Read Online A Bird's Eye by Cary Fagan - Free Book Online Page A

shoes. She started rolling down her stockings.
    â€œHannah, you shouldn’t do this. I’m sorry I ever brought Tobias home. Please stop.”
    But she didn’t stop. She presented her naked foot for Tobias to see. She wasn’t crying now. Instead, she reached back to undo the button of her dress. She tugged it down, revealing the slip underneath, the straps of her brassiere.
    â€œHannah! Stop it! Get out of here, Tobias, get out!”
    Hayim pushed Tobias towards the door. Hannah stopped undressing and pulled the diamond ring off her finger. She made as if to throw it at Tobias’s receding back, but then she changed her mind and closed her fingers around it. It was her ring and she could do what she wanted with it.

It is not boasting to say that the men who hung about the Japanese Magic and Novelty Store said they had never seen a boy learn as quickly as I did. The more I could do, the more generous they became, teaching me what they knew, showing me the secrets of famous apparatus. The card frame. The spirit cabinet. I went to the shop as often as I could, being pulled away only when Corinne enticed me with an invitation to the shed. I could never refuse.
    Even when I was out, I practised. With coins, balls, cards, and small gimmicks such as matchboxes or a fake mouse. There was always something moving in my hand. Of course, it wasn’t enough to practise by myself, or in front of a mirror. If I saw a kid on the streetcar, holding his mother’s hand and staring at me, I would produce the mouse from my pocket or lean over and pull a long ribbon out of his ear. From a couple of old men on a park bench I would borrow a dollar (which took convincing — they always thought I was going to run with it), cause it to disappear, and find it again inside a lemon that I sliced in half with a knife. Once, I entertained four women at a restaurant table through the front window with a small set of linking rings. Even when I didn’t want to, when I was too tired or feeling shy, I made myself do it. I practised colour changes, transformations, vanishes — a black spade into a red diamond, a pencil into a cigarette, a rose into smoke.
    It was the men who told me about Murenski. A true world-class conjuror who had toured Europe, Russia, Asia, Australia. His name was in the books I had read, with old photographs of a thin, dapper man in top hat and tails. The Great Murenski. Over twenty years ago, while performing in Toronto, his wife had died during the act. He never left the city, becoming a pauper and living in a shack near the cottages on the Island.
    The deck vibrated beneath our feet. I had never been on any kind of boat or ferry before and it was thrilling to be moving over water, made even more so by our destination. It was almost dark and the Island only became visible by its scattered lights. They had told me that it was better not to go in the day.
    Corinne said, “Are you sure about this Mureeny guy? That he even exists?”
    â€œMurenski.”
    â€œAnd if he does exist, is he going to be glad to see us? I thought those smarty-pants in the magic shop knew everything anyway.”
    â€œNobody knows everything.”
    â€œThey said he was a hermit.”
    â€œNot a hermit. He just likes to keep to himself. On account of his wife dying right here, on the stage of the Royal Alexandra where he was doing a full evening show. It was during the bullet catch.”
    â€œThe what?”
    â€œSomeone fires a gun and the magician catches it on a plate. Or in his hand. Sometimes between his teeth.”
    â€œBig surprise she died.”
    â€œShe didn’t die from the trick. A sandbag dropped on her.”
    The ferry cut its engines and drifted the last few feet into the dock. We waited with the other passengers to disembark, mostly women holding paper bags of groceries, whose families lived year-round in the summer cottages because of the Depression. Corinne followed me along