reviewed by Isaac Fox
Sacha Bissonnette’s flash story “The Magician,” which appeared in Jellyfish Review on October 27, centers around a man who learns magic from a book found in a storage locker so he can transfer his spouse’s consciousness to another body. The piece is even more disorienting than its premise.
In the tradition of magic realism and low fantasy, Bissonnette grounds his story’s unreal elements in a grimy world of Arizona dust and Storage Wars references. This adds a layer of doubt to the piece: up until the final moments, when the narrator successfully transfers his significant other’s consciousness to someone else’s body, many readers will question whether he can actually do it and whether this world has any magic. That layer of doubt—along with the wild aesthetic contrast between Storage Wars and body swapping—also contributes to the piece’s disorienting effect.
The narrator’s spouse wants to live in another body because hers is a constant reminder of trauma. She has a scar across her stomach from a C-section performed to deliver a baby that quickly passed away. The scar makes her feel disoriented in her own body, and that disorientation is reflected in the piece’s aforementioned layers of doubt and contrast, its surreal plotline, and even Bissonnette’s prose. The story’s dialogue is set off in italics, with no dialogue tags (but only about half the time; the rest of the dialogue has tags, but no italics or quotation marks). There are multiple time jumps that feel rather abrupt. And at one point, the perspective even changes slightly: instead of speaking to his partner in second person, the narrator suddenly refers to her in third.
The narrator—who thinks about his spouse’s body in terms of “[his] use”—has little empathy for her, agreeing to learn the spell only so she won’t break up with him. However, he, too, gets to feel a bit of her disorientation. In the piece’s final lines, he reflects on how he’s done something “magic, but not magical”—not in the way his childhood trip to Disney World was magical. And then he begins to doubt even his own reflections on the experience.
This nameless character does think about ethics in everyday life—as displayed in a comment about “privileged girls” that shows more than a little resentment toward his partner—but the way he thinks about her is quite reductionist. In those confused final lines, he is beginning to engage with the moral complexity of what he’s done, but in his own limited and limiting terms.
The narrator of “The Magician” occupies an odd place in the piece because he’s telling a story that isn’t really his. This indirect use of perspective adds yet another layer of disorientation to Bissonnette’s funhouse mirror of a flash piece.
Jellyfish Review publishes two new pieces of flash fiction each week.
Isaac Fox is a student at Lebanon Valley College, where he majors in English and creative writing. When he’s not reading or writing something assigned, he’s probably reading or writing something unassigned. His prose, reviews, and photography have appeared in Tiny Molecules, Rune Bear, Heart of Flesh, Green Blotter, and Rejection Letters. You can find him on Twitter at @isaac_k_fox.