Step Right Up

Harry hated clowns.

Their garish painted faces loomed at him from childhood memories. Creepy beings, powdery paint disguising the human beneath, presenting a fixed mask to the world. Too bright, too loud, too in-your-face, all fake emotion and impenetrable motives: you couldn't tell what they were thinking. "They're there to entertain, to make people happy, Harry," his mother would insist, eyes crinkling in amusement. But bunches of bright daises that pushed into his personal space and squirted water up his nose did not seem designed to make him happy.

His father had been a magician. His mother, one of his assistants. Harry had inherited his eyes, a mesmerizing mix of green and hazel, from her. A good trait for a magician's assistant, there to distract an audience from the con that was being pulled, like a pretty, sparkling, twirling penny, pulling the attention from the sleight of hand occurring elsewhere on stage.

That's what the magician's wife had called her, lips curled in a snarl: a pretty distraction.

Harry wondered if he'd been named for the Great Houdini. It seemed apropos; Harry felt like he'd spent his life escaping from one life circumstance to the next. Home-schooled by the woman who, it turned out, had been more than just a pretty face, he had made his way, bit by hard-earned bit, into the respectful world. Now he worked in a bank, making money disappear and reappear, or at least that's how it seemed. These days, he never saw money in its plastic-coated flesh. Money was mere figures on a screen, flickering and flashing before him as he tapped tapped tapped, nimble fingers flying. His upbringing lent him a certain skepticism, made him wonder if he was doing anything real at all; was he just spending his days rearranging a trick deck, where it looked superficially legitimate, but if you actually turned up all the cards on the table at once, the queen of hearts was nowhere to be found?

He fingered the check in his left coat pocket, folded precisely into thirds. The crisp paper felt oddly heavy in his hand. Not as weighty as what he carried in the right, but heavy just the same.

"How did he do it?"

That was the question the crowd always asked; if not aloud, then with their audible gasps and shiny wondrous eyes. Yuric had all the most astounding tricks; his mother always said so.

It had been an alien experience, at the reading of his last will and testament, to hear his father's name read in its legal fulsome entirety: Robert Stephen Brown.

Not Yuric at all.

Perhaps more surprising, Robert Brown had left his only son the sum of $20,000, along with his most treasured possession: his notebook of magic tricks. Once, it would have fetched far more than the check Harry now held. In this world of green screens and spectacular graphical effects, the illusionist’s craft seemed antiquated. Yet even at his last performances, Yuric still pulled the crowds and their collective gasps.

"How did he do it?"

Yuric's most famous feat was to make a unicorn disappear. The unicorn, Betty, was an Icelandic Pony with a carved buffalo horn fixed to her bridle. She snorted when she walked, cantered only when travelling somewhere she shouldn't, and Harry thought her a poor choice for magician's prop. If any being embodied the warning never to work with animals or children, it was that contrary, cantankerous creature. Yet Yuric only ever heeded half that adage. His patience with animals was renowned. Harry heard Betty had been retired to pasture long ago. Yuric had seen to it that she was kept in comfort.

"How did he do it?"

How do you make a son disappear?

The answer wasn't in Yuric's little black book, with its carefully penned diagrams and less careful scrawls.

Or maybe it was.

Because, if Harry’s burdened overcoat was anything to go by, maybe it’s the same way you make a rabbit, or a horse, or a lifetime’s worth of regrets disappear…

You don't. You just make it look that way.

He placed the little black book on the damp earth beneath the headstone with its still-shiny engraving. Atop it, he carefully splayed a bouquet of yellow daisies. The flowers would die, and the weather would wear away the secret work of a magician's lifetime, obscuring the ink on the pages and letting the secrets die with the remains of the man beneath them.

And with that, the presence of Yuric the Great would completely disappear from his son's life.

At least, his son would make it look that way.

The crowd can't tell the difference.