The Truth About Celia by Kevin Brockmeier

Author:Kevin Brockmeier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307429476
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Appearance, Disappearance, Levitation, Transformation, and the Divided Woman

First there was the incident at the water park. One of the wooden buttresses supporting the tornado slide collapsed, causing a long section of the tunnel to tilt backward off its axis and crash to the ground. A family of four who had been picnicking underneath were killed instantly, as well as two boys who spilled from a high curve of the chute into the open air. A girl who was inside the tunnel as it gave way, and who must have imagined that a great rush of water was lifting her back to the top, was all but uninjured by the fall, popping safely out onto a cushion of grass. The State Office of Recreational Safety shut the park down that very afternoon, securing the gates with locks the size of human heads. It was just one of those things.

Then, two weeks later, when the paper had relegated news of the event to a quarter column at the back of the local pages, the video arcade burned to the ground. It was an electrical fire, started when a gang of boys knocked a VR machine over into a distribution box. The boys had drilled a hole through a game token and tied it to a line of fishing wire so that they could thread it back out of the machine when they were done playing. When the token got lodged inside, they rocked the machine onto its edge and then tipped it over, running away when its weight carried it through the wall. The room went up in a geyser of sparks. No one was killed in the blaze, though a child who had fallen asleep in the ball crawl suffered second-degree burns on her arms and legs from the heat of the melting plastic.

Finally, only a few days later, the eastern wall of the skating rink was demolished by a wrecking crew who mistook the building for an abandoned warehouse. The warehouse in question was at 1800 Taylor Loop, and the skating rink was at 1800 Taylor Boulevard, and when the manager arrived to unlock the front door, he found a dozen men in hardhats frowning over a pile of concrete at the polished wooden oval of the skating floor.

So it was that Stephanie hired a magician for her son’s birthday—though all he had spoken about since the summer began was the party he wanted to have at Wild River Country, and then at Aladdin’s Castle, and then at Eight Wheels. When she heard that the skating rink was closed for reconstruction, she had asked him, “What do you think? Wouldn’t a magician be fun instead?” and he bent to his comic book with a negligent shrug. “I guess so,” he said, and then, after a few seconds, “But he’ll probably get hit by a car.”

The man she hired wasn’t even a very good magician, it turned out, with his ungainly fish hands and his ragged black cape. Brown crumbs littered

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