Long ago, it is told, cards fluttered upward out of magicians’ hands; rabbits floated skyward from their palms; silk scarves slithered through their fingers into the air.
     The trick was invented here, in this city, whence it spread throughout the society of magicians around the world. It was a simple illusion, one that made the observers feel like they were falling, if just for a moment; a trick of focus and movement meant to startle—how shall I describe it to you—like when you’re sitting in an automobile and the vehicle next to you moves, and you grip the wheel and press the brake even harder, only to realize it wasn’t you who had moved.
     But what at first seemed a harmless sleight-of-hand kept surprising the magicians with unexpected variations, until they could no longer control it. They gradually lost the ability to hold on to anything, couldn’t keep a newspaper or pen in grip, couldn’t remember the last time they’d eaten soup, or rice, or anything that couldn’t be firmly grasped between two hands. Even the pickles atop their sandwiches went zipping up into space; and one by one, the magicians’ lovers slipped out of their embraces into the sky.
     And this, as they say, was just the beginning.
     Bit by bit, everything that was not these magicians began to disappear, floating upward into the stratosphere: farms, pig by cow; woodpiles, log by spider; jungles, monkey by tiger; savannahs, elephant by baobab; until every ant, every pebble, every blade of grass, every speck of dirt and grain of sand, every drop of water lifted up from Earth’s surface and hurtled into space.
     The magicians tried to hold down the strata of rock under their feet, but it was pointless: everything continued to fragment under their palms and float upward, crumbling skyward around them, silt flowing past them like snow in reverse and magma threading upward until there was nothing left but four hundred magicians from around the world pressed together in a knot of bodies, jostling to sort themselves out. For a moment they thought that was the end of the trick, far more than they’d bargained for to be sure, but at the very least over and finished.
     They couldn’t believe this had all started with a simple illusion. Indeed, it began innocently enough, with gasps and hands clutching chests in those moments before smiles blossomed across relieved faces, until that fateful night when—and we’ll never know how this could have come to pass—four hundred magicians around the world did the same exact trick at the same exact time, startling the planet into a chain reaction that began with annoyances of floating sandwiches and space-bound rabbits, but expanded catastrophically until the magicians were all that was left, a scrum of bodies in the middle of nothingness, relieved for a moment, hands on chests, bashful but smiling, until they began to compress even more, squeezing into each other because now that everything else had flown up around them, there was nothing left to do but to collapse into themselves.
     Only once these four hundred magicians had almost winked out did the planet comprehend the trick, blink open-mouthed, begin to reassemble its magma core, chuckling sheepishly as it patted its layers of rock back on, sighing with satisfaction at the return of sand and soil and water and trees, smoothing its grass and animals back into place, and after a brief deliberation, taking its humans back too (though at times it regrets this, chalking it up to residual shock), and for one brief beautiful moment every person, animal, plant, rock, morsel of soil, and particle of air on Earth exhaled a sigh of relief and laughed.
     Except three hundred and ninety-nine of the four hundred magicians. They cried, because they could no longer remember how to do the falling trick. It became a secret lost to time, and the last one who knew the secret was doomed to live for eternity, forbidden from sharing the illusion that might destroy the world once more, and for good.
     They say this one last magician lives here now, in this very city. But who knows if this is true, if one person could carry for all time the burden of a tantalizing trick they may never perform, a secret they might perhaps speak of, but never reveal? Who could possibly be asked to contain such a thing?
     I, for one, am certainly glad it is not me.