Two Works by Joanna Grisham

A MAGIC TRICK

Marvelous Melvin said I was the bravest girl he’d ever met.

The magician came to my elementary school every year in the spring. On a Friday afternoon, our teachers packed us into the gym, where we waited with wide eyes. No one bothered to take down the posters slapped-up on the beige walls with cartoon kids jumping rope, doing chin-ups, high-fiving. But the smoke machines, strobing lights, and makeshift stage hurriedly erected at one end of the gym transformed the space enough for a bunch of kids to believe real magic would to happen that afternoon. 

I was in kindergarten, sitting in the front row on my knees, watching in awe as Marvelous Melvin, a forty-year-old with a fake tan and a curly mullet, turned flowers into birds and birds into balloons and made his assistant disappear from center stage and reappear in a puff of smoke at the back of the gym where our teachers leaned against the wall, chatting about their weekend plans, bored out of their minds having seen this same show countless times. But I was amazed, spellbound.

When Marvelous Melvin called for volunteers, I didn’t raise my hand because I wanted to go up on stage. I raised it because I was six and everyone else did.

Then, it happened.

“You, there. The little girl in the yellow shirt. Would you join us, please?” 

I didn’t know he was talking to me until the blonde-beehived assistant crouched in front of me and took my hand. “It’s okay, sweetie,” she whispered. “I’ll take care of you.”

She led me to the stage and helped me up the rickety steps.

“This is one of my newest tricks,” the magician bellowed, his thick mustache glistening with sweat. Then he unveiled a menacing-looking wooden cutout of a tiger, about six feet tall, with a wide mouth lined in jagged teeth. 

The music grew louder. My heart thumped in time with the bass.

Marvelous Melvin distracted the crowd with jokes and flare, while his assistant explained to me in a hushed voice what would happen next. I wish I remembered everything she said that day. Memory has a way of failing at recreating the details of the most life-altering events. I know she told me something about putting my head into the tiger’s mouth, something about pulling a lever and letting the tiger bite my head off, only how it was all pretend and I would be fine. I remember nodding slowly, worried I might die, thinking it was too late to back out. I didn’t want to look like a baby. And everyone was watching me, counting on me to survive. 

The assistant escorted me behind the tiger and helped me onto a platform. Then she secured a sparkling purple blindfold around my eyes and carefully placed my head into the tiger’s mouth, guillotine-style. I suppose my breath caught in my throat. I’m sure I wanted to cry, to pull off the blindfold and run for the heavy double-doors across the gym. Perhaps, I thought of my mother’s face – proud or terrified – or I fixated on the chocolate milk stain I’d gotten on my favorite shirt at snack time. Perhaps, I prayed, readied myself for the end, the way I was taught to approach death by my Sunday school teacher. 

The music got quieter. There was a drumroll, and Marvelous Melvin said his magic words. I remember the sound of the lever. It was the same sound the big paper cutter in the back of the classroom made when our teacher cut out shapes for us to color. And I remember the terrible cracking noise the tiger’s jaws made when its teeth clamped around my neck, only they weren’t around my neck, somehow, and I wanted so badly to know how that was possible, but I couldn’t see anything. The kids in the audience gasped and screamed, and everyone cheered when the magician must have shown them that I was okay. But how was I okay? I needed to know. But a magician never reveals his secrets, of course. 

After an eternity, probably less than a minute, I felt hands on my shoulders. The assistant whispered, “You did great, sweetie,” and removed the blindfold. I wiped tears from my eyes and stared up at the wooden tiger looming in front of me, unsure of how I survived, worried I hadn’t survived at all but was now a ghost, only no one had noticed yet.

“You’re a brave little girl,” Marvelous Melvin said. “The bravest I’ve ever met.” And he patted me on the head and bowed toward me and encouraged louder applause from the audience. I simply nodded, wide-eyed and delirious. As a prize, his assistant gave me a lollipop that started out clear but changed colors when you sucked on it. I remember my classmates were jealous. 

When I slid into my spot on the gym floor, one of my classmates, Edward, a spiky haired kid who always wore a faded denim vest covered in iron on patches, told me the whole class thought I was dead. “Like for real dead.” 

“I could be,” I whispered, but no one heard me over the music and clapping. Marvelous Melvin had moved on to his next trick.

THE MIRROR

after “Quinceanera” by Judith Ortiz Cofer

On my eleventh birthday, in the Pizza Hut bathroom, while our personal pan pepperonis cooled at a long table near the window that overlooked the video store, we huddled around a slow-dripping sink, turned off the lights, and waited for magic – or evil – to show her face, chanting, I don’t believe in the Bell Witch, I don’t believe in the Bell Witch, again and again. We were five fifth grade girls with poufy bangs, plastic-bangled wrists, neon pink shirts, and dog-eared Holy Bibles on our nightstands at home, girls dabbling in the Dark Arts with as much earnestness as a band of Sunday schoolers knocking on doors to spread the Good News. 

We believed. We wanted to believe.  

Standing hand in hand, breathless, we burned to summon that fabled witch, beckoned the spirit-woman to manifest, the villain our older siblings had warned us about. We willed her to return from whatever heaven or hellscape she inhabited. If our magic worked, we weren’t sure what to expect. Would she be angered? Relieved? Would she suck us into the mirror or simply scream? Perhaps, she’d scare us into fearing something more palpable than the angels and demons our pastors warned us about. Perhaps, she’d look for a moment upon our eager faces, as smooth and sincere as the dolls waiting in boxes in the backs of our closets, longing to be held again, to be loved, and she’d feel empathy or solidarity. Would she see her legacy, her rage, reflected in the eyes of pre-teen girls who desperately wanted to be seen and heard and believed in too? 

Perhaps, we didn’t know what we wanted to happen at all. And possibility was the whole point. 

The lookout, a broken link in the circle, I hovered like a ghost behind my friends and stared into the black mirror, struggling to see the woman taking shape as we chanted. Just in case, I kept my eyes on the sliver of light shining beneath the door that separated us from the jukebox playing Celine Dion, from the tired mother waiting for her carryout on the cold, vinyl bench, from the antsy teenager twisting knobs on a video game – from everything we could return to, as long as one of us kept a trembling hand on the doorknob, a finger on the light switch. 

You can find Joanna Grisham’s work in Thirteen Bridges Review, SHIFT, The Bangalore Review, Still: The Journal, Gleam, and other places. Her chapbook of poems, Phantoms, was published in 2023 (Finishing Line Press). She holds an MFA from Georgia College and lives in Tennessee with her wife and daughter.

1 May 2025