Today’s Daily Prompt asks, What is the legacy you want to leave behind?

Artist Uknown

This is a story about the night one of our neighbors died.

Because I was so young at the time, my memories are a little fragmented so to keep my account as close to what happened as possible, I don’t want to fill anything in because I think it would take away from my memory.

To begin, I don’t remember his name, but the elderly gentleman who lived a few doors down from where we lived at been a magician and worked the vaudeville circuit.

He was a little famous in our neighborhood and he still had posters and props from his stage days.

Before he got sick and his health began to rapidly decline, he had taught me to work some of the  magic tricks that I had bought at the dime store.But he always apologized after our lessons because he said his timing was off. It had been off since the night he had crashed his car driving over an icy bridge and ended up in the river below.

That’s why he left the stage and had given up his act. His timing was off, not by a lot from what I understand. But enough to remove him from the ranks of being a professional magician.

He had changed after the accident too. Not by a lot. Just little things that sometimes made his family and friends say things like, ” he wasn’t the same after the accident. ”

I was friends with his great granddaughter and she had told me that sometimes he forgot their names and sometimes when he looked in the mirror he didn’t recognize his own face-  so his wife took all the mirrors out of their house. The only one they had was in the bathroom downstairs that he never used.

Artist Uknown

On the night he died I remember seeing the Priest going into our neighbor’s house and a little while later I saw the Priest leave.

I was sitting at the end of the walkway and I asked him if my neighbor had died and he told me he had.

I told him I would miss learning my magic tricks from my neighbor and the Priest looked a little  sad. I told him he had taught me the disappearing egg trick, the Chinese Rings, and the Ghost Bunny Trick.

” Which one is that? ” he asked me.

I told him I knew how to make a ghost bunny appear from a top hat. But I said, I hadn’t figure out how to make it get back into the hat right away.

My neighbor said his timing was off and he couldn’t get it back into the hat at all and that if I worked on my Ghost Bunny Trick I could get it to go back into the hat where it belonged.

The Priest nodded and smiled and as he walked away I looked over his shoulder toward’s my neighbor’s house.

I saw the shadow of the ghost bunny from my Elderly Neighbor’s bedroom window- it’s ears were long and pale white, and they curved  away from it’s diamond shaped head instead of over it.

It waved it’s spidery fingers at me and I waved back.

Artist Uknown