Can you keep a secret? Look, look down here, look under this little loose board. Yes, at the back of the closet, under the old photo album box.
It’s where I keep all my magic tricks. Let me show them to you.
See, I have a weighted coin – a little weight, but where it helps. And a deck of cards that will let you hold them all, even when it looks like you don’t. And some tricky dice, and some handkerchiefs, and a little marble that used to be the eye of a great-great-great-grandmother worm. Don’t put it in your mouth; too much wisdom is deadly poisonous. Curse and cure is all in the dose and all that! If you put it down and watch it’ll follow you around the room.
Here is a hat. It looks ordinary, but there’s a little fold here and a little tuck there and with the right placement you can pull a rabbit or a dove or a ribbon from it out of nowhere. Here’s a sword you can swallow. And here’s a sword you shouldn’t swallow, because it’s cursed; its bearer can never die. Trust me, there’s so many ways for that to go wrong you don’t even want to start listing them.
Oh no, there’s much more, you need to keep digging. It’s a deeper box than it looks. Sturdy too. They don’t make them like this anymore – profit margins. An algorithm objected to it.
Here is a box inside the box; it’s full of jewels. These here are costume jewelry made from glass; and these here are costume jewelry made from non-precious minerals; and these here are faerie gems that will melt into dew if you bring them out under the light of a new dawn. You can use these to make someone’s wedding ring disappear and then destroy it in front of them and then return it.
This is a magician’s coat; which is just fancy enough to look impressive at a crowd’s-distance and just scruffy enough to hide all the extra pockets as slight fraying. This is a magician’s ring, which is made from cold-forged iron and can hold any one demon of moderate size as long as you aren’t damn-fool enough to release it. This is a magician’s wand; it’s made from plain scrap wood and a bit of varnish to make it glisten in the light. It does absolutely nothing but moving it around directs the audience’s attention, which is what all magic tricks rely on.
Those are gloves. You don’t need those for most shows, but putting them on is one more thing to get people’s attention and give you something to do while you stall for time, like if you need to wait while your assistant moves a rabbit or a dove around or for the odour of the hemlock you crushed under your heel inside your shoe to drive away the Hidden Folk that were making a plate levitate. Speaking of which, this is a little bag of dried hemlock. Don’t eat it because it will kill you. Stop fussing and keep listening; isn’t this all fun?
This little velvet bag is where I keep my small mirror. This big velvet bag is where I keep my large mirror. You DO NOT want them scratched or harmed; there are so many things that you can do with a perfect reflection that most people have no idea of. Make strings vanish; make ghosts appear; stand between two of them on a moonless night and converse with your truest shadow – the sky’s the limit and that’s no limit at all. And that’s not even getting into what you can pull off if you get into concaves and convexes
And over here, in this little lead-lined box, is my smoke. The little round balls are smoke bombs to confuse and conceal; the little slim sticks are incense to convoke and clarify; the rugged chunk of melted carbon is a piece of a coal forest that pre-dates bacteria that can consume lignin in plant matter, and if you ever expose it to an electrical current it will unleash a three-hundred-and-thirty-million-year-old wildfire that can devour a continent. So that’s only for emergencies.
This egg carton contains the eggs. Turkey, chicken, quail, hummingbird, tiny insubstantial and ineffable forest being, in descending order of size. If you crack them open just right they make doves come out; if you crack them open just wrong they make a mess; if you crack them open just wrong but just right they say things. If you do that, use the sealing wax in this tube to clog your ears the moment your lips start to feel numb. Nothing good comes from hearing too many might-have-been words.
Pay attention. I’ve told you before, you’ve got to pay attention. I won’t say it again; if you keep bugging me I’ll put the box away and you’ll never get to see it again.
See? Look. Look at this wonderful little collection of locks. You can use them with this chain to restrain yourself with a volunteer (a friend) and then you just twist them here and here and there and there and you’re free again, without anyone knowing differently. And here’s a lockpick, for when you need to do it the ugly way when nobody’s looking. And here’s a second chain, for when you’re chaining something you’ve called up that needs to not go back down again. And here’s a second lockpick, for when you’ve paid a price too dear and need to void whatever bargain you’ve made.
These are balloons if you’d like to make balloon animals.
A bottle, unlabeled – good if your memory is (and you hate prying peeping toms); bad if it isn’t. This one is stage blood, which is important if you need to disgust someone enough that they don’t look too closely. A dribble inside a hollow needle, and it pierces ‘through your arm;’ a dab on a sword and it ‘slices off your fingers;’ a razor that can be ‘swallowed’ and coughed up again. And this other bottle is real blood, and THIS one is unreal blood.
This triplet of coconut shells is your best friend. Combine them with some pebbles or coins or anything, anything at all, and you have the most fundamental in slight-of-hand. An amount of something under one, spin the shells about, and look how they change! Magic, pure magic, is about doing things where someone isn’t looking.
That isn’t a coconut shell; that’s a hermit-crab’s shell, and yes, it was someone’s skull. The crab learned a lot from him and if you ask it politely it will share answers. Bring it little bits of dead fish. It like those. You want it to like you. Trust me.
Stop whining. This is important. If you quit now it’s all for nothing. Look. Look in the box. Now.
Under the newspapers from the 1920s that can rearrange their headlines to predict today’s show…
Under the sleeping rabbits that don’t breathe or dream…
Under the black weighted tablecloth that conceals everything beneath it…
Under the SECOND deck of cards – which you can never hold all of, and nobody ever has…
Under the little bent flap of the box that’s gone a bit dogeared….
Under the bag of doves….
Under the coil of stage wires, so thin that no light makes them visible…
Under the bag holding the four winds…
Underneath my last assistant…
And atop the bare scuffed brown cardboard of the box’s bottom.
Here.
Yes, there.
Here’s your place. Alright?
Alright.
Yes, I think you’re ready.
Climb in and I’ll shut the lid.
And you won’t speak of this later, will you? That’s important. A good magician never lets anyone know how the magic works.