“Come on, come on!” Keisha tugged on her mother’s sleeve. “We’re gonna be late!” With a sigh of exasperation at her six-year-old daughter, Lanicqua Travers, Keisha’s mom, checked her watch. “Keish, we have fifteen minutes until we can go! You don’t want to be early and have to wait in line for ten minutes, do you?”
The Travers family of two was going to see a magician today. Magic endlessly fascinated young Keisha, who got easily frustrated with her no-nonsense mother, who was a very busy lawyer.
“I guess not… Can I at least go put on my shoes?” “Yes, I suppose you can.” “Yay!” And with that, Keisha scampered off to find her plastic Dora sandals. When she had run back to Lanicqua, they hopped in their car and drove to the fairgrounds.
As soon as Lanicqua stopped the car, Keisha bounced out of the car, looking quite like Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. Through the loudspeakers positioned throughout the parking lot, they could hear strains of music, cheers from the crowds, and someone’s voice, yelling about cotton candy and popcorn. The pair started walking toward the ticket book, and Lanicqua couldn’t help but catch a little of her young daughter’s enthusiasm. Even though Mrs. Travers knew that all the “magic tricks” were just special effects, and that she was only here to humor Keisha, it was nice to be away from the office for a change, to relax, to let her hair down.
After they had bought two tickets from the quite pimply teenager at the booth, Keisha and Lanicqua nabbed two seats in the middle of a rather crowded field. After sitting and waiting for about ten minutes, Rocco the Magnificent walked onstage to cheers and screams, most of which came from Keisha. “Thank you, thank you.” said the magician in a lilting Italian accent. “For my first trick, I will make a rabbit fall from the sky.” All of the little kids in the crowd gasped. “Alacazam!” Rocco screamed and pointed his hands toward the sky. With a bang and a blast of purple smoke, a rabbit fell, seemingly out of nowhere! The crowd erupted in cheers. “For my next trick, I will make myself disappear!” This time, the entire crowd cheered. “Obfuscate!”
One minute, the crowd of maybe one hundred people was cheering its head off, the next moment, silence.
Darkness so thick you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Cold so chilling your very blood seemed to freeze in your veins. A feeling of weightlessness, a sense of floating, yet a feeling of being totally grounded, as well.
Back at the fairgrounds, Rocco the Magnificent, who really was an American farmer names John Townstone, inhaled sharply. The audience was gone. The chairs were there. The women’s purses were there. But where were the people? “Oh, no!” mourned John. “What have I done?”
And suddenly, a scream echoed throughout the magician’s field. Started in the darkness, yet so powerful, so terrible that only a very young, extremely terrified little girl could make. It carried, breaking the barriers of the darkness traveling to the ends of the Earth. “MAMA!” It was Keisha.
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