keyword "bones" title "not slight at all" in "the next big thing" flash fiction

It wasn’t that she was ugly because she certainly was not, the problem was more simply that she wasn’t perfect. Looks are not the measure of a woman or a man, of course, but even if they were, by any level reckoning she was modestly attractive, would be considered pleasantly-pretty nearly anywhere else in the world, but she wasn’t anywhere else in the world. She was in Los Angeles, her calling Entertainer and, in that hall of mirrors, anything short of perfection may as well be an infectious deformity. All the talent in the world, even with girl-next-door charm, both of which she had, could not recompense her minor arbitrary “flaws”: a stockiness of limb, a somewhat-bulbous nose, a final thirty pounds she could never quite manage to gym-membership away.

And so, Margaret Nussbaum (performing as The Amazing Mitzi) toiled away in well-regarded obscurity despite being one of the finest stage magicians in the world. She made decent money, mind you, enough to have a large apartment in a second-tier neighborhood and had a small cult following among magic nerds. She was a magician’s magician, she’d say, fellow prestidigitators would attend her sets and even the old pros would admit, she always had a few tricks each night even they could never figure out. All agreed that she was gifted.

But she never broke out of those small circles, never got on the reality teevee circuit, never got on talk shows, never got the pay-cable special or “that fat Copperfield money” as she called it because she wasn’t perfect. Her contemporaries admitted her slight-of-hand talent was beyond reproach and her dry-sarcastic self-effacing stage patter was funnier than most other magicians, better than “that hack Criss Angel”, as she would say, nonetheless she couldn’t rise beyond her residency at The Magic Castle up on Franklin, impressing colleagues and super-fans alike with the occasional trick they’d never read in any book, had never learned from any mentorship.

They didn’t know, of course, that those two or three tricks every night were not slight-of-hand at all but were rather actual-factual magic. Mitzi had Kabbalistic sorcery in her bones on her dad’s side and while her castings were limited to simple conjurings and divinations, they’d more than supplemented the mundane close-up act she’d mastered through her life of steady practice. Still, despite the hard-earned skill and mystic blessing both, she’d never be allowed to go mainstream because she could never manage to make herself look television-perfectly thin.

One day, she was walking down to the Coffee Bean on Hollywood to get some extra steps in on her fitness tracker, when she did a double-take, her sensitivity allowing her to see Frank Yetti for what he was, an honest-to-God bigfoot aping as a man inside a suit. “I know what you are,” she whispered in his ear, “and Jesusing Christ, you must lonely, wanna grab a coffee?” kicking off a friendship based on shared imperfection, in their mutual exile of being exactly what they seemed