“There’s a trick to disappearing,” said the man with the fiery hand. “Watch me, now, as I make it plain.”

The children watched, less eager than obedient. First they saw him, clear as a toe-tied bell. Then they did not. They leaned forward, each of them, drawn into the sudden vacuum. They listened for the crackle of fire at the man’s left side, presuming, perhaps, that there was some great deception at play. One child, a boy named Rice, approached the enigmatic spot with timid steps. Sand and sand alone remained.

“I could do that,” said Polly Jackson, but she’d always been such a liar.

“All gaff,” said Toby Enfor. “Even dumb-old Rice wouldn’t fall for that.”

“Ain’t gaff,” said Rice. “Ain’t no gaff at all. Ain’t nothin’ round here but sand, no how.”

“Well,” said Jacky Pollson, an older boy of unknown parentage, “he did have that fiery hand. There’s something to think about.”

“Gaff,” said Toby, not a hint of doubt in his voice.

Rice frowned. “Weren’t gaff, Toby. You take that back.”

Toby balled up his fists. “I will not. Just a’cause you’re too dumb to know gaff when you see it don’t make it real.”

Polly had, by this point, wrapped her hand with a cloth bandage from her pocket. The others looked her way when they heard her fighting to light her father’s windproof cigarette lighter. “Damn thing,” she said. It seems the lighter was only windproof once lit.

“Fuck’re you doing?” said Toby. “Gonna burn your hand off.”

“Nu-uh,” said Polly. “I do this all the time.”

“Go on and do it then,” said Toby.

Rice looked at her hand—wrapped in cloth, as it was, and just over the lighter—and yelled, “No!” But even if she would’ve listened, it was too late.

The bandage caught fire instantly. She looked like she was going to cry. There was even a tear welling in her rightmost eye. The other children watched. They watched as the flames reached up her arm in little licks and as she began to wave her hand in the air in an attempt to free it of the bandage. They watched and they watched until suddenly and without any warning, she vanished from sight. Once more they were pulled forward on their toes. Once more Rice investigated. Once more, and this time with an air of complete understanding, Toby Enfor said, “Gaff.” Jacky Pollson, perhaps wiser with age, offered no conclusions.

Toby and Rice looked for Polly the next day after school. They looked for the man with the fiery hand, as well, but they found neither. They found only sand and sand alone. Toby, being brave and sure, however, felt it important to test the trick he’d seen Polly perform. He understood the core components. There was the bandage, and there was the lighter. He got that much. The rest was just a mess of speculation, though. So, having nothing else upon which to go, he opted for simplicity and performed it just as he had seen. Rice advised against, ever nervous, but Toby was steeled in motion and determination.

The lighter lit on the first go, and it wasn’t a second before the bandage had gone all ablaze. Shorter still was the time it took for the flames to race up his long-sleeved shirt and into his hair. He began to run around in circles, screaming, “Put it out! Put it out!” but Rice was powerless to help—frozen with fear. Later, when Rice would relate the tale of Toby’s disappearance to Jacky Pollson, having found him at the Circle K playing Yie Ar Kung Fu, he would describe the smell of burning cotton, hair, and skin. At that moment though, Toby screaming and flailing about, Rice was unaware of anything other than his fear. Then came the increasingly familiar vacuum sensation, so strong that Rice fell forward and scraped his hand in the loose gravel.

“Three disappearances,” said Jacky as he and Rice walked through the abandoned lots and back alleys that led to where they’d first met the man with the fiery hand. “It’s curious, I think.”

Rice nodded.

As they passed the parking deck of the Desert Estates apartment complex, Jacky pointed to an empty spot and said, “I saw a shopping cart there, once. Had a big ol’ dildo in it that looked like a real wiener. There was some other stuff, too, but nobody around. Then this woman came along and gave me a look. That was the day I got caught breaking into my friend’s place. It was supposed to be a joke, but it went all shitty. We’ll need a magnifying glass and a piece of yellow paper if we’re gonna solve this thing.”

Rice, who’d seemed confused during most of his walk with Jacky, smiled suddenly and said, “You think we can?”

Jacky shrugged. “Well,” he said, “with the paper and the glass…maybe. We’ll also need a baby food jar and some cotton balls, but yeah, I think we can.”

Rice gathered the items listed while Jacky searched at the edge of the canal for an insect of appropriate size for the experiment. He settled on an odd beetle with a forked horn. He’d never seen one like it, but considering the color and texture of its shell it seemed a perfect fit. From there it was back to the spot of the disappearances, the spot where they’d first met the man with the fiery hand.

Rice cut a circle of paper to Jacky’s specifications and placed it atop the pillow of cotton lining the bottom of the baby food jar. Jacky’s work was slightly more intricate. On the beetle’s back he carefully wrote a brief note with a fine felt-tip pen. “Where are you?” it read. Then, with the care of a master model builder, he twined each of its feet and the two prongs of its horn with cotton fiber. Sweat dripping from the tip of his nose, he placed the prepared insect atop the paper platform and tightly screwed on the lid.

The beetle proved a perfect subject. Whether by patience or a lack of interest in its own mortality, it remained motionless, though perceptibly alive, until the first focused ray of sunshine was steered toward its cotton draped legs by way of the magnifying glass in Jacky’s hand. Even then, despite its clear attempts to preserve itself, its torporous moves from wall to wall of the jar were so dispassionate that Jacky was able to track it with ease. Three of the legs and one fork of the horn caught fire simultaneously, their cotton fuel producing tiny little flames like scale models of more noble ones. At this, the beetle became frenzied and ran clumsily along the wall of the jar until one of the boys blinked.

Now, there’s no telling which one it was—sometimes boys blink, is all. What is known, was known by the boys in that instant, is that within the space of that single blink the rushing beetle was replaced by sudden and familiar absence. They also heard the safety cap of the jar lid suck inward with the disappearance, a sound that twisted Jacky’s mouth into a clever grin.

“What now?” said Rice.

Jacky shrugged. “I only sorta know,” he said. “I think we wait, though, just for a little bit.”

Rice told the story about the car crash while they waited, about how he never knew there were so many bones inside of him, so much blood and meat. He talked about the way the police kept finding things the further back they walked, about how his middle finger had landed in the same place as the Ray Stevens tape and his sister’s suitcase. “I couldn’t figure it,” he said. “Wreck made me stupid, I s’pose. Don’t matter how much Gramma tells me they gone; I still wake up all the time and don’t know.”

The safety cap on the jar lid popped up. Rice jumped a little. “Scared me,” he said.

“Me, too,” said Jacky, but it was a lie. All he felt was eager.

“What now?” said Rice.

“We open it,” said Jacky. “We listen.”

The words that came when the jar was opened were so soft that the boys had to lean their heads together, their ears over the mouth of the vessel, to hear. It was Polly’s voice, a hint of it, at least. “No place special,” it said. “Thanks for the beetle.”

Rice frowned and looked at Jacky. Jacky shrugged. “Maybe there’s some more in there,” he said. “Push the paper down.”

Rice did as he was told, but the compression of the cotton balls produced only a single word, a single diminutive whisper in the shape of Toby Enfor’s voice. “Gaff,” it said.

“Can’t be gaff, can it?” said Rice.

Jacky shrugged again. “I don’t really know.”

“Maybe we heard it wrong. Maybe we need a bigger jar or something.”

“Maybe,” said Jacky, “but I think I’m done.”

Rice couldn’t find any words, despite his efforts. He kept opening his mouth, just the same, hoping the right words might come falling out.

“Don’t worry,” said Jacky with a smile as he walked back toward the Circle K. “I won’t be the first to let you down. How could I be?”

Timestamp: 03.06.07 at 06:56 PM. Filed under: Fiction.