The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett

Author:Ann Patchett
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780547548791
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2004-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

Sabine tried to go back to sleep but could not. No matter how far she pulled the shades down the room wasn't dark. She wandered through the house, studying the pictures on the walls, looking in drawers and finding nothing that mattered. She lay across Parsifal's bed and read an entire Hardy Boys mystery. The plot involved a cave and the kidnaping of the boys' father. She shook the other books to see if anything had been left behind and found the wrapper from a stick of Doublemint gum, but that was probably from one of Kitty's sons.

She poked through the room, lonely and restless. She looked beneath the baseball trophies, behind the pictures on the wall. When half the afternoon was gone she found something that interested her high up in the closet, a Mysto magic kit, the corners of the box held together with strips of masking tape that were themselves so old that they were nothing but dried-out pieces of paper formed to the box. On the cover was a photograph of a somewhat sinister-looking man in a top hat and cape leaning over two children. The children were looking at a small white rabbit and a couple of rubber balls. Their oblivion to the magician seemed dangerous. The live rabbit seemed misleading. This had been the kit that Parsifal talked about, "impressing your friends." Inside there was a set of interlocking rings that reminded her unpleasantly of Sam Spender and her breakdown at the Magic Castle. There was the set of rubber balls pictured on the box, a series of cups for hiding the balls, a black wand with a white tip. It had been so long since Sabine had seen anybody use a wand that it took her a minute to figure out what it was for. There was a deck of cards that didn't belong with the set. From the diagram on the lid it was clear that a few items were missing: the magic twine, the five enchanted coins, and the bouquet of silk flowers. Silk flower bouquets turned ratty the third time you used them. Over thirty years they were bound to have disintegrated.

Sabine skimmed over the instructions, which were nearly impossible to follow. To do the cups and balls the way they described it would take eight arms, dim lighting, and an audience recently injected with Versed. What torture this must have been for a child who had never before seen magic performed. Sabine dropped the papers back in the box. She picked up the rings, hit them together and locked them, snapped them hard and set them free. It wasn't a bad set of rings. Thirty years ago there was more integrity in a cheap box of tricks than there was now. She held all three rings together in one hand and then threw one up in the air, hit it, and locked it on. She threw up the second one, hit it, and then all three were connected. That

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.