About a week before Jeremy's next show at the club, I got an email telling me to expect to receive a package addressed to me at the club. He also requested that I put at least an hour of practice with the contents of the package before the show the following Saturday and to tell myself that 'I'll be marvellous' while I did it. This seemed to be all the preparation he required for the short while when I would go from being a topless waitress to being a magician's assistant, to being a topless waitress under the influence of some magical effect for the rest of the evening (or less if I need to get back to normal sooner).

The package was quite heavy, so I took it home telling myself I would check it out in the morning. In the morning I went to my keep-fit class then returned for lunch, so it was not until the afternoon that I opened it. Inside was a hover-board-style Segway. I read the instructions before switching it on and stepping onto it, while telling myself I would be good at this. After a few initial wobbles and having to step off of it a couple of times, when I bumped into the furniture, I felt that I could move about smoothly and went about the rest of my day scooting about with gyroscopically stabilised feet.

When I got home from the club that evening, there was an email from Jeremy asking how I was getting on with his 'little present'. I shot back a reply that I was getting quite good at it already. I later got a response saying that I should continue to practice to get very good and that he would see me the Saturday after.

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The Saturday arrived and I had no further communication from Jeremy. I arrived at the normal time and got ready for my second topless shift of the week. On the way to the main room of the club I spotted Jeremy. “Hey! Don't you want to hypnotise me before the show like last time and the time before?”

“I don't really need to, but if you feel it would help, we can.”

He looked around for a clock and having faced me towards it. He passed his hand in front of my face saying, “You'll be superb.” I saw the second jump a quarter of the way round the dial.

The first hour was mostly normal for a Saturday night, except there seemed to be a lot of people who wanted to know if I was going to be volunteering with the magician that evening. I was glad to tell them that I was, but nervous of the fact I had no clue what he planned to do with me, because, despite being fun, I could not see how whizzing about on a Segway fitted in with a magic act.

The time came when I was summoned to the stage. I felt that the diners were as curious as I was about what Jeremy had in store for me.

Jeremy pulled a low bench, which did not have a lot of space to sit, from the back of the stage and invited me to sit on it. I looked at it for a moment. The actual space to sit was quite small, a little wider than my hips and not much deeper than my body, all hemmed in by a raise border at the back and sides about a foot high. Noting the padding on the base I sat, being careful not to flash my panties at the crowd (not an easy task with the short skirt that was my only other item of clothing besides my shoes).

As I sat, the magician brought over a piece of wood with a couple of cut-outs and a slot between. He slotted it into a guide-rail in the front edge of the sides of the bench, while asking me to spread my legs a bit so that they would be in the cut-outs. With this piece installed he brought forward the next piece of the cabinet that he ended up constructing around me. This was an arch that he clipped to the side walls of the bench; it went straight up to shoulder-height and curved low over the top of my head. If I sat up very erect, my hair touched the top of the arch and any movement sideways brought my upper arms into contact with the sides.

The next addition to the cabinet that Jeremy was building around me was the back; a single panel with some slots. With that slotted in, down the guides rails at the back edge of the upright parts of the arch part, he brought forward an identical panel which it seemed obvious would complete the box encasing my body. There was some light-hearted booing at the prospect of losing sight of me (or maybe just my breasts).

As he lined the panel up with the slots he advised me to lean against the back and hold my breasts back, so that my nipples did not catch on the leading edge or the slots, while he slid the panel into place. There was more light-hearted booing when I lifted my hands to protect my breasts. It seemed that the warning was well founded, because I had to squeeze them quite a bit to allow the panel to slide passed the backs of my hands and I could feel a couple of slots pass across too.

When I released my breasts, my nipples were pressed against the front panel below a diagonal slot.

“Just one more thing for you to do before you can sit back and enjoy the ride,” Jeremy called. “On each side you will find a hole that your hand should fit through. Please put a hand out of each hole; we can't have people thinking that these gorgeous legs are fake and that you somehow escaped out the back.” I found the holes and pushed my fingers out. I felt something touch my fingers. “If you could take hold of this silk square and wave it once in a while, so that people know that you are still in there and alive.”

As before I only know what happened outside the box from reviewing the CCTV footage the following day. It was at this point that the magician revealed the blades to the audience; I had no idea that blades would be involved. I was busy trying to work out what he intended to do, so I missed the gasp of the audience when he displayed the first blade, but I could not miss the noise when he slapped it to demonstrate its solidity.

“Hey! What's going on out there?” I shouted.

“Nothing much,” he replied. “I'm just showing the diners that the blades are solid and sharp.” He showed the blade was sharp by tossing an apple into the air and it being cut into two pieces when its trajectory had it land on the leading edge. He then carefully wiped any apple residue from the blade.

“Blades? What blades? You never mentioned anything about there being blades.”

“Did you ask?”

I shut up, because I had not asked anything about what he planned, except that my head would be in its normal place, so I could smile at customers, my breasts would not be obstructed from view and I would be able to carry on waitressing afterwards.

The next thing I knew there was a scraping noise from one of the diagonal slots that let some light into the cramped confines of the cabinet. There was a moment of stillness, then I felt the sharpness of the blade across the top of my breast and up through my shoulder. This was followed by a scraping as the metal exited through my shoulder blade and the back via the matching slot in the rear of the cabinet.

I experienced a small amount of disorientation when he turned the cabinet sideways to the audience and jiggled the blade forward and back to convince them that the blade sticking out he back was a continuation of the blade sticking in the front. The sensation was like a massage, except the non-massuer had cold hands.

“She's leaning to the side,” someone in the audience called.

I shouted back, “No, I'm not,” but I don't think anyone heard me.

“Were you not paying attention when I built the box around our brave Stella. There is no room, side to side, for her to lean to the side and no room, front to back, for her to twist out of the way, besides which, if she was twisting enough to avoid that blade, her legs would show it and they haven't moved. But it'll be even more obvious that she can't have dodged the blades when I insert this one.”

There were a couple of thumps as he hit the blade in his hand to show that this one was just as solid as the last. The scrapes that announced to me the entry and exit of the blade's sharp edge through the cabinet were punctuated, for me, by a sharp line across my lower torso, which after the initial discomfort of being cut, felt like a pleasant belly-ache. A side-effect of having this blade in place was that I now had a place to rest the wrist of the hand on that side, which I wriggled to shake the square of cloth I held.

The third blade mirrored the first blade that sliced up my chest and through my shoulder, then the fourth blade mirrored the second, cutting down from just below my ribs outward and down to the top of my hip.

What little movement remained to me implied that each blade was apart from its neighbour, up or down or side-to-side, by about two or three inches. This further let me know that I was still in a single piece, even if the connection between some parts had to take a detour round the blades.

There was more thumping, as Jeremy seemed to determined to show that each blade was as real as the previous one. This noise had a lower tone to it, which indicated a bigger blade. At this point I noticed the vertical slot in between the blades that had already been inserted. I was not quite sure at the time how far down it reached, but the top was level with my forehead and the bottom was below the blades that cut off my limited view downwards.

There was some scraping as the blade blocked of the light filtering in. “You'll need to face directly forward, if this isn't going to get uncomfortable! Wave your left hand when you're ready!”

I sat as straight as my confined circumstances allowed and then wiggle my left hand. There followed a moment of horror as the edge of the blade touched the tip of my nose,but did not stop. In a rush of strange, but not unpleasant, sensations I felt the blade pass through me from the middle of my forehead down to my belly button.

The next thing was a pair of sharp edges that I felt just above the waistband of my skirt; one on each side. The magician had inserted them one at a time and then gone round the back of the cabinet, spread his arms and pulled them inwards. Despite my upper half being connected via the narrow gaps around the five blades that penetrated the box, it seemed obvious to me that I had been divided from my legs. This was less clear, because I could still feel the bench on which it sat and the lower diagonal blades were in the way of me pulling a hand and feeling down to find out what was actually happening.

There was short period of the cabinet being turned and the blades being moved back and forth. I cooperated by shaking the cloths that I held in my exposed hands. After that there was a disorienting moment, when it felt that top half was being moved, but my feet, which reached floor, told me different. Whatever was going on, the audience were impressed enough to applaud. There was a light thud against the bottom of the cabinet and the movement stopped.

What I saw on the security tape was Jeremy lifting the upper part of the cabinet from the low section that my legs stuck out of. He carried the upper half to a stand and placed it up top.

Following this division, there was a pleasant, but confusing, set of sensations as the blades were withdrawn, in the same order in which they were inserted, meaning that the big vertical blade that divided my left and right halves came out last, except for one of the blades through my waist.

The next minute was devoted to removing the cabinet parts that had be constructed around my torso and showing me the foot-high box on legs that my legs emerged from, some six feet across the stage.

“Thank you, Stella, for taking part in this demonstration. You can go back to work now.”

“How am I meant to go back to work? My body is sitting on this one-legged stand and my legs are in a box over there.”

“Try leaning forward a little,” the magician suggested.

I followed the suggestion and felt the stand roll forward. I leaned back and it rolled backward. “OK, so I can move around, but how am I meant to get down from the stage?”

“Down that ramp.” He pointed to the board that had been set up over the steps that I had mounted to get up on the stage.

“And where's my order pad?”

He went to the box with my legs, slid back the blade that was its top and lifted the apron, still tied, and handed it to me. He gave me a steadying hand as I rolled the wheels that were my current means of locomotion down the ramp and then returned to his act.

It took about five minutes, before I was trundling about my job as if I had been born with wheels. When Jeremy finished his act, he came to check how I was doing. I asked if something could be done about my legs, because having them trapped by the stock was getting uncomfortable. He setup a chair near the stage, then lifted my legs out of the box and sat them on the chair.

Like the previous occasions, the customers were generous with their tips and their concern for my well-being. So the rest of the evening flew by, as they do when you are too busy to watch the clock.

As the last customers were being poured into taxis, Jeremy came to me. “I guess we'd better get you back together, so that you can get up the stairs to your dressing-room.” What followed was him helping me to get my upper torso back on top of my waist and then slid into the correct position to rejoin.

“I'm curious,” I said. “I noticed a slot between the leg holes. I was half expecting that you would be putting a blade in there too.”

“Well, when my friend who helps me test the illusions that I invent said that while she greatly enjoyed the blade between the legs, she also suggested that it would probably be too distracting to work with it in place or an hour afterwards. Then there is the issue that the blades aren't clothing-safe, and I didn't feel like having to buy you a replacement skirt and underwear.”

“So, when are you next booked here?”

“I don't know when I'll get the chance to perform here; I've been booked for a cruise ship for the summer and my private bookings have increased substantially too. But I'll let you know when I next get to perform here.”