The Sunrise Manor Routine
AUTUMN RAIN spits against the grimy windows. They’ve left the curtains half-closed, garish flame-retardant monstrosities in a flat green the precise shade of cartoon vomit. The bouquet of tightly budded roses on the windowsill only makes the décor that much more depressing, too bright a contrast to the grey walls. The television is barely audible, a game show I remember as a child, only the host died years ago. The guy who replaced him is brash and creepy, flirting with women old enough to be his mother.
Now I sound like my father.
He sits next to me on the sofa, his bony legs crossed easily, one of my mother’s hand-knitted sweaters hanging off his emaciated frame in thick folds. He smiles benignly at the television, at the kind of program he used to loathe, at me. “It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?” he says with an easy smile, as if I’m a charming stranger. Which I suppose I am, now.
A commercial comes on for the Great Illusionist Milo van West. It’s an astonishing sixty seconds, a tour de force of graphics and cinematography, yet it still has the aura of a relic, like circuses or ice shows. When men can walk on the moon, when you can talk to anyone anywhere in the world, what do you need of magic?
Not that you can even call it that anymore. “Illusion” is the legal term now, per the Honest Purveyors Act of 1970. A thousand magicians suddenly reduced to curiosities.
But there I go, parroting my father again. On the surface the HPA changed nothing; it wasn’t even
