One Page #8

The crowd was nearly fooled until the sudden change in the liar’s demeanor. And liar is what he is, a magician who thinks he can actually pull rabbits out of hats and cut women in sequins in half and wave his wand around like fire and smoke are pouring out of it and swords are glittering down his throat and eggs are turning into chickens and people are smiling and the smiles are jumping off of their faces and wandering around the crowd picking wallets out of pockets and watches off of wrists and even cigarettes out of mouths and the magician watches it all and thinks while he pulls rabbits out of hats that once the show is over and the lights are off and he is far away in his caravan of colors and ribbons that he will have a stash of wallets and watches and the cigarettes will have been smoked and long gone into ash but he will be a rich man and he will know that the magic lies not in his rabbits emerging out of hats or his sequined women getting cut in half but the magical materialization of gold and silver and paper dollars and shining jewelry and he will splurge on a glass on chardonnay in crystal tonight and maybe even a touch of caviar. BUT there had been that change in his demeanor, just a simple lifting of the edge of his lips into a half smile, and one woman, one single woman noticed, and felt a small discomfort although she wasn’t sure where it had come from but it was enough of a tinge to put her hands into her fur coat pockets and to notice that her pocketbook was gone, and she remembered that she had about three thousand dollars in her pocketbook which had been bursting at the seams and barely fit into her fur coat pocket and when she reached in and discovered it wasn’t there she checked the other pocket to make sure she hadn’t been mistaken which she wasn’t, and she looked on the ground among the shuffle of feet to make sure it hadn’t fallen out which it hadn’t, and then she screamed one simple long scream that was almost like a moan and the crowd turned toward the woman wondering whether she had actually been cut in half while the sequined woman had only been fake cut in half and when they saw she was whole but was disconsolate, shoulders shuddering and great bellows of sobs ripping through her body shaking the fur of her coat so it looked like an animal shaking off water, and they all seemed to notice together that their own wallets were missing and their watches were missing because they suddenly realized that they couldn’t look at the time to see when the woman had started screaming, and the magician was discovered to be a fraud and would now be eating soggy food off of a tin plate rather than chardonnay from crystal, and he was a ruined man.