The magician’s assistant is lean and lithe, with a white rabbit tattoo etched high up on her left arm, and a black hat full of jokers peeping from the stocking on her right thigh. We don’t know which came first, the tattoos or the job.
The magician’s assistant is the reason we beg our mothers to hire the magician for our parties, despite the,
‘Aren’t you too old for that now?’
We aren’t. We never will be. We want to know her tricks.
The magician’s assistant knows how to disappear. She stands beside the black moon and star patterned box, chewing her marshmallow-pink gum, her eyes scanning the crowd. She twirls the box around on the podium and shows us the gold curtain inside, flapping the material back and forth with a wink that we know is meant only for us. She waits patiently while the magician talks and talks, telling his old jokes, trying to distract us, trying to lead our eyes away. But we watch. We watch her. The magician’s assistant blows the gum into bubbles, her pierced tongue stretching and lengthening the membrane until it is nearly transparent. Pink through pink. Then she blows out, just a little, just enough to make a small puff of herself, of her insides, that hovers there between her lips. Our stomachs flip at the thought of it, those little particles of air that have been inside her, that know parts of her that we never will. Then she sucks in her cheeks and click-bursts the gum into pink sheets that enfold her lips, before it’s all sucked back in for another round. Her slick black lipstick remains perfect throughout.
When the magician finally turns to the assistant, she smiles at him and takes his hand and allows herself to be placed into the box. There she folds up like a paper plane, her body displaying new ridges that make heat prick at our cheeks. Before the curtain is pulled over, we see her tucked in, in ways we try and fail to recreate in our bedroom wardrobes once the party is over, and she is gone, again.
The magician’s assistant wears purple fishnet stockings and a silver sequined leotard which she never has to pull out of her buttcrack the way we do with our after-school swimming costumes. She wears her hair in tight black curls pinned back from her face with sleek pins dotted with silver shooting stars. One time she wore a small red hat with a thick white band around it, and still her hair underneath never looked out of place. She wears heavy black eyeliner, flicked at the corners, and has a plump brown beauty spot right above her lip, which we swear is real because it never moves. We compare our photos after, and year after year the spot is there.
The magician’s assistant levitates over wooden pasting tables, rooted out from the back of our parent’s sheds and draped with cloth, while real swords are brandished beneath her. She chews her gum, side-on, the lump of it balling in one cheek, and props up her horizontal head with her hand, and still her hair stays in place. Our mothers smoke their cigarettes and say she must go through a can of lacquer before every show, while our fathers slurp from their beer bottles and mull over the gimmick in the table.
The magician’s assistant climbs into a barrel on one side of the freshly mown lawn, only to appear in a burst of fire crackle from another across the way. The magician’s assistant is bound at the wrists and ankles and immersed in a clear plastic water tank, covered with a hooped curtain only to emerge seconds later, bone-dry and free. The magician’s assistant is curled into a cannon, the fuse quickly lit, only to materialise at the back of the crowd, singing in her low, husky voice, holding a birthday cake teeming with candles.
The magician’s assistant is a distraction, the best kind. We are so busy looking at her, the magician could pull five hundred rabbits from his hat. They could fight or fuck or shit in the egg and cress sandwiches and we wouldn’t even notice.
One day, the magician’s assistant allows herself to be strapped to a wheel, then spun as daggers are thrown at her. A knife nicks her fishnets. We are angry when we see the blood. And the other red lines carved into the top of her thigh. How many times has he missed?
Still, the magician’s assistant carries on. She balances porcelain plates on tall sticks and we never hear a crash, she lets a dozen knives pass though her boxed torso, she puts cigarettes out on the back of her neck at night, right where the nape of it meets her scalp.
The magician’s assistant begins to age before our eyes. Her gum no longer snaps, but sags. Her fishnet stockings wrinkle at the ankles. Her black curls are streaked through with grey. Her eyes roll when they used to wink. Her dark lipstick sticks to her teeth like dried-on blood. The rabbit on her arm bears long, drawn-out ears while the jokers on her thigh cave in on themselves.
The final time we hire the magician, our friends talk over the act. Beer bottles are passed, fat joints are lit, bodily fluids are exchanged, but we still watch her, even now. We watch her spit her stale gum out onto the ground before climbing into the sun-faded box, the stitched moons and stars as threadbare as her skin. She moves slowly, patting her hand to the base of her spine as she curls her body inside. Once in place, she tucks her knees up to her chin and lets out a slow, deep breath. She looks over at us and raises an eyebrow, then waves her fingers in a ripple as the magician closes the door. He billows his cape around him, taps on the box three times, and the magician’s assistant disappears, forever.
Later, when we’re older, we will think of the magician’s assistant as we curl our hair, as we paint a small brown dot above our lips with eyeliner before we head out to bars and nightclubs. We will dance under dark lights and try to move and bend like she did, and we will cover our drinks with our hands and check for exits when we enter strange rooms with strange men. We will always be looking behind, underneath, trying to figure things out, trying to see beyond the world as it is presented to us. We will mimic her and disappear from jobs we never really wanted, and relationships that perhaps we did.
Much later, much older, we’ll magic away laundry and nightmares and make affairs vanish with only our minds. We will do more things than there is time in the day for, and we will do it all with a smile and a wink and a pop of our gum. We will keep our screams inside, keep painting on our faces, keep curling our hair, even as our stockings wrinkle and our hair streaks grey. Every now and then we will see something in a girl, maybe our daughter’s classmate diving into a pool with her hands touching at the wrist, or a young waitress balancing plates up her arm, or the scars on the tops of our thighs, and we will think of the magician’s assistant, climbing into that box with a wave. And we will wonder about the life she is living now, and the ones we could have lived.
***
Gaynor Jones is a writer, carer and horror fan based in Oldham, UK. She won a Northern Writer’s Award for her (unpublished) short story collection, Girls Who Get Taken. She has won first prize in several writing competitions, including Bath Flash Fiction and the Mairtín Crawford Short Story Award, and has placed or been listed in others including the Bridport Prize, Aesthetica and Mslexia. In 2024 she was a virtual writer-in-residence for Melbourne UNESCO City Of Literature, and is currently the recipient of an Explore grant from Immersive Arts.