frills on your magic, Sugarcube, would be where you were either stealing something, or you weren’t trying to impress anyone. That’s about it. Magic is show, regardless of how real it is.”
“Okay.” I pick up a little pebble from the porch, kicked up from the gravel driveway. I generate lift beneath the little rock and levitate it several inches above my palm. “Heidigger’s beard!” I say. And I set the air around the rock on fire.
“And there,” says Hannibal McCrae, grinning like a bear trap, “is the flourish I was waiting for.”