The magician’s girl has a groove in her body where she is split in half,a deep cutting straight through her waist where the blade slips, night after night,irrevocable. in every town her bisection is complete; again and again she sinks down into the locking box, concealed, her sudden splitting hidden beneath painted wood, a bland night sky of yellowed stars shining dully where her blood should run. but when the box halves slide together, she is fused, mysterious. when the magician lifts her from the box her face is blank, serious, her eyes cast upwards, distant. he would have to end the show there even if it wasn’t his big finale after she is cut, the girl cannot smile. fused, a dark welt bands her waist, red, sometimes jagged at the edges if her joining has been imperfect. * * after the first four years she stopped crying out when the edges of the saw began to slide, but it still hurts, she tells me. Of course it still hurts when he cuts me in half, is what she actually says, in a dampened voice that chastises me for asking. there is not much more she will tell me, though I batter her with questions invasive as any blade, What was the worst part of it? How badly did it hurt tonight? What did it feel like when you were put together again? she is silent to these questions, still. I palpate the scarring of her flesh, the hard, hidden ring, tiny hitches, like globes of hardened wax caught beneath her skin. why are you always doing that? she asks, her face turned away from me. I try to lift my hand from her waist, but can think of no other place to put it, no other caress to give her. because it's you. because no one else has anything like it * * you’re wrong, of course, it’s not just me, the funambulist girls have deep grooves cut into their feet where they walk the wire the high flying girls have gashes slashed just as deep in their gripping hands. the contortionists, too, have long streaks, like faded maplines, etched along their overstretching limbs, we are all marked, if not miraculous. no one knows the nature of the magic that my father-uncle-master-lover (every possibility or none, dress me as you wish) used to first spilt me in two, or if, perhaps, the magic was my own, but there is no time in my life when I was not cloven, somehow disconnected at the middle even when I'm not locked in the box, ready for the cut. even in dreams something is forever glistening in the Great Magician's hand and I am split, whirled open at the middle, turned sideways so the audience can see me in pulsing cross section as I stare off towards the sky of canopy. though forever trained to smile my face falls flat each night, deadened. I tell it to smile but it does not obey. * * and of course it still hurts when he cuts me in half. as much as I would like to tell you, my lover who loves only my cutting, that it is otherwise, I spend each show imagining the first cold tear of the blade. like the audience, who truly have come only to see the Great Magician's greatest trick, my continuous vivisection, I grow impatient with the smaller tricks, the teasing preamble. I have no more time for the bright cards that he flips nimbly through his hands, the ragged doves that fly up from my proffered scarves, cooing listlessly in the latticework until later, reconnected, I will coax them down and press them into wicker cages. I catch the crowd's thirst for my dismemberment, after the doves, the end is near, and the crowd grows quieter, more attentive, you want always to touch the mark of my bisection, to feel it. I want only not to feel it, but it is only in this moment, as the box rolls across the stage, lumbering somehow, like an animal, that I do not feel the line of my cutting my blood rushes loudly, then, in my inner ear, in my self, oceanic, its tidal pulse distending every vessel of my body, down to the smallest branching of my veins I can feel nothing then but the wholeness of me, the terrible and terrifying wholeness of a body about to be split in two.
