Funeral Lilies Conjured With a Sleight of Hand - Track 8

What’ll you have next?

Let’s see, I think that’s enough for the night…

Woah… You really are here.

Maci. I’m impressed that you managed to find your way here.

Oh, yeah. Chihiro said he heard a cocktail shaker over the phone, so I figured you’re at a bar.

Then I heard you’d been to this bar before, so… Figured I’ve got nothing to lose.

Oh, right. I took cica out on a date here.

A-Ahaha. I’m sorry… Please don’t get mad at the Chief…

Whatever. I was about to leave anyway.

Huh!? Already…?

Ufufu… What’s with the face?

Um, nothing. Sorry…

……

Seems like it can’t be helped… I’ll stick around for one more drink.

Really!?

Um, excuse me, then. I’ll have a beer–

Maci. You haven’t tried the cocktails here yet, have you?

They’re made really well here. Since you’ve come all this way, you should really take your time to savor one.

A cocktail… I’d like a gimlet, then, please.

Coming right up.

Hmm? Why a gimlet?

Umm… I help out part-time at Ten Nights of Dreams sometimes, and this is one of Natsume-san’s specialties.

Customers order it a lot, so I was wondering what it tastes like.

So you don’t actually know what the word “gimlet” means.¹

Huh…?

Thank you for waiting. Here is your gimlet.

Ah, thank you.

It’s stronger than I expected… It’s got a mature taste.

……

So? What did you want to ask me?

Umm… Not exactly ask you. First, I want you to listen to me…

As long as it’s not boring.

Umm, I’ll try my best.

Ufufu. Go ahead.

…I asked you if you’d seen a magic show as a kid, right?

Ladies and gentlemen! Come one, come all!

I will hit my hat twice with this cane…

Daaaaooo~!

…Come here, Taiki, Dad’s gonna hold you up. Can you see now?

Kyaaa~!

It looks like magic, doesn’t it? It’s actually just a trick.

But it’s beautiful… Outings like this are nice every once in a while.

Right? We’ll have to say our thanks to the church for sending us these tickets.

When we went home after that, I found some cards and just started practicing.

At first I just… wanted my parents to praise me.

My parents often left me to my own devices back then, so I thought that if I surprised them with a magic trick…

They’d praise me… They’d look at me.

……

So, once I learned the trick I’d thought up perfectly, I showed it to them.

I was hoping they’d smile like they did when the magician took the pigeon out of his hat.

But…

When I showed it to them… my parents started saying weird things.

Like… How I had awakened my “powers”, or that I’m “the child of God”.

They started paying attention to me to the point they started being overbearing, but they treated my little brother the same as always…

It was hell on earth from then on…. My parents worshipped me and paraded me around…

Before long I was appearing on TV as some… “young genius” esper.

I did my card-guessing trick over and over again, and they were saying it was a prophecy. Laughable, isn’t it…? It was all just a scam.

I just couldn’t bring myself to tell them it was a trick… But I didn’t want to keep lying and being made a spectacle.

I also hated myself for leaving my little brother to suffer by himself.

In the end, I revealed it all to the world myself… I told them I didn’t have any godly powers and it was all just a trick.

I thought if I destroyed everything, we’d go back to normal.

I thought my parents would open their eyes, and even a family like ours could become normal…

But… reality didn’t make it so easy for me. My parents didn’t come to their senses until the bitter end.

……

That’s why the circus to me brings back memories I have with my parents before they went insane…

It’s one of the very few memories I have of being a normal child to them.