The Magician Performs Miracles

A thousand hollow-eyed, rumble-bellied children come out on the stage one by one. They are given a bowl of soup and crustless sandwich, cooing white dove that lights atop their heads. They each bow to the audience, suck their soup-drip fingers. A thousand dove wings rustle.

She is kind in a way that she never was when she was alive, wears a ruffled apron, smells of cinnamon-sugar pie crusts. Her cheeks apple when she smiles. She spots you in the audience, waggles her fingers, calls yoo-hoo, yoo-hoo, and you dot at your teary eyes with a silk handkerchief that has appeared in your hands.

She waves, beautiful as birdwings, waves, waves until she is unconjured, vanishes as a piteousness of soft-white doves.

He says: I can only do it if you believe.

He says: Clap if you believe.

His voice is like a child forest god calling a fading tinker fairy back from the dark, he says clap, he says clap, clap, clap, and the audience roar startles up doves, everywhere, black-eye, white-wing doves.

It is a very good card trick.

In the empty, dark auditorium, the magician wields a broomstick army, sweep, sweep, sweeps up the tumble-fuzz of dove-wing feathers, cloudbursts of popcorn, discarded napkins and tear-heavy tissues.

And so do the starving children and your grandmother's ghost and everyone's favorite pets and President Obama and dancing brooms, and the audience cheers and the audience thinks it will never be like this, it will never be like this again.

And outside there is a thunderstorm of doves.