The Glacier
Issue Three
Winter 2024

The Amazing

What’s so amazing? A rabbit farm, a new hire, Susan, trying to earn money so she can write her next unpublished novel; she asks where all the rabbits come from, and the farm manager says, where else, the basement.
Does she go down to the basement? Of course!
In the middle of said basement stands a magician, in a cape and tuxedo, a red cummerbund around his waist, white gloves on his hands. A single spotlight shines upon him, but as for an audience it’s just Susan and the clock on the wall counting down the hours until the shift ends. “Oh!” cries the magician, and Susan thinks he’s surprised to see her, but he’s just complaining about his shoulder, tender from pulling rabbits out of a hat, day in and day out.
“Abracadabra!” he says. “Alacazam.” Rabbit after rabbit he pulls, each sitting docilely in their baskets on the slow-moving conveyor belt leading up out of the basement.
“I’m going to my niece’s in Málaga,” he says, handing her the hat. “Just reach in and grab what you can. It’ll be amazing.”
He’s a magician: he disappears.

The manager calls down. “Is everything sorted down there, Diego? Where’s the rest of the rabbits?”
Does Susan question her place in the universe? You bet! Does she quit? She’s thinking she’s not getting paid enough. But then she dips her hand into the hat, just to see what it’s like, when she feels it, a softness, and from that softness her mind races from metaphor to metaphor trying to make sense of it, until she lands on, what else, a blanket from her distant childhood, the purest love.
Grabbing hold, she instead pulls out a rabbit, warm and forgiving. “It’s okay,” the rabbit says. “Keep trying and you’ll have it someday.”
“Now put me on the conveyor belt.”
So she reaches in, time after time, but all she gets are more rabbits. “I’m sorry,” she tells them, as she places each one on the belt. When her shift is over the next magician appears in a puff of smoke. “Of course you’re Susan. You look like a Susan. We should have coffee,” he tells her, as he takes off his top hat. “I’m Randy. Let’s exchange digits.” He smiles while he flutters his fingers in her direction.

After a month of pulling out rabbits and avoiding Randy, Susan feels she’s getting closer to the amazing. Committed to a magician’s life, she dresses in tuxedos even when she isn’t at work. Her friends weary of the scarves she gives away as presents, but like magic, her novel accumulates, page by page. “You’re doing great,” the rabbits say. “You’re so gentle, kind and compassionate, unlike all those other magicians. You deserve a raise.”
Every time she sees another magician, there’s more of them than you think, no one talks about the amazing: it’s either rabbit farms, or some industrial use for pigeons Susan doesn’t want to know about. Softness or flight. Two rings that are both separate and joined together. A life in Andalusia, a position at some magical think tank. That unfinished book everyone is trying to finish. Metaphors no one but a magician can make any simpler: her friends tell her she is amazing, and Susan feels it in her fingers briefly until magic turns it all into rabbits.
“Do you know the answer yet about our place in the universe,” she asks one of the rabbits as she places it in its basket on the conveyer belt. “It’s been years now and my shoulder’s getting sore.”
“Maybe it’s somewhere in Málaga,” the rabbit tells her. “I hear that’s where you need to go if you really want to finish your novel.”
Abracadabra. Alacazam.

Time passes. Randy gets promoted to manager: it’s the opposite of amazing and you know exactly why. One day Susan reaches into the hat just like she’s always done, reaching for something that isn’t actually there, but instead of a rabbit her hand grasps the shaggy pelt of a hare, wild eyed, heavy and kicking.
“What the fuck?” the hare cries. The rabbits in their slowly ascending baskets swivel to see what happens next. Susan tries to put the hare in a basket, but it jumps right out. “Who the hell are you and how did you get me into that stupid hat of yours?”
Susan explains.
The hare is not amused.
The hare looks at the other rabbits. “Seriously,” she says to them. “You all just go along with it?”
The hare looks back at Susan. “You’re a magician, right? Isn’t that supposed to mean you have options? Why are you spending your gift getting rabbits killed?”
The rabbits hop out of their baskets, like somebody finally pointed out the obvious, breaking the spell. More hop out of the hat, looking expectantly up at the conveyor belt; they haven’t heard the news.
“Well?” the hare asks.
Susan explains the amazing. It sounds stupid when she puts it into words, like the roughest draft of a novel, so she keeps talking, explaining, describing, hoping that if she can’t capture, she might encircle the concept, enough for the hare to understand the reason for the years she spent in this basement.
“You won’t find it here,” the hare cuts her off. “Figure it out.”
A basement full of rabbits, one angry hare, and a magician who doesn’t know what to do, not yet, but then Susan scoops up all the rabbits with her hat, sending them to Andalusia. They can learn to fend for themselves. Then she makes herself disappear. Maybe she’s finally gone to Málaga. Maybe her novel is now in your basket, waiting to be read.
Maybe you just want to rip it apart.
And the hare? There’s always something below even the deepest basements. Something amazing right under your feet, the finest of unwritten novels. That’s what every rabbit knows, what no rabbit ever tells, not when there’s a magician around.
She starts digging.
Abracadabra. Alacazam.

Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s prose can be found in X-Ray, The Pinch, Invisible City, Heavy Feather Review and The Offing. His short story “Taylor Swift” won the Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast, and his story “Goodwill” was picked as one of the Wigleaf Top Fifty Very Short Fictions. A collection of prose poems and microfiction, Animal Children, was published by Nomadic/Black Lawrence Press. He lives in Barcelona..

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