prompt: "promise", title: "the fine print" in "the next big thing" flash fiction

Magic is not a trick, she told him, it is a promise. It isn’t about fooling someone else or fudging reality, it’s a pact that is made. “Both stage magic and actual magic,” she continued, “though in different ways, of course.” For slights-of-hand and mundane illusions, the deals are cast between magician and audience: you suspend your disbelief for a little while and the magician will make it worth your while. You are allowed to pretend the world is fresh and new and that anything is possible and the performer gives you a fantasy to inhabit for a slice of time. You will have to go back, sure, you will remember again afterward that in the really-real, everything just goes up her sleeve, into the webbing of her thumb, behind a mirror, between a crack in the floor. Unless you are crazy, of course, you know this is all just something you both agreed upon so that you could feel young again for a little while. You go home and marvel over which distraction allowed you hold up your end of the bargain but you know it wasn’t real. That’s the promise of stage magic.

That’s the promise of the theatre too, of television, of movies, of all stories. You know the leads probably hate each other or consider each other work acquaintances at best and yet they will kiss and in that moment, you will believe it. If you are insane or a child, you’ll spend your idle hours trying to figure out if the actors are actually having sex in the dressing room, you will pour over gossip magazines hoping to find proof, you’ll write fan-fictions on the internet. When you grow up, you know that it was all just made up for you to feel something different for a little while.

Some cities are like that too, of course.

Actual magic, though, you are required to give up something of yourself so that the arcane or the divine or the weave of the universe itself might bend the rules of reality for a little while in trade. “You perform a sacrifice, you agree to some pact,” the Amazing Mitzi Nussbaum told him, “you enter a covenant. You offer some future favor, you swear an oath of loyalty, you give up a piece of yourself. You make a promise. For those offerings, you receive something miraculous and you are left to wonder if what you gave up was worth what you got in return. Maybe you never know if you did the right thing or not. All you know is that every part that you have given over makes what’s still yours all the more precious, all the holier, all the harder it would be to give up even more of yourself for another taste of the impossible, of the divine.” You just move forward in hope, steeling yourself for the day when you might have to give yourself away even more.

Some stories are like that too.