Magic Memories

By: Hannah Yoder

FREDERICK THE MAGICAL: ONE NIGHT ONLY! The old poster read. Part of Frederick will always cherish those days as a world-renowned magician. He enjoyed bringing so much joy to his audiences. Another part of him, however, is so glad that he gave all that up years ago. It got so tiring having to constantly be on the road and come up with new ideas for shows.

“Hey, Dad, what’s all this stuff?” Frederick’s son, Eric, came over with a large, dusty trunk.

He came home for spring break to help his parents clean up their house and get rid of odds and ends so that they were ready to move by the end of the summer. The other day when Frederick was getting gas, he decided to grab a Powerball ticket just for laughs. Little did he know that buying that ticket would change his life forever. Frederick and his wife, Matilda, had wanted to move out of their house for a while now, but just never had the money. But when they found out they won the lottery they immediately jumped online to look for houses in Vermont.

“I have no idea, set it down and we’ll have a look!” The man smiled at his son as he crouched down beside him to open the trunk. When he opened it, all these memories came flooding back to him. “Oh wow…this is the very first magic kit I ever got. I thought it had gotten lost somewhere. I haven’t seen this bad boy in years!”

The two started to go through the trunk, dusting off old instructional books and various different tools. “Oh my god! Is this you, Dad?” His son holds up an old worn-down picture of Frederick when he was younger, all dressed up in a cloak, top hat, and silk white gloves, holding a magic wand triumphantly up in the air.

“Oh, I remember this day! It was the day of my fifth-grade talent show. That was when I really started getting into magic. You know I won first place that night? From that day on, it was my dream to become a magician. I remembered how much you wanted to be one too when you were younger. You loved when I had some new tricks I wanted to try out because you would always help me with them.”

“Yeah, I loved watching you do them when I was little.”

“Hey boys, the pizza just got here so whenever you’re hungry. What do we have here?” Matilde walked down the basement stairs, over to Eric and Frederick.

“We found Dad’s first magic kit while cleaning out some shelves! It’s got some pretty cool stuff in it!”

“Oh, I bet it does…” she peered over the shoulder of her husband to observe what they were pulling out of the box. “Oh! I haven’t seen these in ages! Oh! You used these to propose to me!” She pulled out a deck of playing cards and opened it. She began shuffling through the cards until she found a blank one with the faded words “Will you marry me?” appeared.

“I’ll never forget this day. See, we were at the park with all of our friends a few weeks after graduation. Your father was showing everyone these new card tricks he learned with just generic playing cards. Then he turned to me and pulled out these new metallic cards, which honey, you were not subtle in the slightest with that one. Anyways, he did the plain old regular ‘is this your card’ trick, but instead of the card that I actually picked, he pulled out this one.” She held up said card and showed it to her son, “We got married a year later, then had you not too long after. I can’t believe you’re in college now. It feels like just yesterday you were in kindergarten.” She gave her son a big hug.

“How about we bring this thing upstairs so that we can look at it better? We can have pizza then finish going through it.” Frederick stood up from being crouched down.

“That sounds like a great idea. I’m starving!” Eric got everything packed back in the box and carried it up the stairs. Frederick and Matilda not too far behind.