Still the Greatest
J Corn
It was the strangest thing. One day the marble bust of Harry Houdini that I kept on my desk -- for obvious reasons -- decided to wink at me.
Not being one to doubt the world’s greatest escape artist -- dead or alive -- I, of course, winked back. Though when the formerly inanimate piece of marble spoke, I found myself a little worried about the state of my mind.
“One can extricate himself from any trap or bond ever devised. The key is to believe in oneself.” Harry’s voice was hard and polished. Or maybe his face was, I forget now. Either way, he was quiet and difficult to hear.
“Thank you, Harry,” I replied.
“No, boy. Thank you.”
“For what, Harry?”
But he didn’t respond to my question. The marble lips regained their immobile expression of distant bemusement. I noticed that his eyes were squinted in concentration and I found myself wondering what the world’s greatest escape artist was concentrating on.
The small marble bust showed Harry with a bow tie secured around his neck. Two weeks after he spoke to me the tie was unraveled and hung in bas-relief about his neck as if a stone gorget. That night, as I packed the sculpture in bubble wrap and a cardboard box, I noticed that Harry’s last name had been misspelled on the base -- “Houdni” it read. How clever, Harry, I thought.
I mailed the little statue to the Houdini museum in Budapest the next morning. I don’t know if they ever received it and I never heard anything about it again.
