The Flash: Amnesty International

The proceeds from The Flash, an anthology of 100 short-shorts edited by Peter Wild, go to Amnesty International. I just got my contributor copy and thought I'd post my piece. Other contributors include Katherine Dunn, Rick Moody, Aimee Bender, Michel Faber, Conrad Williams, Jeffrey Ford, Matt Cheney, and Jonathan Lethem.If you like the piece, please consider buying the antho. It's for a good cause. If in the US, you can order here. If in the UK, you can order here.THE MAGICIANThere was a magician, of course. I say "of course" because we had no right to expect a magician, or anyone else. At first, he didn't seem that good. The cards were still visible when the doves appeared from his hands. The sleeves of his shirt seemed loose, suspect. He smelled, inexplicably, of lime. His coattails were muddy. Only gradually did we realize that the magician was doing things we hadn't noticed. He turned Kotie's shirt from gray to a melange of orange, red, and green. He gave Sewel a lisp and a moustache. The stupid sad tricks that dripped from his hands with a loose insolence, the limp shuffling of the cards, the way he flexed the singing saw before he cut his lackluster assistant (a sad-eyed terrier) in half--these were just the decoys to distract us as we began to tell him things we didn't want to, things we'd never told the guards even when they were torturing us. Details about our families, about our pasts, about our very blood. And so: Our ID tags changed. Our opinions on a myriad of topics changed. We realized we were standing in the snow in our boots, chained together, with just a tent roof to protect us. The horizon was an engulfing yellow-black line and in front of it there was nothing but the camp and the dogs and the fence. None of that changed, but we changed. And kept changing. In the cold. Under the gray sky. During his entire routine, the magician did not speak, his arms and hands, in their deceptive motions, speaking for him. At the end of his performance, he stood there for a moment, waiting for the applause frozen in our minds. Then he said, "It's your turn now." But there was no turn for us. Why should there be? We had not asked for a magician. We wanted our tongues back. We wanted our words. Our lives. After awhile, the guards took him away, leaving us as we had been before, only a little more so. The doves lived for a day, but only because we waited until then to kill and eat them. The doves were all that remained of the magician, and our need to preserve that memory had been stronger than our hunger. For a time. And so we waited. Waited for the next. And the next.