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reappeared in unexpected places.
    “Magic is about perception,” said Clarence, leaning close to Sean. Sitting in his wheelchair, his head was on the same level. “What we perceive is our reality. If you think you are hungry, then you find food. If you think you are cold, you shiver.” Clarence paused. He thought about Professor Gilded on his stage talking to an audience. What happened that night when the horse turned into bones? How did Gilded perceive it? Did the animal shimmer before the flesh dissolved? Clarence flourished the quarter eagle. Sean watched, his eyes dark and intent.
    “Now I’ll show you a trick that will amaze you. I don’t even know if I can do it, but I’ll try. Are you ready?”
    Sean nodded, mostly with his eyes.
    The nurses leaned in.
    Clarence clasped the coin in his right hand hard enough that he could feel the ribbed edge marking his palm. He let his thoughts drift from it, so that he was both holding the coin and not holding it. Forced distraction, but to himself, not his audience. He thought about war news and Pepsodent and Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders. Instead of the coin, he imagined the Edison’s polished wood tuning knob in his fingers as he slowly turned from station to station, of how delicious the sound tasted late at night when his parents had gone to bed and the search for voices made the time flee. Clarence thought about magic. He thought about “take a card, any card” and “abracadabra” and “there’s nothing up my sleeve.” There were illusions and tricks, and then there was magic. There was a horse that was there and not there. Perception made it real. Perception ruled.
    When he opened his hand, the coin was gone.
    One of the nurses sighed, disappointed. After all the other tricks Clarence had done, this one must have seemed anticlimactic.
    Clarence smiled. He said to Sean, “The coin is gone. Do you know where it is?”
    Sean waited until the machine reversed so he could speak. “Is it . . .” The motor clicked. He inhaled. It flipped into the exhalation cycle. “ . . . in my hand?”
    “What?” said a nurse. She stepped to the side of the iron lung to look through the window. “Oh, my gosh.” The other two nurses crowded around her. “He’s got it in his hand! How did the coin get in there?”
    Clarence touched Sean’s forehead. “A friend of mine told me the world is a dark, dark place, if we see it that way, and if we’ve got any magic, we should share it.”
    Sean waited for the machine to give him the air. “Okay.”
    “You need to get better. Someone else might need that iron lung.”
    “I will.”
    Clarence shifted in his wheelchair. One of the braces clanked against the chair’s metal frame, and he realized his legs didn’t hurt as badly as they had on the trolley. He’d barely thought of them while he did the magic. The thought made him happy.
    The nurses were still marveling about the coin. Clarence could see it through the window in the paralyzed boy’s hand.
    Slowly, Sean’s fingers closed over it.

WHERE DID YOU COME FROM?
WHERE DID YOU GO?

    M onday started bizarre. At the bus stop, the sun rose like a diseased orange, dark and ruddy at the bottom and a sick yellow at the top. “It’s the fires in California,” said someone as we shivered in the October cold, but it looked like an omen to me. I shouldn’t have worn a skirt.
    The bus arrived late. A little girl who’d missed her ride to the elementary school sat in my seat. I asked her to move. She said, “Who do you think you are?” I had to sit on the other side and watch houses slide by I’d never watched before. At the high school, scraps of paper and an empty milk carton littered the hallway by my locker. The janitors must have taken the weekend off. My locker combination didn’t work the first three times, and then it did. In the meantime, kids walked back and forth behind me, headed to their rooms. I didn’t catch what anyone said, and what I did hear sounded