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blocking out his positions as all good performers do. And as he watched, the cards in his fingers riffled together in lightning-fast shuffles that hissed like snakes. The kings and jacks and queens and jokers and all the rest of the cards slithered onto the black velvet and then seemed to defy gravity as they leaped back into his strong hands, where they vanished from sight. Watching this impromptu performance, an audience would shake their heads, half-convinced that reality had given way to delusion, that a human being couldn't possibly do what they were observing.
     
     
But the truth was the opposite: the card tricks Malerick was now performing absently on the plush black cloth were not miraculous at all; they were merely carefully rehearsed exercises in dexterity and perception, governed by mundane rules of physics.
     
     
Oh, yes, Revered Audience, what you've seen and what you're about to see are very real.
     
     
As real as fire bumingflesh.
     
     
As real as a rope knotted around a young girl's white neck.
     
     
As real as the circuit of the clock hands moving slowly toward the horror that our next performer is about to experience.
     
     
"Hey, there."
     
     
The young woman sat down beside the bed where her mother lay. Out the window in the manicured courtyard she saw a tall oak tree on the trunk of which grew a tentacle of ivy in a shape that she'd had interpreted a number of ways over the past months. Today the anemic vine wasn't a dragon or a flock of birds or a soldier. It was simply a city plant struggling to survive.
     
     
"So. How you feeling, Mum?" Kara asked.
     
     
The appellation grew out of one of the family's many vacations-this one
     
     
to England. Kara had given them all nicknames: "His Kindness" and the "Queenly Mum" for her parents. She herself had been the "Royal Kid." "Just fine, darling. And how's life treating you?"
     
     
"Better than some, not as good as others. Hey, you like?" Kara held up
     
     
her hand to show off her short, evenly filed fingernails, which were black as a grand piano's finish.
     
     
"Lovely, darling. 1 was getting a bit tired of the pink. You see it everywhere nowadays. Awfully conventional."
     
     
Kara stood and adjusted the down pillow under her mother's head. Then sat again and sipped from the large Starbucks container; coffee was her sole drug but the addiction was intense, not to mention expensive, and this was her third cup of the morning.
     
     
Her hair was cut in a boyish style, currently colored auburn-purple, having been pretty much every color of the spectrum at some point in her years in New York City. Pixyish, some people said of the cut, a description she hated; Kara herself described the do simply as "convenient." She could be out her door minutes after stepping from the shower-a true benefit for someone who tended not to get to bed before 3:00 A.M. and who was definitely not a morning person.
     
     
Today she wore black stretch pants and, though she was not much over five feet, flat shoes. Her dark purple top was sleeveless and revealed taut, cut muscles. Kara had attended a college where art and politics took precedence over the cult of the physique but after graduating from Sarah Lawrence she'd joined Gold's Gym and was now a regular weight-pumper and treadmill runner. One would expect an eight-year resident of bohemian Greenwich Village, hovering somewhere in her late twenties, to dabble in body art or to sport at least a latent ring or stud but Kara's very white skin was tattoo free and unpierced.
     
     
"Now, check this out, Mum. I've got a show tomorrow. One of Mr.
     
     
Balzac's little things. You know."
     
     
"I remember."
     
     
"But this time it's different. This time he's letting me go on solo. I'm
     
     
warm-up and main bill rolled into one."
     
     
"Really, honey?"
     
     
"True as toast"
     
     
Outside the doorway Mr. Geldter shuffled past. "Hello, there."
     
     
Kara nodded at him. She recalled that when her