“I like to think that the greatest stories come to you as broken things, requiring the reader to pause periodically and use their wits to, as it were, experimentally push the bits around until the devices mesh their teeth and spring into whirring life. At the end of such novels, it’s almost as if you’re standing side-by-side with the author at a workbench, knuckles pleasantly grazed and wiping grease from your fingertips as they polish their glasses.” – Lawrence Damocles Eggbester

Mr Eggbester there, at his best. I wonder if he had even the faintest idea of the eventual weight of those words as he patted his back so hard. “Wait,” you say, “that wasn’t him. It was you!”  You’re right of course, but wrong. Put on a hat. Turn backwards. There. The difference is as short and thin as the very now. Cross your eyes. Lose and regain focus. Now we’re the same. After years, I declare my love for him and thus change his name by marriage. Lose that dangerous middle. Stand clear then carve through the single horse hair it depends from so, as it finally falls, its hungry edge cracks only the lonely ‘b’ down the stroke and slaps the remaining crescent over to make the most wonderful ‘n’.

Better. Much, much better; but my man Lawrence is a criminal. A liar. And our shared pen will not do our good bidding unless we first unwrite this:

“My dear child, there is no magic in this world nor any other.”

A joke was intended, clearly. And a tongue should have stayed at home in its cheek. Now, mechanically speaking, a joke must land on a truth or else it’s little more than time wasted on a lie. We’ve talked it right through, Lawrence and I, so here (for it must be here), now and on the same lit-up paper:

We sincerely, sincerely apologise.

There is magic in this world and every other. We’ve been presented with it gleaming golden, yet we cannot show it to you. To you it would not appear. You’d see only the thin air. If you had the right bright eyes and had perhaps just put down a perfect novel, you might see something akin to a trespassing breath between purpled iron bars. But eyes like that are not merely one in a million, or even a billion. They are only one. Our magic can only be seen by us. Yours will appear differently.

For one last time Lawrence and I will momentarily divide so he can have his last word:

“You will know it when you see it.”

“And… I feel I should add,

that I did actually write:

‘The man winked at her.'”

Stay watchful,

OXO