Magic Short 3: Mirror and Table

Magician Mark the Majestic started by producing Amy, his assistant, from a previously empty glass box. He had not been on stage much longer before it became obvious that he was not particularly well organised. Each trick he finished he dropped onto the stage, leaving his assistant to pick up the debris of one trick having just handed Mark the equipment for the next. After a few tricks his assistant was getting tired of the situation and the leering looks of some of the men in the front row trying to peek up her skirt, which was short as she felt was decent. She brought out a mirror.

The magician looked at her with surprise and in a whisper that carried throughout the auditorium, said, "What did you bring that out for? You know the next trick is supposed to be the linking rings."

"I thought that the audience might like the change of pace. A bit of audience participation, to break up your clever manipulations that the people at the back are probably having difficulty seeing. They're all very well for table magic and other smaller settings, but in a theatre this size you need something bigger." Amy spoke in a tone that might have indicated that she was continuing on stage an argument that they had been having earlier. The audience, particularly those further from the stage, muttered in support of the assistant's point.

Amy propped the mirror against Mark's leg and headed for the wings.

"So, where are you going? You know this one needs both of us to perform."

"I'm going to get a broom to sweep up the cards you've been scattering across the stage. I'll be ready before you've recruited a volunteer and done the introductions." The last words get a little lost to the audience as Amy disappeared into the wings.

For several seconds Mark stood looking puzzled, then shrugged. "I guess she has a point," he said, more to himself than to the audience.

An audience member shouted, "Yes, she does. I didn't expect to need binoculars to watch a magic show." His intervention was followed by more agreeing muttering from the spectators.

Mark observably pulled himself together and resisted the urge to respond to the heckler. A quick tug on the hem of his jacket preceded him saying, "Ok, I need a volunteer; someone willing to help."

Amy returned to the stage with a broom that was a bunch of twigs bound to the end of a wooden handle. "Wow! You're really selling it!" Her sarcasm was obvious. She turned to the audience, "The lucky volunteer will not only have a story that will amaze people for the rest of their lives, but will get to see the rest of the show from a much closer vantage and help with some of the bigger tricks later in the show."

"What are you playing at? And why are you using that broom? You know it's not for that."

"I'm trying to save the show. I'll explain more when the interval arrives; if we get that far without the audience walking out on us and demanding their money back. And this," she added, "was the only broom I could find (Won't they be surprised when they find out what you use it for). It's not as if I've got any help back there; just some officious twit from the theatre moaning 'Health and Safety' at me, because you couldn't plan enough to not bring every trick you've got with us, even though there is little chance that we will get to perform even a quarter of them."

The assistant's comments resulted in about a dozen extra hands being raised, when Mark finally got round to asked volunteers to raise their hands. From these he selected a young woman from the third row. She was the third person the magician had asked to stand up. The previous two had been rejected on trivial and absurd grounds, which Mark used to cover the fact that the real reason for them not being selected was that Amy was making comments about the potential candidates.

Mark went to meet his assistant-approved volunteer, mostly to be out of the way of Amy's sweeping. He took the mirror with him and handed it to the woman as soon as she had mounted the stairs to the stage. She carried it back to centre-stage, where he asked her the usual questions that magicians ask volunteers. Her name was Vanessa. She lived in a nearby village and she was a stay-at-home mum. She was here with her husband and two children as a birthday treat for her eldest son, who had been fourteen last week. She had volunteered at her son's prompting.

"So, Vanessa, What do you make of the mirror?" asked Mark.

"For a start, it's quite heavy and mirrored on both sides. It seems pretty solid." The tapped the mirror's surface and everyone heard the sound of knuckle on glass. "I'm glad it has handles on the frame, or I might have dropped it. Besides being double-sided and having handles the only odd thing is the bit framing that goes across the middle dividing it into parts, but each part is solid." This she proves by tapping each section and getting the same noise from each of the three section. "I think it's a single mirror with some extra frame added across the surface."

Amy joined the magician and the volunteer centre stage. "The point of the extra framing is so that these can be attached, once the mirror has been checked out." She held up a pair of smaller rectangular frames covered by black fabric.

Mark took the mirror by two of the handles and held it up to allow his assistant to slide the first rectangle into place over the centre of the mirror. He turned it over and she fitted the other to match the first one. She began to walk offstage again.

"Where are you going now?" Mark asked.

"To get the last couple of items we need," she replied in a tone that she intended to sound like she was chiding him for being forgetful, but the audience picked up that she was going outside the intended program, by more than altering the originally planned order of tricks. "Show them than we have not altered the mirror when we added the frames. I'll be back before you know it."

Mark seemed dumbfounded as Amy disappeared into the wings. Vanessa took pity on him and asked, "What are the frames for?"

"Oh, they just cover this part of the mirror, so that people can't see exactly what's going on." He heard what he had said and shook himself in the realisation that it was a bad thing to say. He continued, "Not that there is anything going on; see!" He put his hands to the fabric and stretched it aside to show the mirror beneath. He had Vanessa tap the mirror and confirm that it was still solid. He also rested a corner on the stage and rotated it by the opposite corner; in the process briefly dazzling most of the audience.

The magician was rescued from having to extemporise further by the return of his assistant. She was pushing the glass box she had appeared in and there was a squarish flat thing laid on top of the closed lid. He resisted the urge to ask Amy why she had brought these things on stage; his resistance was visible to the audience. The thing that concerned him most was that the flat item was one of the lids to his thin model sawing box.

"Are you ready now?" he asked.

"Yes! Are you?"

"Of course!" said Mark, without convincing anyone that he really was.

Mark and Amy took positions either side of Vanessa, each holding a handle on their side of the mirror so that the mirror rested on edge in front of her.

"Are you ready to help us amaze this audience, Vanessa?" asked the magician.

"Yes. What do I have to do?" The volunteer seemed more confident of the situation than the magician.

Between them, magician and assistant lifted the mirror above their volunteer. "Tap the mirror! Check that it is still solid! Check the open sections and the cloth-covered bit too!" Vanessa reached up, the noise of her knuckles against the glass were audible throughout the room, only slightly muffled when she tapped the mirror through the fabric. "Now, put both hands through the gap in the fabric and touch the section of mirror under the fabric."

Vanessa reached above her head and felt the overlapping edges of fabric and pushed her hands through. She was a little surprised that the next thing she felt was another layer of stretchy fabric; this layer did not feel as if there was mirror directly behind it. She pushed her hands through this layer and encountered nothing. She looked up to see her arms disappearing through the mirror-framed stretchy fabric up to her elbows.

"That's great! Hold that pose!" said Mark.

It took a little while for this to register with Vanessa, because her mind was engaged in the puzzle of was she passing through the mirror or vanishing into it. The excited murmuring from the audience did not help her decide. She felt the constriction of the stretchy fabric move down her arms. She hoped that she was penetrating the mirror, because the idea of being, even temporarily, non-existent seemed the worse of the two options. The pair struggled getting the mirror over her head and shoulders, which allowed Vanessa to discover she was passing through the mirror.

The audience watched as the magical couple passed the mirror down the volunteer's body, until they reached her knees. Mark seemed to want to lower the mirror further, but Amy had other ideas. With obvious bad grace Mark raised the mirror back up to Vanessa's waist; shooting What-are-you-up-to looks at his assistant; his hope was to get this finished, the volunteer back in the audience and continue the program as planned. He was still mystified by the presence of the glass box and the lid of his sawing box

"I thought that, maybe, Vanessa should check that the mirror is still solid before we finish," said Amy.

They held the frame in place while the volunteer tapped the sections of the mirror once more; each section sounded no different from before, not even the part that Vanessa appeared to pass through.

"Here's where the plan changes slightly," said Amy. "Vanessa, would you please untuck you top from your trousers."

Not sure what this was for, she complied pulling the hem of her top from the waistband of her trousers until it was resting on top of the stretchy fabric at her waist. She was concerned that she felt something that could be the edge of a sheet of glass pressing against her waist all round. Suddenly that pressure increased, almost to the point of pain. A moment later she felt a pleasant sensation that her mind rejected, because it seemed to be associated with the edge of glass cutting into her all the way to her core.

"Mark, Lift!" commanded Amy, and Mark did. They lifted the mirror about six inches and Vanessa's upper half was lifted with the mirror. With the assistant in charge, they carried the volunteer's body, from the waist up, and placed it on the lid of the appearance box.

The audience, after a few stunned moments, cheered and applauded, while Vanessa was having trouble reconciling the feeling that her body was moving, but her legs were not. It took seeing her lower half standing where it had been stood before she worked out what had happened. She began to protest, but Amy calmed by pointing out that the offer of a better view and being part of the show was real.

With Vanessa calmed, Amy instructed her in her first task as a part of the show. "For the rest of the show, Vanessa, you are in charge of the table." Both the magician and the volunteer looked puzzled.

"What table?" they asked in unison.

Amy took the flat rectangle of wood that ten minutes before had been one of the lids of thin model sawing box and placed in on the flat surface just above Vanessa's hips. "This table. Your job is to be the table where-ever Mark needs a table. Mark, you wheel Vanessa's upper half over there where she can see what's going on without getting in the way of the rest of the audience. I'll go and get the next trick; no it won't be the linking rings, but we might be able to fit them in later. Vanessa, you'll probably want to practice walking around with a table top instead of your upper body."

The show continued, and the audience were more interested. Vanessa's legs carrying the top followed the magician, providing him with somewhere to put stuff, rather than dropping it.

For the interval the appearance box was wheeled in front of the curtain so that people could talk to Vanessa and get a closer look at her. Amy provided a stool so that Vanessa's lower half could sit. Vanessa could hear the noise of an argument backstage; it seemed that Mark was distressed that Amy had used the sawing box lid for the walking tabletop. Amy argued in return that they were not going to be using it anyway, because why would people be impressed with sawing a professional magician's assistant in a box after they had seen a spectator divided in two without the cover of a box?

The main big illusion of the second half featured the broom that Amy had been using to sweep up the scattered cards earlier. A piece of carpet was placed on the stage and the broom made to stand on it with no apparent support. Mark moved Vanessa to a few feet from the broom and with her help they balanced Amy on top of the broom handle. Once Mark had moved Vanessa back, he pushed on his assistant's feet causing her to slowly rotate about her point of suspension. Partway through her third rotation Amy's body sunk a few feet further down and the end of the broom handle was visible sticking out of her belly.  Spotting Vanessa's horror-stricken look, Amy winked at her.

Mark's reaction to this turn of events appeared to be panic. He stopped Amy's continued rotation and made an attempt to lift his assistant from the broom's handle. This failed, so he knocked the broom over, allowing Amy to land on her feet and then pulled the broom from her back.

At the end of the show Mark and Amy thank you audience for attending and sticking with them. They then asked Vanessa's family to stay behind, because it would take them a few minutes in private to restore their mother to them in one piece.