My cousin Sid Morrow told me he’d woken up, just yesterday, from a dream that showed him how to get into a triple-locked box without ever opening it. To convince me, Sid said that he’d bought a crate, locked it, tied rope around it, and sealed it with wax. To resist temptation, he’d tied his own hands together and sat on the box. And then, with no way else to do it, he’d willed himself inside. “Lucky for me,” he said, “I was able to wish myself out again.” When I didn’t laugh, he offered me a job he called “Shilling and Booking” because, as he put it, “You’re in need, too.” He was prepared, for a reasonable fee, to demonstrate his skill at enterology to an audience of paying customers. “Tm a human ship-in-a- bottle,” Sid said, and that’s how I put it in writing to a dozen small venues in Western Pennsylvania, landing him in Uniontown, Dubois, and Punxatawney, home of the groundhog festival.
The first night, Sid wore a deep blue cape, looking a little like a shy Dracula. As far as I could tell, he had the stage presence of forgotten presidential candidates, which was why he’d also signed me on as emcee, begging me to work up a little patter to keep things going with the audience while, within a carefully drawn circular curtain, he rematerialized himself inside his crate.
He was flawless. He did a routine that would have received 10’s from even the Axis of Evil countries. For the finale, he did the lock and rope and wax combo with handcuffs an audience member snapped on for authenticity. When I reopened the curtain, there he was, still handcuffed, curled inside the trunk.
After three nights of that, I created a new intro, starting with “Sid Morrow, the King of Enterology,” and added outright lies like “Never accomplished by another human” and “Witnessed by world leaders.” Sid seemed pleased, but not for long. Beaver Falls, New Castle, and Butler signed on, but by the time we played Johnstown, moving East, he’d read about Major Zamora, the dwarf who, in 1894, entered a specially made bottle of Bass Ale. It was oversized and Zamora was undersized, but the crowd loved it anyway. Sid said “hhmmm” like that was something for a full-sized man to consider. When I pointed out the likely degree of difficulty, he shook his head. “I’m better off not knowing how I do these things;” he said. “That’s the joy of it.”
Impatient, I mentioned the Bottle Conjurer, the ad campaign from 1749, when the publicist promised a man would enter a quart bottle in full view of the audience, and Sid beamed so brightly that I hurried on to say, “It was a hoax. Nobody could do that, let alone in plain sight. The hoaxer just wanted to prove how gullible people could be. The audience rioted. Mark Twain used it in Huckleberry Finn. Every high school kid who finished the book knows something about it.”
Sid didn’t want to hear about the aftermath. He wanted bigger towns and larger venues. “Make a splash,” he said. “Tell everybody I’ll enter a three-gallon bottle that’s floating in a trunk full of water that’s inside a tank of burning gasoline.”
I had to call bullshit, but Sid was adamant. “Not in plain sight, of course. Call it The Wrath of God. Tell them I can survive the end of the world by doing the impossible.”
I was more than skeptical, but I worked up a press release full of disasters and miracles that landed us a booking in Altoona, a theater with 3000 seats, every one of them filled by show time. Two attendants pushed Sid’s new rig onto the stage. It looked to me as if he’d bought all of it pre-assembled, including the three-gallon bottle with the wide throat. It struck me as too professional, like silicone breasts. Such manufactured equipment made Sid’s magic seem diluted and suspect.
After Sid went inside the curtain, the fire throwing its light, the water sloshing as if there were tremors running through the earth beneath us, the audience stood as if they might see better the molecules of Sid’s body dancing through asbestos and fire and steel and water and glass. More than a few, I suspected, wanted The Wrath of God to fry or drown or smother Sid Morrow exactly the way he deserved for trivializing the meaning of life.
As always, I counted aloud. When I reached ninety seconds, the fire still roaring, I took a few steps toward the curtain. Hearing a wash of audience doubt lapping at the stage, I counted slower until the fire went out at 150. When I pulled the curtain aside, the audience buzzed because Sid, as promised, had nowhere else to be than inside the trunk, possibly cooked or drowned. I counted to 200 as I drained the trunk’s water into the large, open saucer. Nearly knee-deep, I unlocked the trunk. With a flourish, I lifted the lid and showed the audience that neither the bottle nor Sid was inside.
There was a brief hush, the crowd making up its mind, and then it roared a unison, full-throated Boo followed by all the familiar blasphemies and obscenities. The main curtain started swirling shut like the return of the Red Sea, but not before dozens of half-pint bottles bounced and skittered across the stage. “Shove yourself in this,” flared as if Sid’s contraption had rekindled. I shoved myself into the nearest hallway.
The following day, no word from Sid, I posted a declaration, complete with animation, that claimed Sid Morrow, as promised, had entered that bottle but been stolen away by a jealous rival who I left unnamed, even, as days passed, half-believing my conspiracy theory while Sid went as viral as any D. B. Cooper clone. Poorer, of course, but legendary, what all of us, he’d insisted, long to be.
~
Gary Fincke’s latest flash collection is The History of the Baker’s Dozen (Pelekinesis, 2024). He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.