27. Wendy Learns an Old Trick.

Oct 27, 2020

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Room 650

Wendy screamed in frustration and flung the cards across the floor.

As they scattered in disarray, she punched the mirror that leaned against the wall. It spiderwebbed, and a central spiral of blood spread in the cracks. She looked her hand over and found a ragged cut on the edge of her pinkie knuckle.

“Dumbest motherfucker on the planet,” Wendy muttered to herself. “Real smart shit, you asshole.”

She sucked on the cut and tasted the iron, and let her auburn hair fall down in front to make a small cocoon for her face. It created a private space that let her block out the world, giving her mind some time alone. It was an old trick she learned from she forgot who.

Wendy breathed deeply for a few seconds, then recalled how little time she had left. She flung her hair back, stood with enough force to topple the chair onto the carpet, and stormed into the bathroom to put her hand under the faucet.

As she let the cold water wash out her cut, she looked at herself in the mirror.

Her outfit—the forest green dress she’d wear tomorrow—fit nicely around her body, but her face was another matter. Her latest forehead wrinkle. A yellow splotch along her cheek. Her brown eyes, dry and reddened. A newly burgeoning mole near her temple.

She pulled her fist from the flow of water and tore off a piece of toilet paper. She set it on her cut and watched the blood expand its borders in an oblong circle, gluing the paper in place. Then, back to the bedroom to work on this fucking stupid card trick some more.

It was nearing midnight on the night before her big audition for The Herman Marcuse Show.

A few months back, they’d lost one of the main acts, The Great Fraust. The rumor was it was due to a positive HIV test. Sad stuff and all, but the opening was a big to-do in the magic industry. Marcuse was one of the few network showcase spots, and now it was up for grabs. One season on that show was enough to guarantee sell-out performances for the rest of your showbiz days.

Wendy knew she was ready for prime time, but also realized she was attempting the impossible: entering an old boys’ club. If they were going to go with a woman, they wouldn’t want her, no matter the skill level. They’d want someone more attractive, younger. They’d want a girl, not Wendy.

Still, these kinds of chances didn’t come around often, if ever. And when she called her dad for advice, he said she had to try, if only so when she made it big, they’d have to live with having said no. When he bought her a plane ticket and a night’s stay at the Palmer, then told her they were both non-refundable, she had no real excuse left to give him.

Wendy’s audition trick was something she called “Lucky Sevens.” She’d shuffle the deck, have someone in the crowd cut it, and fan all 52 cards face-up in a seemingly random splash. But meanwhile, her keen eye would pick out where the sevens landed. After that, she’d tell the story.

This rendition was about “a friend of hers” named Alfred, a day trader who’d only ever buy stocks whenever their listing showed a seven in its price. It was a compulsive quirk he picked up after not going with his gut on a big buy a few years back.

“Maybe you heard of it,” she’d tell the audience of Marcuse scouts. “A little company called Energizer.”

She’d pause for their giggle of recognition, then continue.

“Alfred couldn’t stop thinking about how much he lost because of that single decision, so he vowed to never let it happen again,” Wendy would say. “Every time a seven came along that ticker, he bought. So today, in Alfred’s honor, we’re going to keep an eye on the sevens.”

As she told the story, the real deception would occur. Her hands would pass through the deck, shuffling and reshuffling, then reshuffling some more until the sevens were all lined in a row. It took countless hours of practice to make this subtle ordering appear like random chaos as she spoke. That part, she was comfortable with. It was the next step she was stumped by.

When the story was over, she’d have someone cut or tap the deck. She’d make it their call—the trick seemed more spectacular that way. If they tapped, her job was over, the trick already having been completed.

But audiences rarely did this. She’d found that observers couldn’t resist having a say in the outcome. And if they cut in just the right spot, the trick was fucked—anywhere in the middle third, and it’d be necessary for her to reorder the sevens again.

With a close-up trick like this, mere inches away from the crowd, all eyes would be on her hands. This moment, then, was make-or-break for the trick—where the real magic was. What Wendy couldn’t figure out was how to make it work.

She’d tried slipping her wrist in front to block their line of sight, but that was clumsy, and often drew further attention to her movements. She tried scratching her opposite arm as a red herring for those expecting such an obvious distraction, but that gambit sometimes led people to focus their attention elsewhere; in those cases, they might find her attempt to clandestinely stack the sevens. She thought of going with a meta “hey, look over here” bit to break the tension before pulling it off under their noses, but that wasn’t the right tone for Marcuse.

Back from the bathroom, she got on her hands and knees to pick up the flung cards. She reorganized the deck and returned to the desk. The chime of a clock striking midnight came through the hotel courtyard from somewhere below.

She walked to the window, and as she approached, a blur of scarlet fell past. It was gone in an instant.

She opened the window and leaned out to inspect below, but nothing caught her eye. Must have been a trick of the light. The only thing out there was the courtyard lit up radiantly—white from below mixing with red from the rooftop’s ancient sign.

Then, a sudden movement from across the way.

A curtain had pulled back. Standing in front was a young blonde girl. She was probably six or seven years old. She’d pulled the curtains behind her to create her own hidden, private space.

“You’re up late, sweetie,” Wendy muttered.

The girl had blonde pigtails that hung at her sides, her eyes stretched wide open. She pressed her forehead against the glass and Wendy watched her mouth the word “wow” as she looked in awe at the courtyard’s complexity.

Wendy put her own forehead against the glass and felt the cool of the outside. This movement caught the girl’s attention.

Wendy gave the girl a little wave. It took the girl a moment to figure out the proper response. Soon, she raised her hand back. Wendy took the wordless conversation up a notch by placing her lips flush with the window, then blew until her cheeks bubbled like balloons.

The girl giggled. Her face contorted into an expression of curiosity, as if asking “can I do this too?” Wendy answered by removing her lips, then slowly and expertly restarting the process.

First, she opened her mouth and the girl across the way opened hers. Then, she placed her mouth against the window, and the girl followed suit. Wendy blew so her cheeks filled up. The girl tried, but instead of inflating her mouth, hot breath dusted the window from either side of her cheeks.

Wendy laughed, and seeing this reaction, the girl laughed too.

Then all at once the window split into long strips. They warped the courtyard into odd, funhouse-mirror distortions. The screen of reality fell apart, and Wendy was in the way back seat of her family’s old station wagon, shuffling a deck of cards to pass the time like usual.

They were on a road trip to the House on the Rock in Wisconsin. She was six years old and sitting next to her cousin, Amy. Both of them were their family’s only children, born a day apart. “One day older, one day wiser, a whole lot blonder,” Amy always said. They were basically sisters.

The road stretched out far behind them. On that trip, Amy had snatched the deck from Wendy’s hands and taught her how to blow raspberries on the back window as they passed cars.

“Give them something to remember us by,” Amy had said.

Then, suddenly, the vision from the back seat stripped away, and Wendy and Amy were older and sitting at the townie dive named Fish’s. They used to sneak in as high schoolers, but now, they were both home for grandma’s funeral. They’d run into some acquaintances who still lived back in town. After a few, Amy had unbuttoned her top, and soon enough, the guys were buying their rounds.

“Gotta work with what you got,” Amy had said.

The bar scene fell away and now Wendy was at Amy’s funeral. Dead at 32. Cancer. Came on fast, then it was all over. One of those things.

Wendy blinked and was back at her sixth-floor window, looking into the hotel courtyard.

The window where the young girl had been was now occupied only by curtains that gently swayed, as if someone had just brushed past them. A light rain began to fall.

Wendy looked for another figure in the Palmer’s windows—anything to give her some distraction away from the task at hand. But after a while, when nothing fit the bill, she returned to the desk to perfect her misdirection.

She thought of her cousin again and set the cards aside, then stood so her full body appeared in the cracked, leaning mirror. It was still marked with a circle of blood from her knuckle. She undid the top few buttons of her dress and considered how it would look to the old boys’ club.

Artwork by Tiffany Silver Braun.