My Favorite Card Trick

I do not know what to call it. I want a title, so that spectators may respect it, and recommend it to others. It feels like a book! It's really just a long card routine, with many chapters. I love it. I'm always editing it. Practicing it feels like meditation. Performing it feels like reading it out loud. It's a different story every time, but the movements are the same. The first chapter takes place in a desert, somewhere in between night and day. It ends at dawn, and all the cards are face up to see the sun. The first card is the floater, and in the second chapter, spends an entire week, or seven days, floating from the bottom of the deck to the top. I guess you can say the second chapter takes place in the sky. It ends at a loss, though, as the floater card vanishes from sight. The spectator and magician comb the desert in search of it, only to find nothing- no water, no women, and no sign of the signed card anywhere. The third chapter, which deals with this loss in a magical fashion, finds the card in the shade of a cardboard cave, outside the desert! I guess you can say it's an escape. The card is housed, and the magic continues. The fourth chapter deals with escape, more elaborately, and the card dances in and out of the cave-box it grew up in. It flies out, as if it had wings, only to return, to fly back, and to end up in the middle of the ocean, swimming or floating with ease. The fifth chapter is of sirens, or many women who fly to rescue our card from desolate lonlieness. The queens surround him, and dance like rings of saturn around his sides. It's beautiful, and scary, because at the end, he finds himself lost in the desert again. It was a mirage! The queens remain, and gamble away with the spectator to confuse him and loose him in the quarries of a shallow, shifting desert romance where nothing is certain, and all hearts turn to sand. A prayer is said, for something real, in the sixth chapter, where the magician banishes each unholy siren to the far corners of the desert. Our card is found! Burried like a mummy at the center of the desert, and with him come the sirens, back from their pilgrammage of pennance, this time to help our card find his way home. They grow wings, and attract his family from hiding. He is not an orphan! The card has matching parents, and a sibling, and together they journey through the cardboard expanse of paper rivers and red mountains to find grace. The desert is behind them, and it's just eight cards left- infinite cards left. The sirens, now saints, dance with the hands of the magician and the spectator, switching places selflessly to put one another in another one's shoes. Walking becomes easier, and feet are rested. Hands move, and the better four end up carrying our card and his kin to the promised land of applause. The audience loves it! The odyssey of one card trick into an opus of poetic magnificence, of sleight of hand sorcery, and mythological mayhem. I really see this card trick as more than a card trick. I don't know what to call it. It's 15 minutes in length, and a lifetime in depth. I don't know- who am I to express anything more than just magic. I could get it out of my mind. This could just be another stupid card trick.

-antidote