The trick made it into the show, and it was a success. Tom revelled in the screams of sheer horror as he was impaled onto his mother's leg. Everything played out the way they had rehearsed. Everything, except that he didn't get to be ripped in half. Jim, his father, had deemed that part too intense for a wedding reception, and Bonnie, his mother, hadn't objected much.

What happened instead was that Bonnie spun Tom around a few times with her other foot, pushing him further and further up her leg, until eventually she kicked him free and he floated down to the ground, landing gracefully on his feet.

Applause rose from the dining tables while the boy checked himself out. His chest showed bare through the lapels of his waistcoat, with no signs of wounds, holes, or other damage. The show being Arabian Nights themed, Tom's outfit consisted of a blue waistcoat matched to white baggy trousers, while his mother was a harem slave in a purple skirt and golden lingerie. Cheap, tacky, possibly offensive, but whatever the customer wanted.

Bonnie rolled over and sat up, smiling at the guests and then at her husband as she saw him return on stage. Dressed in a supposedly Arabian sorcerer costume, Jim was pulling behind him a pair of wheeled platforms connected by a hook-and-eye latch. He handed the handle over to Tom, then pulled Bonnie to her feet and indulged in a little dance, which came to an end the moment e captured her lips with his own.

The two were still kissing when Tom walked up and yanked the woman's skirt off, exposing her bikini bottom and causing an outburst of whoops and cheers across the room. Bonnie snapped around, gaping in shock, but Jim promptly caught and turned her to face him again, and she froze under his gaze. Tom stepped back, skirt folded over his crossed arms, watching like everybody else as the magician hypnotized his assistant.

When all fight had abandoned the woman's body, Jim guided her onto the double platform. With mechanical obedience Bonnie got down on all fours, her hands on a platform and her knees on the other. Her son then tossed her skirt at Jim, who draped it over her back, from the top to the bottom of her golden bikini. He and Tom grabbed a handle each and began walking in circles, offering the audience a view from all angles of the platforms and the woman thereupon. After two full rounds they stopped, then Jim walked behind Bonnie and whipped off her skirt. Under it was absolutely nothing.

The crowd gasped as one when it sank in that the woman was now in two pieces, her entire midsection vanished in thin air. A few feet away, unnoticed, Tom smirked as he watched them all squirm in disbelief. There was possibly no way, or so it seemed, for his mother to be concealing her belly anywhere. Jim stood behind her, by the latch that connected the two platforms, and he was visible from head to toe through the gap in her body. He was waiting for an applause, which came in volume after the initial surprise. The magician kicked open the latch and stepped forward for a bow, passing right between the two halves of his wife. He had her skirt hanging from his shoulders, like a huge silk scarf.

And the best was yet to come, Tom thought smugly to himself. At his father's cue they pulled the two platforms further apart, then turned them around so that both halves of Bonnie had their cross-section to the audience. The woman's body appeared to be hollow inside, and made of or coated in gold, transitioning seamlessly into the fabric of her bikini. She was then flipped over, briefly presenting the onlookers with her blank stare and her firm glutes before being returned to her original position.

While the wedding guests struggled to make sense of what they were seeing, Jim took the skirt off his shoulders and fed one end into his wife's mouth. Tom, who was standing between the platforms, reached a hand deep into Bonnie's hollow chest, and when he pulled it out he was holding the skirt. He then turned around and stuck his arm into the woman’s bottom half, his fist pushing her bikini aside as it emerged from between her buttocks, still holding the hem of the purple garment, which Jim grabbed. The boy was quick to move out of the way as his father began pulling.

The spectators were beyond stupefied at this point. Bonnie's skirt could be clearly seen sliding through the gap in her body, its free end gradually sucked up into her mouth. Soon enough the waistband met her lips and got stuck there, with the result that, at each pull, the woman's top half was dragged closer and closer to her bottom, until the two ends of her bikini met.

Meanwhile, Tom was once again scanning the dining room. His gaze kept returning to this brunette in a black dress, who was seated in the front row together with an elderly couple. She was leaning forward on the table, gnashing her teeth at the disconcerting sight. Tom was starting to notice girls, and this girl, he reckoned, was quite pretty. He had also long been aware of how beautiful his own mother was, of course when she looked normal and not like some sideshow freak. "The woman without a middle." Step right up, step right up, only a dollar.

When the time came for him to take action, the boy walked up to his mother and retrieved some length of the skirt from her mouth, causing the other end of it to slip back into her butt. He then forced her mouth wide open, crumpled the waistband tight and shoved it down her throat, all without so much as a wince on her part. The woman now had her skirt entirely inside herself.

Moving in unison, father and son grabbed Bonnie's hips and shoulders respectively, and began to pull in opposite directions. The two halves of her body parted to reveal something attached to both pieces of her bikini, something purple and all shrivelled up. It extended like an accordion's bellow, and the next moment Bonnie was in one piece again, wearing a sleeveless leotard that was golden at her chest and hips and purple in between.

An early applause broke out as Jim helped his wife off the platforms and woke her from her hypnosis. Bonnie blinked and immediately looked down at herself, then around, and the confusion on her face gave way to a tentative smile.

The applause grew louder.