Each week, I send out a story via my email newsletter. Each story is around 1000 words, sometimes less, sometimes more. The stories are in a variety of genres: supernatural, thriller, sci-fi, horror, and sometimes romance, and all of my stories typically feature a gay protagonist.
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This is story number 45 of the series. Enjoy!
The Final Performance
Max’s reflection wavered in the dressing room mirror like smoke behind glass. He blinked hard, pressed his palms against his eyes until stars bloomed behind his lids. When he looked again, his face stared back—solid, familiar, alive.
“Five minutes, Max!” Alec’s voice echoed from somewhere that felt very far away.
The theater’s burgundy velvet seats stretched before him in perfect rows, each one filled with expectant faces bathed in amber light. Max had performed this routine hundreds of times, but tonight something felt different. The spotlight seemed too bright, too hot, yet he couldn’t feel its warmth on his skin. The audience’s murmur reached his ears like voices underwater.
He flexed his fingers, watching them move with precision. Everything worked. Everything felt normal. So why did he have the unsettling sensation that he was watching himself from outside his own body?
“Ladies and gentlemen,” his voice boomed across the theater, “prepare to witness the impossible!”
The crowd erupted in applause, but Max barely heard it. He moved through his routine with mechanical perfection—doves materialized from silk scarves, playing cards danced through the air, Lila floated above the stage like an angel. But each trick felt hollow, as if he were sleepwalking through a dream of his own life.
It was the little things that bothered him most. The way his coffee had grown cold before he’d taken a sip. How Lila’s eyes seemed to look through him rather than at him. The strange echo in his voice when he spoke to the stagehands, as if his words were coming from somewhere else entirely.
“You’re different tonight,” Lila whispered during a costume change, her brow creased with worry. “Are you feeling alright?”
Max wanted to tell her about the growing certainty that something was terribly wrong, but the words stuck in his throat. Instead, he smiled—that practiced showman’s grin that had never failed him—and said, “Just focused on the big finish.”
The straightjacket routine. His signature piece. The trick that had made him famous and nearly killed him a dozen times over. Tonight, as the stagehands strapped him in and hoisted him above the pit of flames, Max felt a crushing weight of déjà vu.
I’ve done this before, he thought as the timer began its countdown. Recently. Very recently.
The leather restraints bit into his wrists. Sixty seconds. His body moved with practiced desperation, contorting and twisting. Forty-five seconds. The crowd held its breath. Thirty seconds. Sweat stung his eyes, but when he blinked, his vision stayed clear. Too clear.
Dead men don’t sweat, whispered a voice in his head that sounded suspiciously like his father’s. Dead men don’t feel pain.
Fifteen seconds. Max’s hand slipped from the cable, just as it had—
When?
He was falling. The spikes rushed up to meet him, flames licking at the air. The audience screamed, but their voices seemed to come from another world. He hit the metal with a sickening crunch, felt the points pierce his chest, his back, his legs. Fire engulfed him, and the pain was—
Nothing.
Max stood in the pit, surrounded by twisted metal and dying flames, completely unharmed. The audience was on their feet, applauding wildly. He raised his hand and smiled, tasting ash on his lips.
“Ta-da,” he whispered, and the word felt like a prayer.
The emergency room’s fluorescent lights hummed overhead as Dr. Martinez studied the X-rays with growing confusion. Alec sat beside the examination table, his face pale as parchment.
“These injuries…” the doctor began, then stopped, shaking his head. “Mr. Castellano, you have multiple fractures, severe internal bleeding, and third-degree burns over sixty percent of your body. These wounds are at least three days old, maybe more.”
Max stared at the X-ray images—his own skeleton, fractured and broken like a shattered marionette. “That’s impossible. I feel fine.”
“Max,” Alec’s voice was barely a whisper. “The accident—it was three days ago. You’ve been performing every night since then, but…” He looked at the doctor, then back at Max. “Nobody could survive injuries like these. Nobody.”
The words hit Max like a physical blow. Three days. Three days of performing, of living, of pretending everything was normal. Three days of being dead.
“I need some air,” Max said, standing abruptly. Neither Alec nor the doctor moved to stop him. In fact, they didn’t seem to notice him at all.
Max’s penthouse felt like a museum of his own life. Photographs lined the walls—Max with celebrities, Max accepting awards, Max defying death night after night. He approached his bedroom mirror slowly, watching his reflection flicker and fade like a candle in the wind.
“I know you’re there,” he said aloud.
Lila materialized behind him, her reflection solid while his wavered. “I’ve been waiting for you to figure it out.”
“How long have you known?”
“Since the first night you came back.” Tears ran down her cheeks. “I watched you fall, Max. I saw you die. But then you were there, taking your bow, and I thought… I hoped it was just another trick.”
Max turned to face her, and for the first time in days, he felt something real—a crushing weight of grief and love and regret. “I was so scared of failing. Of being ordinary. I couldn’t let go of the spotlight, could I?”
“You were never ordinary,” Lila said softly. “You were brilliant and brave and completely, utterly terrified of being forgotten.”
Max laughed, a sound like breaking glass. “I mastered every trick except the one that mattered. I couldn’t escape myself.”
He looked at his hands—solid one moment, translucent the next. Three days of denial, of clinging to the illusion that he could cheat death through sheer force of will. But death wasn’t an audience to be fooled. It was the final curtain, and no amount of sleight of hand could hold it back.
“I need to say goodbye,” he said. “To Alec. To the theater. To…”
“To yourself,” Lila finished gently.
Max nodded, feeling something inside him finally release. The desperate need to perform, to prove himself, to be magnificent—it was all fading away like smoke in the wind. For the first time in his life, he felt truly free.
“The show’s over,” he whispered, and in saying it, he finally understood what it meant to let go.
His reflection flickered one last time in the mirror, smiled, and vanished.
Behind him, Lila stood alone in the empty room, her hand pressed against her heart, watching as the last traces of Max the Magnificent faded into the night.
The greatest illusionist in Vegas had finally performed his masterpiece—he had made himself disappear.