Photo by Morgan Vander Hart on Unsplash
by Gary Fincke
In the early years of the ether era, a magician taught his son how to float as if near-death made him buoyant, practicing until the boy gasped as if resurfacing from a minute underwater.
The first night on stage, his father announced, “When he breathes ether, the boy’s body will become as light as a balloon.”
The boy inhaled, slumped as if asleep, slowly rose, and floated above the sound of murmurs, the audience suspended as well between wonder and worry as the smell of ether reached them so distinctly that many began to hold their breath, enough fear wafting over them that they were relieved when the boy awoke, blinking as he dropped safely down and walked off so awkwardly that he appeared to have been lamed by the gas.
But soon, another magician and then yet another learned the trick’s essential secrets, how the boy’s splinted body was hoisted after the terrible smell was spread from behind the curtain rather than from the bottle passed empty beneath his nose, so many copies made that the trick fell into disuse.
By then, that first flying boy had aged out of the deception, even the uninformed or gullible unwilling to believe in the flight of the large and heavy, and the boy’s father never again showed him such care and tenderness. Once height became ordinary for other boys, the framework for his floating packed away to preserve what remained of secrecy, the first flying boy, each evening, opened his upstairs window wide, regardless of weather, and thrust his head through to look straight down, leaning farther and farther at the waist to inch toward plummeting without trembling or even imagining a scream, his body, each night, perfectly balanced by the memory of an odor.
Gary Fincke’s latest flash collection is The History of the Baker’s Dozen (Pelekinesis 2024). His newest book is After Arson: New and Selected Stories (Madville Press 2025). He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.
