American Magician

by Emma Atkins

A magician once asked my nan to come to America and stay with his family. She worked at the hotel hosting the magicians’ convention and invited him back home to see a real British house. He did magic for the kids, then extended an invitation of his own like a bouquet of faux flowers. She said, Yes, worked extra shifts and saved enough money for a plane ticket, not knowing whether the magician’s house on the other side of the pond was actually an illusion, or whether the offer had been made out of politeness. She went anyway and dragged my dad along. As the youngest of the seven children, he had no say.

My grandad drove them to the airport, although he didn’t speak a word the whole way and didn’t believe that she would really get on the plane. My dad, a couple of months shy of a single-digit birthday, sat in the back, looking like a kidnapping in progress: bleary-eyed and still in his pyjamas. They stopped a milkman on the way and filled up a bowl of cereal. Grandad still said nothing. He dropped them off at the airport, watched them get on the plane, and realised only then that Nan hadn’t been bluffing about going to America to see the magician again. He sold his boat to afford his own ticket and waited in the airport The Terminal-style, until there was a seat free on a plane and he could catch her up. 

I hadn’t known the first time she told that story that my Grandad had even had a boat to sell; that you could stop random milkmen and ask them to fill your cereal bowl; that you could cross the Atlantic and turn up at a magician’s mother’s house and have her welcome you in for a crap fish and chips. These were the kinds of things my grandparents did, the kinds of stories they’d tell if you asked where they’d gotten that framed picture of Niagara Falls.

BIO: Emma Atkins is a poet and novelist currently studying for her PhD at Middlesex University. She has recently started writing creative nonfiction to document the chaos of family life and to prove to herself that these things happened. Her work has appeared in magazines and journals, including Stony Thursday Poetry Book and Amsterdam Quarterly, among other publications.