The Big Tricks
Cathy Ulrich
The bartender at the end of the world has been learning magic. She spends her days behind the counter of the bar where she had worked before. She thinks of that time as before, thinks of now as an empty after. She moves the glass tumblers around, practices magic tricks, juggling. When she breaks something, she sweeps it into a corner, shimmers of glass in the daylight. She had never been to this place in the daylight before, never seen the span of dust on the overhead lights, always existed in the late-night dim, dim, dim.
Now, in the after, in the cracking, silent after, the bartender drags one of the barstools behind the counter, sits and looks out at the street.
Abracadabra, she thinks.
In the before, the bartender was always having to smile when men complimented her hair, when they touched it without permission, touched her without permission. When men said, come on, babe, this isn’t what I ordered, she smiled.
You know how it is, she said to her sister roommate in the mornings, both of them eating soggy-cold bowls of cereal, her sister on her way up, the bartender on her way down.
I know how it is, her sister agreed.
When the world ended, or was ending, or is still ending, the bartender looked for her sister, the bartender looked for her sister, the bartender left notes in her sister’s favorite places: If you’re still here, come find me.
Come find me.
The bartender hasn’t been back to their apartment since she couldn’t find her sister there, the bartender makes imaginary cocktails with empty bottles. It is dark in the storage room, even with a flashlight, the kind of dark the bartender had never thought of before, untouched-by-light, eternal dark. The bartender hasn’t been able to convince herself to bring out more bottles from there.
She sits on the barstool behind the counter.
She says what’s that behind your ear, makes a quarter appear in between her fingers. She spins the quarter on the counter. It turns and turns and falls.
There is an apartment above the bar. Someone used to live there before, someone with three pairs of frayed-lace Converse slumped beside the front door, someone who drank out of mugs instead of glasses, someone with a cracked bathroom mirror and dirty bathtub. The bartender sometimes sleeps on the bed there, sometimes flips through the pages of their books, dead-white-men books, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald.
The bartender carries a pool cue everywhere she goes now. It has become habit, the way holding her car keys sharp end out had been habit before. She goes from one room to another, clutching the pool cure in her hand, laying it down on bar counter, tables, beside her in the bed.
She hasn’t seen anyone in months.
There is a broken pool cue in the alley behind the bar, there is a dried patch of blood. It has rained since then, but the stain still remains. It trails off in thin, flat threads.
The bartender looks out the apartment window and she can see the broken pool cue and bloodstain pavement. She looks out the window and remembers the rumble of traffic in the morning, the weight of her sister’s step creaking the stairs as she came up, the way she wished for dark, dark, dark so she could sleep.
At the convenience store around the corner, the water bottles are still cold. The bartender drinks them one by one, watches them disappear one by one.
This is magic, she thinks.
At night, the bartender flashlight-reads a book on magic in the over-the-bar apartment. She leaves the Steinbeck and the Nabakov and the Mailer on their shelves, leaves them spine-face outward, thumbs through the magic book, goes back and back and back until she has learned it all.
For the big tricks, the book advises, you need a partner.
The bartender leaves the book on the wobbling kitchen table.
In the alley, she covers the broken pool cue and bloodstain with a white sheet, snaps it wrist-fast. The bartender remembers the sound of gunshots, remembers the crack of a pool cue over skull, remembers locking the storage room door behind her, hiding and hiding in the dark.
The bartender spreads the sheet over the pool cue and bloodstain, watches it settle.
When she pulls it away, she will say presto.
When she pulls it away, everything will be gone.
Cathy Ulrich has only ever mastered one magic trick that only fools small children. Her work has been published in various journals, including trampset, Adroit and Flashback Fiction.