Complete Fiction

by Hal Annas

  Mysto got sick and got arrested for making a speech, while sick, on the street corner. For being sick and taking too much of the amber liquid as a remedy, the officers kept him overnight in a sort of cage.

  Bonnie was frantic. Without Mysto, the show couldn’t go on and they wouldn’t get paid and everything they owned would be held for their obligations. This in addition to the humiliation of failure.

  “Maybe you could do the show,” she suggested. “I’ll wear a very brief costume and attract attention to myself whenever you make a mistake.”

  At curtain time they were waiting nervously in the wing. The preceding act, acrobats, was good which automatically put a demand on them to top it or suffer the coldness of the audience.

  On the stage he plucked the rose out of the air. Concentrating on the proper passes and words, he forgot to press the button on the piece of rubber and it didn’t inflate. The audience booed. They booed again when it didn’t turn into a sphere and float away. They became apprehensive when it became first a salamander and then a baby alligator, but they clapped. They clapped until the alligator got out in the audience. There was a near riot. But at this point, as always, something unexpected happened. A shark swam down from the rafters and hit the alligator in the throat, then both vanished.

  The orchestra played loud until the audience quieted.

  He materialized some counterfeit money, warned the audience they couldn’t spend it and flung it out to them. They booed.

  Bonnie did an upstage jaunt to hold their attention and managed to hold his also. He forgot about the show and concentrated on her. Her brief garments weren’t just the right shade of purple and so he made the proper passes to make them darker. And again something unexpected happened.

  Wings sprouted from her shoulders and she flew out over the audience. The unhappy part was that she was pursued by a winged monster which, breathing fire, set someone’s program aflame.

  He made the passes to stop the whole thing, but, while the monster vanished, Bonnie fell in a man’s lap and his wife happened to be there. Also she was nude, as the wings had taken their substance from her garments. There were moments of confusion before the clothes got back in their proper places.

  Flushed and excited, Bonnie hurried back to the stage as someone wheeled out the box in which she was to be sawed in two.

  Instead of letting Bonnie get inside the box he placed her atop it. And to keep her from being frightened he cast a spell of sleep on her mind.

  She sawed nicely, just as he’d known she would, but when the blood began running people out in the audience began to faint.

  “It’s just magic,” he told them reassuringly. “Nothing to get excited about.”

  The stage hands weren’t so sure. There were hissings and calls from the wing. And the manager walked on stage and grabbed the saw before he was finished. But as always something unexpected happened. The saw snatched away from the manager, threatened to saw him in two, then went on with its job. And then Bonnie lay there in two parts.

  It didn’t look just right and he got a little nervous, but went on with the act. There was no one to catch the bullet, so he asked someone from the audience to come on stage.

  Several came. They were all in blue uniforms and they put handcuffs on him. They led him into the wing and pointed at Bonnie.

  “But that’s just magic,” he said.

  “Magic or not, she’s dead.”

  “Of course,” he admitted. “You didn’t expect me to fake it, did you?”

  Somebody cried, “Lynch him,” and a man with his collar turned backward came and said, “Don’t you know it’s a sin to kill?”

  “It’s just magic,” Sasko insisted. “And very poor magic on my own world. I was excited because it was inferior . . .”

  A siren sounded outside and somebody said the riot squad was coming to close the place and arrest everybody connected with the show.

  Photographers gathered round and took Sasko’s picture while he stood handcuffed to an officer with the still two halves of Bonnie in the background.

  A guard formed round him to keep him from being injured by the outraged mob that had marched upon the stage and into the wing.

  “If you’re so good at magic,” somebody yelled, “why don’t you disappear?”

  Sasko felt very humble and sad. The old sense of inferiority was coming back. When he’d used props and done things by trickery on his own planet he’d been labeled a moron. And it wasn’t that he wanted to do things that way; it was just that he had to. Now he’d performed the feat in a straightforward and honest manner and they were calling him a murderer.

  “It’s just magic,” he repeated for lack of something better to say.

  “If it is,” a photographer said, snapping a picture, “the act will get the biggest booking in the history of show business.”

  “It is,” Bonnie said, rising. “Now cut out the nonsense and let’s get better booking. My sister wants a big brother and we’ll need enough to live on. He told you it was magic all along.”

  THE END