Magic Show

“Come on! It’s starting!” Greg, my neighbor, hollered from the sidewalk.

“What’s starting?” I said. Behind him, groups of kids hurried down the street.

We’d moved to the neighborhood just weeks before. I was shy; a bookworm, waiting for school to start. Greg was the only kid I’d met.

“The magic show!” said Greg, exasperated. “At Mr. Hale’s house!”

At the end of the Hales’ dirt driveway, rows of kids were seated on the grass.

White-haired and very thin, Mr. Hale wore a black top-hat and tails. In his hand he gripped a wand, producing doves from an urn. He asked for a volunteer to be sawed in half. I raised my hand. No one breathed.

“Just relax,” Mr. Hale whispered. “There’s nothing to it.” I got into the box and held my breath.

A collective gasp went up. And when I emerged in one piece, I was a star.

Ice Cream Truck

You still see them in the mill cities: ice cream trucks trawl the neighborhoods like hulking beasts seeking kids with loose change. Their knife-sharp melodies perforate our thick summer evenings like an ice pick passes through butter.

When I was a kid, that music was a call to run, to beg your mother for a dollar and hurry into the street. Today hardly anyone comes.

Our ice cream truck is yellow. Cheerful decals decorate its sides. The driver, a slender Vietnamese man, speaks little English but smiles as he passes. The speakers on his truck blare “Silent Night” and “Easter Parade” because he’s unaware, or perhaps doesn’t care, that the songs are out of season. We joke that he got the soundtrack cheap, but in our neighborhood those tunes have become the soundtrack of our after-supper-time summer nights.

Alone, our Asian ice cream man rolls on, sometimes long into October.