Aaron, our little magician, spends his days pulling white rabbits from his top hat, and they scatter across the house. When my husband and I try to catch them, the magician waves his wand and they disappear into smoke, curling through our fingers.

Sometimes, I catch one in the cupboard, gnawing through a box of Cheerios. Aaron flicks his wrist and this one disappears too, but there are already fine white hairs tangled in the cereal, and we have to throw the box away. The little magician cries when he can't have his usual breakfast.

* * *

It feels like we've always known. When he was three months old, I slipped into his room during a nap, just to watch him sleep, and found the small black top hat covering his face. I ran to him and pulled the hat away, but Aaron was still breathing easily. Those tiny pauses between his baby breaths, in and out. The hat landed in the corner of the crib, and the first tiny white rabbit, the size of a cotton ball, hopped out and across the mattress. It sniffed at Aaron's fingertips, still curled into fists in his sleep.

* * *

On his third birthday, he lifted his arms to me for a hug, and when I held him close to me, he put his finger in my ear and then I felt it, something thick and heavy that muted the sound. Aaron pulled out three coins. "Three like me!" he said, dropping the coins in my palm. They were coppery and dense as stone, etched with an ancient, forgotten language, all sticks and squiggles.

I don't know how he does it, but they were real as anything. I could feel those coins behind the folds of my own ear, like they'd always been a part of me but I'd somehow missed them. It's strange, how he's made my own body a place I don't understand and leaves me wondering how I'm connected to something so foreign, how all this magic found its way under my skin.

* * *

Once, he wrapped himself in his silk cape and spun around reciting hushed words to himself, and then he was gone. For just a second, his cape hung in the air, fanned out like he'd grown wings, and I almost expected him to fly. Then the cape dropped, liquid spilling into a puddle on the floor. His top hat spun on its rim like a coin before settling. I lifted the cape expecting to find a hole in the floor, or Aaron standing up, grinning, but there was nothing. Only the bare hardwood floor and heat rising from it like an iron.

My husband and I screamed for him, ran through the house calling his name and waving the wand he'd left behind like it might perform some magic for us, too, but it doesn't recognize our fingers. Jake called the police but I asked what we could tell them, and he hung up after the first ring.

We found him twenty minutes later, sitting naked and muddy and shivering under our back porch. He looked at us like a wild animal when we picked him up.

Inside, Jake ran a bath and Aaron's eyes came back into focus as we poured water over his back. He sailed a plastic boat and made waves that rose over the edge of the tub and hung there for a second before splashing back down into his own little ocean.

* * *

Some nights, we string a clothesline across the living room and drape a bedsheet over it to make a curtain. The magician steps out from behind and performs for us.

For a few minutes, we pretend it's all just a trick. Aaron pulls colored scarves from his sleeves and the rabbits jump from his hat and scamper at his feet. He connects and pulls apart a row of brass rings, shiny and gleaming as our wedding rings on the day we got married, and every show begins with "Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls!" even though our magician is, and always will be, the only child in our house.

* * *

Then, there's bedtime, and we have this: the magician is a good sleeper. His days of performing exhaust him, and Aaron drifts off quickly while I sit in the rocker and Jake cleans up downstairs, sweeping up rabbit droppings into one of the magician's silk scarves. He drapes the string of brass rings over the arm of the couch, carefully as a necklace laid in a velvet-lined jewelry box. We don't know how to pull them apart.

I cover Aaron with his cape, black on one side and a brilliant scarlet on the other, and know he'll sleep all night.

Before I leave, I stare at him for long minutes. Hair swept across his forehead, those eyelashes making shadows on his cheeks in the glow of the nightlight. I listen to him breathe, listen to the silence between each breath, and in each silence, think of the six quiet years before him.

The waiting and hoping and disappointment. The needles in my hips and the gentle voices of doctors with no good news, and finally the moment of giving up.

* * *

We hardly understood how it happened when he appeared on the ultrasound screen, a thin white line pulsing, disappearing into the black static and then emerging again, like he himself was a trick.

Sometimes we still wonder to ourselves how it happened. If Aaron knows how he did it.

Even if he does, we know he'll never tell us.

In the dark of his room, I hold my own breath between each of his, but they keep coming, in and out. The cape rises with his chest, steady and constant and easy to believe in.

Kara Oakleaf's stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Monkeybicycle, Jellyfish Review and others. She manages the Fall for the Book Festival at GMU, where she also teaches.

Read her postcard.

Detail of digital collage on main page courtesy of seriykotik1970.

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