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moodboard: the mourning rooms, by tee thomas. "Love it. Love all of it. There’s a curiosity that shines through in science fiction and fantasy that appeals to me, a need to shape an uncertain future into something extraordinary."

[tricksterphilanthropists-blog]

The Mourning Rooms, pages 1 - 5! (Excerpt #1)

Taran.

 Mine and my brother’s pre-show routine was as precise and scientific in nature as that of the actual magic we performed onstage, at this point. We’d finally approached the status level in our careers that allowed for our specific requests, and we did our best to not abuse the privilege. Casper only ever wanted cold bottles of water and hot green tea with honey and lemon, while I usually asked for pretzels and dry towels waiting in our dressing room at the Thinkspace theater, having long since learned that our particular brand of magic often resulted in being splashed by water - the water we used onstage for tricks, or from one of Casper’s water bottles backstage, flung in my direction with impeccable accuracy for a blind person during one of his diva fits. Despite those rare occurrences, my brother was my best friend in all the world, and now when he called my name I was at his side more quickly than I wanted to admit.

 “Pull my arm,” he said, extending it toward me with no further explanation, and I shrugged and curled my fingers around his wrist, slowly pulling backward and leaning back on the balls of my feet until I heard a faintly audible pop and he relaxed visibly, sagging in his chair. He’d laughed when we’d first made headlining status at Thinkspace and the theater’s owner had furnished a small dressing room for us - she’d included mirrored vanities. For both of us. I remembered Casper’s fingertips skimming over the cool glass, a smile touching his lips as he’d asked Audrey, “...is this a mirror?”

 “Oh, god,” she’d blurted in abject horror, her mistake dawning upon her in exactly the last possible moment. “Casper, forgive me. I am so sorry, I wasn’t thinking. I’ll have it removed.”

 “Audrey!” my brother had said, with his standard brand of blunt, bullshit-free kindness. “Relax, okay? I appreciate you doing this for us, period. I just hope you didn’t waste any extra money on this, I’d honestly be happy with a chair and a closet to keep my stuff.”

 “I feel so foolish,” she’d mumbled, but she’d taken his hand into her own, giving it a squeeze. “You two know I’m not meant for this kind of thing, running a theater.” She’d inherited Thinkspace from her father, who had passed away roughly six months ago, intending to honor his final wish that it never be converted into anything else, that “the free republic of human expression be allowed to persist” there. She was a ballerina at heart, the two of us having met her during our days studying dance at the Eastern Ballet Company of Boston. She’d offered us a weekday spot at first, just before dinner time, unsure if a magic act would sell any tickets. My brother and I though, we knew our shit. It wasn’t long before our shows were selling out, and Audrey had promoted us to weekend nights.

 The gesture of faith in our talents had meant more to me than Audrey could have known - but neither was she aware of the torch I’d been carrying for her since the day we’d met. If she did, at least, she was mercifully silent on the subject. In my head at night, her naturally illuminated deeply autumn-brown skin and narrow, fox-gold eyes lit up my space with her soft glow, her long, elegant dancer’s neck exposed by the tiny rebellion she wore in the shape of close-shorn black curls. I could have written volumes of poetry about how she made me feel, and probably would have, if Casper would have ever let me forget about it later. He threatened at least once a day to tell Audrey how I felt for her, “because you never will,” but she was ten years my senior at thirty-one, and all of the grace and class that ballet and classical music and stage magic had instilled into my brother and I seemed to dissolve upon impact whenever she spoke to me in her smooth, low voice. It was a voice that one just did not question, musical and artful with her west African accent. It reduced me to a stammering mess about sixty-seven percent of the time.

 Now, Casper buttoned up his crisp white Oxford shirt under a narrow-cut, jet-black suit jacket and a slim black tie that matched the black jeans he preferred to wear - it suggests a certain unpretentiousness, he’d insisted. I’d responded with a brutally honest, “but we are pretentious. We are both pretentious as hell. I thought that was our thing.” He’d laughed, but still he wore those jeans. It wasn’t long before I was following suit, loathe to admit how much more comfortable they were.

 Our lovely assistant on that particular night had already been chosen, an air-aligned demon who resided in a particularly nasty part of the underworld but who would also be crucial to making tonight’s show a success. It had agreed to help us in exchange for three full days and nights in my body, possessing me, tasting the living world for just a bit. The ritual to summon each individual demon was always different and required significant research on our part, but they always began in the same way. Baby demons, minor ones, usually only asked for a lock of hair, fingernail clippings, an eyelash or two, but the deeper places demanded blood. Casper and I had long since designed a system to categorize the status levels and abilities of all of the demons we’d called forth over the years, and this one was a 3B - about midway between a very minor new demon and an ancient, godlike one. Casper called those “black diamond demons” despite neither of us ever having been skiing.

 I hesitated before dragging across my pale skin the wickedly sharp, carefully charged ritual knife we always used to do this, wincing a little when a beaded line of blood bubbled up from the shallow wound. Casper never hesitated or winced, and I handed him the knife to watch him slice a quick cut across his open palm. He’d gone deeper, and we could sense how this pleased our demon, who of course refused to give us its real name. Demons never did, and we never asked. The air around us went icy and dense like a thick fog filling our dressing room, swirling around us in gusts and damp bursts that tousled our hair and raised goosebumps on our skin. Finally, it stood before us, a vaguely humanoid shape made of dark smoke and the scent of raw tobacco and ozone.

 We held out our bleeding hands, and the smoke ghosted over them, wrapping itself in tendrils around our fingers and wrists, soaking up the life in our blood like a fine wine. There was an almost audible sigh of pleasure, and we let it enjoy itself for a moment before Casper asked, “Can you disguise yourself onstage if we need you to?”

 Wordlessly, the demon went transparent, a barely visible cloud of steam that definitely couldn’t have been seen from the audience.

 We’d already established that it could do everything else we needed for tonight’s show, and I said to Casper, “It can, it’s right in front of us and I can barely see it. We’re good.”

 “Outstanding.” Casper’s tone was dry, but I could sense how excited he was. Audrey knocked on our door.

 “In five, gentlemen,” she said, and I reached for my brother’s hand.

 “We’ve got this,” I assured him, giving it a squeeze.

 “I know,” Casper said, but he squeezed back.

 The crowd was already seated and waiting, the lights dimmed and smoky-violet. Casper knew the stage well enough by now to not really need his reflective cane, but he brought it anyway in the interest of alerting the audience to his blindness. It occasionally played a role in our tricks. The scent of rose incense lingered in the air, as Audrey was fond of burning it all over the theater while she worked. The stage was an old-fashioned raised one with a real velvet curtain pulled back, a deep eggplant color instead of classic red. The ceilings were impossibly high and lined with wooden rafters, which was golden architecture for magicians, and the audience seats were padded with the same plum velvet as the stage curtain, comfortable enough for people to relax for hours. Luckily, we only needed one.

 “Ladies, gentlemen, and others,” Casper opened with his standard easy confidence, and the crowd’s reaction was all but visible. They leaned forward slightly, eyes wide, some hoping to catch us pulling an obvious trick to validate their jaded natures and some hoping for proof tonight in this small Boston theater that magic was real. “I am Casper Lenox, this is my brother Taran.” We were dressed identically as always, and I could hear wheels in nearly a hundred brains turning as they struggled to find some difference between us so they could remember who was who later on. Our twin outfits that matched our twin faces was a deliberate effect, however. We were even roughly the same height and weight, down to less than an inch and five pounds, both us tall and lanky. Once Casper put his cane down, we were indistinguishable from each other. There had always been something about this that soothed me.

 Our warm-up was always something the audience expected, was ready for. This loosened their minds, made them smile, and that was when we went in for the kill. Casper was a far better opener than me, so he gestured to a young woman sitting in the third row, obviously completely at random. “Taran,” he said to me, his voice clear and strong. “Who is sitting in that seat?”

 I peered out for longer than was necessary, and smiled at the woman as well. “It’s a woman. Maybe twenty-five, thirty.” She was clearly middle-aged, and the flush that spread up her cheeks as she laughed was visible to me from the stage. The rest of the audience was charmed by our charming her, murmurs of approval floating up to us. “...lady killers, look at them.”

 “Such good-looking kids.”

 “Look at her, she’s blushing.”

 “So sweet, they made her night.”

 “She has brown hair, up in a bun. Beautiful eyes, cream-colored sweater,” I went on. “Natalie Portman’s lost sister.” The woman covered her cheeks with her hands, shaking her head. The fact that Casper had gone blind far too young to know what Natalie Portman looked like was irrelevant. The point was the effect.

 “She’s perfect, please bring her up here,” Casper said, the sleeves of both his shirt and his jacket rolled up to his elbows to avoid accusations of clumsy sleeve conceals. We were not amateurs, with or without demonic assistance in our shows. I stepped off the stage via a short staircase that extended down to the audience, waiting for her to cross through the seats in her row before taking her hand and bending to press a kiss to her knuckles. Her girlfriends squealed, one of them shouting, “look at you, you cougar!” I led her up to the stage with her arm in mine, aware that it had been a long time since any non-related male had shown her any kind of attention. It was evident in the way she looked away, shy, when Casper took her hand to kiss it as well. Her horn-rimmed glasses glinted off the stage lights, obscuring her eyes, but the nervous pleasure radiated from her, and I smiled. Flirting with people in the audience was my favorite part of the show, making them feel special.

 “You two are crazy,” she insisted. “Get some young girl up here, no one wants to look at me on the stage.” She was wearing sensible navy-blue slacks and brown loafers, a string of small pearls around her neck. She was at least forty,  maybe older, and I felt an inexplicable surge of protectiveness toward her, wondering what had created her low self-esteem.

 “I don’t need to see you to know that you’re beautiful,” Casper told her quietly. “My brother’s taste is impeccable.” The crowd sighed, men and women alike, and the woman looked like she might get emotional. Casper lifted a closed fist to hold it over the small wooden table that Audrey had left on the stage for us, devoid of any hidden compartments or secret drawers in which to hide things. Loosening his grip a bit, he let a handful of dark soil that had not been there before funnel down into a small pile onto the table’s surface, and the crowd tensed with surprise. “What’s your name?” he wanted to know.

 The woman cleared her throat. “Theresa. Theresa-Anne,” she said haltingly, and Casper smiled.

 “What’s your favorite flower, Theresa-Anne?”

 “Oh, I don’t know, I suppose…” she went soft around the eyes then, a sudden memory rushing back that quieted her voice and slumped her shoulders. “A calla lily. My husband used to bring them to me every Sunday before he died.”

 Casper only nodded, waving a hand over the small pile of soil on the table. We’d both been gifted with long, elegant hands, our fingers nimble and spidery and good for close-up magic, slender wrists full of bird-bones. The audience waited, breathless, some having heard of us doing this trick before. It took a moment, but then. A tiny, barely visible green bud popped up from the rootless soil, a pinky-sized bright green leaf unfurling along the base of a thickening flower stem that was somehow rising of its own volition from the soil. Another leaf, a third, and now people were hushed in total shock, leaning forward as the bud at the end of the stem widened and grew right before their eyes, opening after maybe three minutes into a fully-formed, fresh calla lily. Casper allowed it to finish before gently plucking it from the soil, using a silk handkerchief from his jacket pocket to pull off the stringy white roots and clean the dirt from it, and then he handed it to Theresa-Anne. She was crying a little now, her round dark eyes wet with memories.

 “Oh…” she said weakly, taking it from him. “Look at me, my god. I’m sorry, I’m just - I haven’t touched one of these since my John died.” She held it to her chest, inhaling its scent, some old ache in her eased in that moment, and Casper and I smiled faintly at each other.

 “He loved you,” I told her. “How could he not?” That was when she whimpered a little, dropping her head to my shoulder and struggling to contain herself. I gave her a moment, and then guided her back to her seat, where she rejoined her friends to dab at her eyes with my handkerchief, which I’d given to her. The applause erupted all at once, people touched and awed by what they’d just seen, which really was the whole point. The world seemed determined to erode humanity’s sense of beauty and magic and wonder, not with science - there was a reverent artistry in the truth and discovery of it - but with what seemed to me an increasingly jaded approach to life. Fuck that, I’d decided long ago. I wanted to spend my life bringing magic back to the world. If it left me vulnerable to ridicule, to hurt feelings, then whatever. I always had my brother.

 It was my turn now, and tonight I was adhering to a favorite standard of mine - a card trick. Casper and I had gone through endless decks over the years, learning and performing. I’d been working on this one for some time, and for my audience member I selected a beautiful man sitting near the end of the b-section’s fifth row. He too was roughly middle-aged, with warm brown skin and a mess of chocolate curls falling over his forehead, smiling liquid-dark eyes that crinkled at the corners no matter what his expression said. He jogged up the steps to the stage on his own, laughing and waving at the people. “Your name, Sir?” I began, and he grinned at me.

 “Joaquin. Joe.”

 “Joaquin,” I continued, deliberately ignoring the anglocized version of his name that he’d offered up like an apology. “Thanks so much for coming out tonight.”