theme: diversion, title: for my next trick I'll need a volunteer in "the next big thing" flash fiction

“What you might not expect,” the Amazing Mitzi once told the sasquatch called Frank, “is how fake magic is actually magnitudes more difficult than actual magic.” She smiled, gestured with her right hand, muttered a few words of some ancient Hebrew dialect that still possessed all its vowels now lost to history and suddenly a silver Kennedy half-dollar appeared hovering in the ether between them.

“How did I do that?” she asked him, snatching it out of the air and shoving it into the right front jacket pocket of her low-cut tuxedo-styled magician’s costume. “I have no earthly idea,” Frank could only reply, “because I don’t know how to work magic.” “Exactly.”

“Now,” she smiled again, bending low and taking on a more theatrical tone, “allow me to get a little pixie dust out of my pocket to perform the trick differently…” She reached into that same jacket pocket, pinched out a small amount of thin air, said “poof” then stood up reached behind Frank’s ear and produced the same coin as if pulling it out of his head. “How did I do that?”

“When you were pretending to pull magical powder from your pocket, you actually just palmed the silver between your fingers and then behind my neck, you moved it between your forefinger and thumb.” “Exactly, Frank, but most folks wouldn’t notice that.” “Why not?”

She looked down her cleavage. “Because puberty gave me a diversion that doesn’t work on those not attracted to human women,” she muttered two sentences of Hebrew again and the half turned into dust draining through the space between her fingers, “I may be too chonkity to be television-pretty, Frank, but fat-girl titties are still a pretty good distraction for a little sleight-of-hand, most of the time, you’d be surprised.”

Actual magic isn’t available to most of us but to the few who it is, it’s as easy as breathing. Mitzi just needed the right set of triggers and a good relationship with the lowest-level angels to make the impossible actually real. Faking it, though, takes the real work of making the audience look in the wrong places long enough to create the illusion of having done something impossible. It’s why she took so much more pride in her stage magic than her miracles, because for the fakes she actually had to try.

In the days before Disney gentrified Hollywood Boulevard into a goddamn shopping mall, there used to be games of three-card monte on the sidewalk all the time, hustlers honestly lying their way to some stupid tourist’s money through the hard-work of criminal distraction. These days that kind of thieves’ artistry are gone, replaced by a Magic Kingdom’s worth of lazy smiling family-friendly marketing schlock.

The new kind of confidence job there is certainly cleaner and safer, sure, but if you asked Mitzi, she’d say the old kind of magic was a more honest kind of dishonesty and after the steamrollers went through, something was vital and holy was indeed lost.