There’s no room for the old magic. The Age of Enlightenment burnt bright, and its light was thrown into every corner of our understanding. Every stone was upturned, every folk remedy distilled or debunked. There was no more room for the old gods to hide at the bottom of streams, or for lucky ghosts to sit and listen in the rafters.
Where magic did manage to hold on, it was diminished. The mortals did not look for the magic and so they could no longer see it. It persisted in small ways, in lucky ball caps and little totems for safety. But for the most part, the old magic was dead, replaced with science and innovation and technology and sleight of hand and the other thousand things people found to fill their time.
It does follow that a new sort of magic would evolve, if given the opportunity. With enough time the scrappy, surviving magic might form a new species, adapted to the modern world.
Brinley stared into the bright red eyes of the little white rabbit. The rabbit looked back at him, its wide set prey eyes gazing absently past either side of his head. He sighed.
Brinley Brock was a magician, and as a magician, he was in need of a rabbit. In the fluorescent light of the Petco his options sat before him. There was a large and affable peach colored rabbit. A small white bunny with black feet and ears. Something that had been identified as a rabbit but looked more like an animated dust bunny. And then there was the albino rabbit. Its back feet were abnormally long, its face was squat and uneven, and it looked underfed. Things were not looking good.
A magician needs a rabbit, and that rabbit ought to be white. Sure, there were hipsters and hacks who’d stoop to using a Holland lop or dwarf Hotot, but a real magician had a fully white rabbit. Brinley liked to think of himself as a real magician. He came from a long and storied line of showmen and illusionists. His grandfather had taught him how to make coins appear from behind people's ears when he was young. His father had spent most of his childhood performing for adoring crowds. At 34, Brinley had neither the success nor skill of the performers that had come before him. Mostly he had impatience, and a deep seated sense of injustice.
Despite his many failures, and gentle nudges from his family that accounting might be more his speed, Brinley was determined to get his big break. He’d left the small town in England that he’d grown up in, and come to Las Vegas, Nevada, the last oasis of magic. He had attributed his lack of success to the UK’s dismal sense of whimsy, and he was sure that Las Vegas was the place to be as a scrappy, upstart magician.
That had been six months ago. In that time Brinley had realized that Vegas was mostly filled with disillusioned gamblers and bachelorette parties. It was not the last safe haven of magic, it was a glittering testament to consumerism and the modern era. It was a shrine to the society that had killed magic.
But all that could change. He’d finally got his chance. A third rate casino that could accurately be described as geriatric needed a new stage act. And Brinley needed a new rabbit.
Mouth puckered in concentration, Brinley weighed his options. This was an ugly rabbit, but this was the third store he’d been to, and it was the only pure white rabbit he’d been able to find. His gig started in a week. Once he got paid he’d be able to afford a better rabbit. A cute one with a cotton ball tail and big black eyes. He’d get one from a breeder or something. Yes, this rabbit would do, for now.
Brinley bought the rabbit, and a wire cage, and he went home.
In the morning, he walked out from his bedroom to find the rabbit eating his house plant, one of the few decorations in his sparse apartment.
“No!” He scooped up the rabbit, knocking over the plant in the process. He had some vague memory of the plant being bad for cats, and he didn’t know how that transferred to rabbits. He had locked the cage, hadn’t he? He was sure he had! But there the little rabbit was, squirming under one arm.
Brinley looked down at it, and he could have sworn the rabbit was looking back at him intently. Its beady red eyes contained a kind of menacing intelligence. He shut it back in its cage while he swept up the mess. He caught himself glancing over every couple of minutes to make sure the rabbit was still in its cage.
The next morning, Brinley woke early and went to work. If you had asked him where he worked he would say that he was a magician. But his I-9 showed that he had been employed at In-N-Out burger for just over two months. Clad in a paper hat and white apron, Brinley spent most of his days taking orders at the drive through. It was a particularly rough day. His manager yelled at him, and a road tripping family of eight got into a fight in the middle of the lunch rush, backing up the line for half an hour.
It was after that long and terrible shift that Brinley returned home to an empty apartment. His apartment was always empty, besides the day he’d toured it, no one had ever been to his apartment while he was inside it. Brinley enjoyed the silence. He popped in a microwave meal, and sat on the couch watching tv, letting his brain melt away.
It was some hours after he had gotten home that he looked over at the rabbit's cage and realized it was empty.
“Fuck,” fork and meal fell to the floor as Brinley shot off the couch. He opened the cage, but it was not a large cage, and it was plain to see that the rabbit could not be hiding in it. “Fuck.” He moved the cage to the side, but it was not behind it either. He cast a frantic look around the room. Brinley spent a sleepless night tearing apart his apartment before he collapsed onto the couch at 3:00 am.
In the morning, he woke groggy and disoriented to find that the white rabbit had re-materialized in its cage. Its pink nose worked frantically as it chewed on a scrap of hay. Brinley scrambled off the couch and sat in front of the cage, mouth agape.
The rabbit was gone. The rabbit was back. It had been gone. He’d searched the whole apartment. He sat in angered contemplation in front of the cage, before he realized the time. In a mad dash he left for work, and could only hope the rabbit would still be there when he returned.
That night, a distant scratching woke him. Scritch-scritch-scritch crept into his dreams, until it was incompatible with the internal story, and he was woken up. Outside of his dream the scratching continued, punctuated by muffled thumps and sniffing. He lay in the dark of his room, breathing slow and shallow, listening to the rabbit as it hopped around outside his door. It was out, somehow it was out.
With a restraint that was not common to him, Brinley carefully, delicately, pulled the covers off of himself, and swung his feet off the bed. He put one foot down, then the other, and took a tentative step. The scratching continued beyond the door. He took another step, and another, until he had crossed the floor and made it to the door.
He knew that the damn thing kept getting out. He had never seen how, he had only caught it outside of its cage that one time. But he knew, he knew!
The doorknob was slick in his palm. In one fluid motion, he turned the knob, shoved the door open, and stepped out into the apartment. Reflected street light illuminated the vague outlines of torn paper and shredded couch lining that scattered the floor. The rabbit, a bright, almost luminescent ball of white in the dim lighting, was the only bright spot in the apartment. It was in its cage.
Brinley flipped the lights on and stomped over. It had been out! He’d heard it, the evidence was all over the floor. The little thing looked up at him, it’s mouth twitching, it seemed to always be chewing on nothing. Its red eyes looked almost incandescent in the night.
Go to bed. He told himself there wasn’t anything else to do.
On his first day of work at the casino, Brinley found that he was anxious. His standard entitlement and overconfidence had been replaced with a nervous distrust of his co-star, the rabbit. He’d spent most of the night sleepless, wondering if there was someway he could cut the rabbit out of his act entirely. Sometime around 6:00 am he had resolved to keep it in. He was a magician, from a prestigious family of magicians, and a magician needs to be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat.
In the afternoon, he loaded his props, the rabbit, and its cage, into the back of his sedan, and drove to work. The casino had been built sometime in the 1970’s, and had not been updated since then. The whole building was carpeted in threadbare velvet and gold edging. The theater had an entrenched musty-ness, and the floorboards on the stage were pockmarked with chips and gashes. Brinley was beginning to question if this would really be a big break for him.
This was not how he had pictured things. The rows of theatre chairs were moth-eaten and threadbare. A heavy silence was suspended in the air, alongside the dust, and Brinley had the sudden and terrifying realization that it was his job to clear it. His performance had to throw the weight out of the air. That was an entertainer's job. Somehow that had never occurred to him.
In its cage the rabbit snuffled, and Brinley brought his attention to more immediate matters. If this went poorly, he would have bought the stupid rabbit for no reason. He had let the demon into his apartment only to fail. With that angering thought, he got to work.
As the curtain rose Brinley was pressed, polished, and determined. His coat was an ink spot of black, his smile was 100 watt, and he was ready to put on a show. It started off well, there were polite laughs and claps at the appropriate places, but through it all Brinley could feel the dust in the air, the silence that had settled in the room and left an unbreakable film. It was as though the audience was afraid to react too much, out of respect for the quiet that inhabited the space.
From his table of props Brinley turned to grab his hat. Heart clenched, he could only hope the rabbit was still inside. As he picked it up he felt the weight of the animal tucked under the false bottom. He tipped the hat to the audience, before reaching inside to grab the rabbit. As his hand closed around the scruff of the rabbits neck he felt the fur slip away. He pushed his palm flat to the bottom of the hat, but wherever the rabbit had gone, he couldn’t follow. He grouped around the hat desperately, as if it had disappeared into some second, even secret-er, false bottom, but the rabbit was gone.
It was as this reality set in that Brinley realized the crowd was laughing. A real laugh, one that was escaping rather than being forced out of politeness. He quickly straightened and set the hat on his head, he could salvage this. The rabbit was somewhere, the first law of thermodynamics still held. He faked fake embarrassment to the audience. This is part of the act, he willed it into their minds, this is part of the joke.
There was a collective gasp from the audience, and Brinley turned to see the rabbit slipping out from behind one of the table legs as if it was coming into view from behind a wall. The audience roared with delight, and Brinley seized upon the moment to spring for the rabbit.
He dove for it, and right as he made contact with the ground the rabbit leapt at him in turn. But they never collided, except for the faintest brush of fur across Brinley’s nose.
He landed hard, and the crowd was thunderous. Rolling to his feet and brushing himself off, Brinley did not have to work very hard to portray mock embarement. He glanced about the stage, calculating his next move. What if the rabbit didn’t reappear?
At that thought, he felt a sudden weight on his head. For once the rabbit was where it was supposed to be. Before the winds could change and the rabbit could escape he lifted his hand to the brim of his hat, took a deep bow, and removed his hat. While he did not see it, he was later told that the rabbit jumped from his hat, and vanished into thin air. All that Brinley knew, was he had had it in his hand in one second, and it was gone the next.
The crowd leapt to their feet, the curtains swung closed, and Brinley tore around the stage looking for the rabbit. He swiped the props of the table in a magnificent crash. Pulled back the layers of curtains. Searched behind the sound equipment. He was frantic and dazed when the man who had hired him strutted backstage, with a big, booming laugh.
He was carted around, first to talk to the audience, then to casino management. He’d done good, better than good! They told him. Much better than expected. The words rolled off him as he craned his neck in every room in search of the rabbit.
Some minutes or hours later, after Brinley had been brought to talk to everyone in the damn casino, and he had loaded everything back up in his car, Brinley stood in the warm desert night with an empty rabbit’s cage.
The story of a new magician with an unbelievable trick spread rapidly, and Brinley’s career was quickly elevated. He worked his initial gig for only four months, before being poached by a large casino. With a real budget and proper salary, Brinley really was a half decent magician, and he managed to spin his initial success into a respectable career. He worked the “escaped rabbit” into his act, though without his original rabbit this required 4 bunnies to be hidden at different points across the stage.
What he could never manage to replicate was the original miracle, his one act of true magic with his teleporting rabbit. This is because it wasn’t his act of magic at all, and he was merely a stop over in the winding life of an odd, white rabbit. That was well enough, he’d managed to create his own sort of enchantments.