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ticks once you stepped inside. Mexi Ped came next and after that Maxi Pad followed in its course. They left tampons in his locker and stuffed a few in his lunch bag on breaks. When the cafe served tomato soup, the Magician would find it splashed all down his line, gumming up the works, lingering for days like a dead mouse between the rollers.
    He tried to tell them about the one race up in Sudbury, the one where Uncle Al left him down at the hotel bar the night before, the one where he slid off the horse and got his face trampled by That Ghost Just Ain’t Holy Anymore, Juniper, and The Last True Austrian. Their collective hooves rearranged his face and Uncle Al’s number one stallion, Charles Bronson III, broke a leg in two places during the collision. The horse was put down right there out on the track and carted away in a pick-up. The Magician tried to tell them about the medication and the doctors, but they were too busy stuffing Maxi Pads into his newspaper. Carl and I watched as he mumbled about new prescriptions, better prescriptions, and the feeling of bliss, of God, but he couldn’t find anyone like that on the night shift. We found his dead spider plants sprouting fruit flies in his apartment after he didn’t show up for three nights straight. Uncle Al said let him go, let the fucker go. He’s probably in a McDonald’s somewhere asking for change or offering a blowjob. Probably lying in a ditch drinking rainwater again or locked inside a motel room with his pants undone and the television on mute. This time he phoned us from a hardware store.
    They call it a youth centre out here in Barrie. They call it a place for people who have been rundown, people with nowhere else to go. No one looks sixteen here, not with rotting cheeks, tired eyes and yellow spots along their legs where the bruises have begun to heal. The Dillson Motel couldn’t keep the Magician anymore, not after he tried to pawn the shower head and let the water flood out half the first floor. The Magician is not sixteen, not even close, but he looks younger than he should. Maybe it’s the patchy nature of that moustache, the way it gathers in tiny bristled bunches on the edges of his cheeks. He is on the floor now and he’s rolling in the French fries, the bone white French fries he bummed off some kid across the room who keeps asking us if we are here to take him too. No, no, Carl says, we’re just here for the Magician, we’re just here for our cousin and the kid says they call him Chester the Molester ’cause he looks fucking forty, doesn’t he? Look at him. That ain’t no Magician, man, no way.
    That’s Chester.
    Uncle Al kicked the Magician out after he got a hold of some credit cards and crashed the third Volvo towards the end of high school. The Magician said it didn’t matter, he fucking hated horses anyway, hated their smell, hated their eyes, hated the way people talked about them like they were people. They weren’t fucking people; they were commodities like bonds or real estate. They were property and you were lying to yourself if you said you truly loved a horse. It’d be like loving your china cabinet or a fifteen percent increase in your stock portfolio. Like loving a toaster or a Toyota. Uncle Al loved horses so much, the Magician said, because he could always decide when to put a bullet between their eyes.
    The Magician called every few weeks for cash and always found new ways to spend it. He got the snake tattoos from some Estonian girl in Scarborough, along with the hepatitis and whatever else was on the old needles she shared with her sister and their brother-in-law. The Magician picked up little tattered pieces from everyone and he clutched them until the stains were his too, until they all smelled the same. He collected all the spare parts he could find, even if they were busted
    Carl and I pull the Magician up off the floor and he smiles at us. The teeth that are left are bright and white. He might have stolen more