The Magician

by Rebecca Serle

drink, untying the top lace. If mothering is a long con, then fatherhood is a shell game.

I feel a kick to my ribs. I suddenly realize that he will never see my mother up there. That he will never get to witness her at the Cherry Lane Theatre in all her glory. How will he know me if he doesn’t see her?

Seth squeezes my arm. I look up at her above me, soaring. A god in the sky.

She looks to me. She wants to know. I think about telling her my fear. That my child will not truly know me without knowing her. That in order to be a mother, I need mine.

“There is too much suffering here when really what we have is love,” she’d say. She was right, and she wasn’t. Denying grief is a lot like denying love.

“You need to know, Charlie,” she’d always say, “that I cannot guarantee you anything but this: I will never leave you. Not really.”

“It’s magic,” she says. And I think, briefly, that she has lost the definition. That she has forgotten that magic is not the stars at night. Or the moonbeam on the sand. But then I imagine that big, wide, open sky. “Are you up there?” I ask her. I hear the wind through the phone.