Carter Beats the Devil

by Glen David Gold

Soon, they were swamped with the language of fistiana, with cheering swells and rapid-fire descriptions of a brute struggle between two cherubic assassins on cauliflower row, each landing pancake blows that knocked the gallery gods cuckoo.

He turned to a recent page. “If I were to perform a truly original trick,” he had written, “it should be a metaphysical one.” He had divided the page into thirds: on the uppermost tier, he had drawn himself as a stick figure in a turban, with a wand, and written beside it, “For my next trick, I shall, without benefit of wires or mirrors, change my mood from sour to genuinely happy.” In the middle tier, he had sketched the stick figure now stiff with concentration, beads of sweat spraying off of its body. And at the bottom of the page, there was the figure, sour mood intact, now being pelted with rotten vegetables.

When you walked a city, wherever you looked, someone had probably fallen in love there.

Of the several hundred people who’d arrived early, there were men who wore diamond studs in their blouses, escorting women wearing pearl necklaces secured to their bodies the way Parisians did, with secret binding chains that discouraged theft. The thieves who worked in bump-and-run teams, impressed, stole the men’s wallets instead.