The Magician and the Acrobat

an excerpt

She finds him in the water up the mountain ridge where birds go to die. He is a halo of feathers when she pulls him out, a bright red leotard stretched over his skin. Half the men from town have at one point thought he was a bird and tried to shoot him down.

They are not malicious, she was assured by the same men when she first arrived, but when he appeared in town eight months ago with no memory, they could not trust him. No money, no family, no one to vouch for him — the rest is belief, and they do not have that.

She has briefly seen him tending to the twelve horses on the other side of town, the small barnyard room he dips into before crossing town each night to disappear up the ridge.

The mud sags beneath them now when he brings himself to his knees. She sees the writing, then, the ghosts of words on his hands and running up into his sleeves.

ACROBAT.

“You know, you can’t trust your life with those words,” she says.

“Why not?” He asks her.

She reaches forward and pinches open air behind his ear, plucks a coin from nothing. He catches it in a palm still wet with feathers.

In the 1870s this place was cowboy bedrock, a New Mexico block imprisoned in its own myths of outlaws and gangsters, and before that, the Pueblos, the Apaches. The slaughters.

Even if the summer months today cull nothing more than lowbrow tourism.

In a way, the locals say, it is not a surprise that an amnesiac acrobat found his way here. And a magician, like herself, here to cultivate her greatest magic trick.

She rents a room in a ranch house away from the center of town and falls asleep to the barks of the German Shepherd in the basement beneath her bed. She turns in the summer heat. When she fails to stay asleep, she ties keys around her wrist and leaves through the window. For an hour she wanders through the dark acres of land and growing fruit before finding the road.

Without seeing much she climbs the mountain ridge until she makes her way to the water. “Magician?”

He is standing beside a tree, his leotard stitched up in clumsy lines by his shoulder. “Hello,” she says to him.

He smiles, tucks his fingers into the fabric by his neck and shows her the coin. She tells him to keep it and he tucks it back in.