A thunderous applause arose from every row of the audience as the masked magician stood before them on stage before them. The fiery-haired woman betrayed no emotion though the white plastic cover over her face as she towered over me, and I lay sprawled out over the table in the center of the stage.
With every act that performed at Selbit Theatre, magic or otherwise, few drew as large a crowd as hers. Her performances were great, her service was compelling, and most important of all, the magic was real. And she proved it. From a hidden compartment in the table, she retrieved a katana and held it high over her head for the audience to see. It glinted in the spotlight, and the audience’s cheers shook the auditorium abruptly silenced.
Curious murmurs filled the crowds, and everyone in the first two rows leaned forward in anticipation, hoping to be picked to inspect her handiwork closely, and prove to themselves the magic was legitimate, while also feeling around the assistant. The usual skeptic sat back judgmentally, trying to observe every factor that could hide an illusion. Smoke, mirrors, hidden compartments. Anything to expose the legendary masked magician as a fraud. They never left with the proof they hoped to find.
The katana looked enormous in the magician’s hands and ran nearly half the length of her small body, but she wielded it perfectly and hovered it above me. I saw my reflection in the flat side of the blade and tightened my fists in anticipation and nervousness.
“Now,” she said, “This act of detachment is all too familiar to you all, but the machines my show is so famous for have limited just how far I can take this.” With a swish, she cut the blade down through the air and stopped it less than an inch above my neck. I choked on a gasp and felt my heart race. “So today, we’re trying something new.”
Her Australian accent rose with excitement as she spoke. “This katana is a brand-new tool in my arsenal and will perform magnificent things on my dear assistant here.” I turned my head to look at the audience and smiled. “Ji Todoro has come all the way from Japan, as some of you may know, to help me with my performance. Some of you die-hard fans may remember her from some previous acts.”
A couple of stray cheers went out across the audience, and I blushed at the fact I was recognized. The magician continued. “She’s been cut up with just about every machine I have, and you’ve all bore witness to that, but tonight, she’s going to be the very first to test this new weapon of mine. Let’s see how far we can go, shall we?”
I tightened up as she moved the blade into position. Purple shimmers danced across the enchanted hiragana letters near the base of the blade, and I tightened for the next part. The magician tilted her head lightly to look down at me, and mouthed the words “just relax, and you’ll be fine. Carefully, she lowered the blade into my midsection.
I inhaled sharply as the cold steel contacted just below my belly button. The frosty metal sent a wave of goosebumps washing up my spine and down my arms, making my hair stand at an end. The chill ran down my legs like water flooding an empty canal, and I resisted the urge not to squirm. Not here. Not on stage, during the act, and in front of so many people.
As it cut deeper, the sensation of chill was replaced by a warm, gold feeling penetrating my waist, quelling the cold even faster than it had started. I smiled. The pleasure had never gotten old, no matter how many times I had been cut with every machine.
Suddenly, the magician drew away the blade, and I felt her hands gripping around both parts of my body and pushing them apart for the audience to see. Several “oohs” and “woahs” came from the front row. I took a moment to stare down at my lower half, now disconnected from the rest of me. A smooth layer of skin, which we all called “stumps” covered the area of separation, like it had always been there. Its tone even matched my tans, for some unexplainable reason.
I reached down and rubbed the corresponding stump below my belly button, pleasuring in the strange feeling. I could still feel and control both parts of me, even separated. The bare parts of my leg brushed against the chilled metal edges of the table, and the cold returned. The magician showcased it to everyone watching, and I moved both parts myself seductively on the table to draw them in further. She wasn’t done yet, though.
Without warning, she sliced the katana through the air at a blinding speed and cut straight through my neck. I didn’t even have time to react, pleasure to the sensation, or even gasp. My body grabbed the edges of the table to stabilize itself, and the waves of pleasure and cold clashed in the middle of my chest.
I was overcome with a disorienting feeling as my view of the auditorium toppled, but my body remained stable but flailed around in confusion of senses. My head had been cut off. My fall was stopped by the magician’s hand, reaching down to catch me. I heard a quiet and satisfied “gotcha” escape her mouth as her hands tightened their grips. She had dropped my head before in rehearsals of previous acts, so this was a win for her.
I felt dizzy as she raised my head above her for the audience to see. Many gasps and one forlorn scream of terror penetrated the baited silence of the room. I smiled to let them know I was alive, but the audience recoiled even further in shock. I waved at them from my separated body, and more murmurs rose up. The few skeptics were picking their jaws up off the floor and trying to figure out how illusions could pull this off.
She set my head down in between my upper and lower halves, and I felt almost sandwiched in between myself. She took one of my hands in hers and raised it up carefully, cutting the whole arm off just below the shoulder, before doing the same to the other one. Knowing where she was going, I kicked one leg after the other into the air seductively before she cut each one off. She rested all limbs gently on the table around me, spreading all the parts out for the audience to see.
Everyone could be seen eagerly leaning in, curious and impressed. Most of them probably didn’t process it as magic and subconsciously dismissed it as a really good and unexplained illusion, but if there was any difference between the two, you couldn’t tell by the applause.
Reversing her grip on the blade, the magician turned it downwards and stabbed it into the center of the table, just behind where my head rested. I saw a few strands of black-dyed-blue hair fall around me from the corner of my eye, and knew I should have cut it shorter before the show.
“Now,” the magician spoke. “I know that many among you are suspect of my magic, but I can assure you this is no trick. No, this is real.” As she inched closer to the next part, the first two rows looked ready to launch out of their seats. “So, why don’t we have a few of you skeptics up here to inspect this yourselves?”
She raised her finger and danced it around in the year, musing over the crowd to select the inspectors. She chose six from the front rows, equal numbers of men and women, her choice dripping with dramatic suspense to almost literally pull the audience in further.
“Go ahead and poke around. You’ll find no smoke and mirrors here.”
I tried looking around, but my perspective was limited. I could barely turn my head, and my own body parts blocked a good portion of my view. The first, an elegantly dressed man who looked like a critic, waved his hand under the table, looking for any compartment or box made invisible by mirrors. He jotted something down on a notepad and began walking around the table.
One of the guys moved to grab something but stopped and pulled away suddenly after receiving a disapproving glance from a woman on the other side of the table, presumably his wife. The third man picked up my right arm and inspected it in his hands, poking me on my wrist and watching my fingers reflex involuntarily. He tapped the stump where the arm had been separated just to be sure, and satisfied, put it down to keep walking.
The women were more direct. Aside from the second man’s wife, they were very hands-on with their investigation. The wife poked me in a few places and watched my reactions but just observed the others as they did their own surveys. I almost yelped in surprise as two hands closed around my head and lifted it off the table. At first, I thought it was the magician, but it felt off, somehow. I was turned around in her hands to face the second woman, taller and more muscular than the magician. Her hair was cut straight and short, with a lopsided bit of it hanging down one side, reminding me vaguely of a few movie characters. She smiled at me, and I smiled back. Her hands were incredibly soft, and warm as my cheek squished in her palms.
I let out an unsteady “wuhhuh” as she turned me to the side in her hand, inspecting the neck stump on the bottom. With three fingers, she gently caressed it and then moved her fingertips rapidly across the surface. I couldn’t help it. It tickled too much. I let out a half-laugh, half-pleasant yelp, and the second woman smiled, satisfied.
The third woman, a tall, dark-skinned woman with very curly hair, grabbed my torso around the waist and lifted it off the table, feeling its warmth and my breathing, which had become more excited. She turned her head and pressed it into my chest, listening to my heartbeat, which was rising. I blushed horribly at the pleasure, and she noticed. She smiled at me, with a beautiful, cute, affectionate smile. Damn that smile. I turned completely red and gave a smile back before she put my chest down and left with the group, returning to their seats.
The rest of the show felt very fast after that. My pieces were juggled, I was stuck like a kebab on the katana, and I was reassembled in a few different ways, but eventually I was completely rebuilt, and took a bow alongside the magician as the curtains closed. Through the whole thing, I could see the third woman smiling at me, and I did my best to smile back from the piles of my own parts.
The magician set down the katana carefully and came over to me. She didn’t have a habit of saying too much after the show, but she made sure I knew I did good. A simple “great job” and a pat on the back, sometimes with my own detached hand, sufficed.
The lights dimmed, and I stood staring at the table I had been dispersed on a few minutes earlier. I just lingered as the clock ticked past 10:00, and everyone had probably gone home, including most of the stage crew. One single spotlight remained on, gleaming on the table. As I studied the table and its intricacies mindlessly, a single glint caught my eye. It was familiar, but out of place. I stepped closer and narrowed my eyes on the piece of metal, more details revealing themselves as I approached. The metal became long, silver, and curved, and guarded by a hilt, wrapped fine fabric.
The magician had left the katana.
I quickened my pace and scooped it out of its box. The enchanted letters illuminated my face in a faint but noticeable glow. I carefully aimed the sharp end away from me and steadied myself. I had never held the thing before, just been the target of its strikes. The blade was surprisingly light and didn’t look like it would be. It must have been one of the qualities of magic.
I swung it through the air curiously, listening to the whistling noise it made as steel parted the wind. The weapon of my ancestors, altered by magic. The moves felt like they came to me naturally, and I brought the blade down to rest at my side, satisfied.
I couldn’t help but smile as I left the stage and walked down the service halls to the changing rooms. A few cheap lightbulbs illuminated the gray and green halls, cluttered with supplies, outfits, replacement parts and so on. There were about five doors for the changing rooms. One for the magician, and one for each of the assistants, including me, though I had barely ever seen the others. She liked to cycle through who was used on what night.
Little slits of light peeked out from the edges of the magician’s door. No telling what she was doing back there, and the thick stone walls stopped any looking into it. I stopped at the door to my own room, two doors down from hers, my name in a metallic blue plaque on the door.
As I fiddled with my keys, I heard a voice at the far end of the hallway, and I nearly jumped.
“Quite a show tonight.”
I turned to stare at the dark-skinned woman from earlier, who had come up to inspect me earlier. I let out a silent sigh of relief as my heart slowed down. I was jumpy tonight, I guess.
“Hey you,” I said. “How’d you get back here?”
She started walking towards me, and I could see her flipping a keycard in between her fingers. “I have my ways,” she responded, grinning mischievously. As I turned to face her, she bit her lower lip and shifted her pace, to be slower, and more seductive.
My heartbeat quickened, and I dropped my keys. She reached me and then bent over, giving me a perfect view of her behind as she did it, and brought her face close to my chest as she stood back up, dangling the keychain ring around a single finger. She carefully selected one of the keys and pushed it into the door, unlocking it and pushing it open slightly to the darkness.
My words barely escaped my throat, I was so paralyzed. “So, what are you doing here?”
She tossed the keys into the room blindly and turned to face me again. “You’re quite an interesting woman, Ji,” She glanced at the katana I was still holding. “I like interesting women.” My face turned hot red as she put her arm around my neck and tugged me into a kiss.
Her lips were burning hot, so hot it was cold, and I was entrapped in them. I felt her tongue reach into my mouth and feel around my inner lips before pulling out. The whole thing had caught me by complete surprise, and I stood there like an idiot, too shocked to kiss back.
“I wanna see what sorts of things you can do in the aftershow. And bring the katana.”
She stepped backwards into the darkness, taking my hand in hers and pulling me in with her. The door slammed shut behind me, wrapping us in darkness, and I suddenly felt my body pressing into hers, far differently from before on stage. This time, her chest pressed into mine, and I could feel the heat coming off both of us in excitement.
I smiled in the darkness, and somehow, I think she noticed. “Now show me some of that real magic.”
My grin grew wider as I began undressed and readied to wield the katana.