Jesus raising the dead with a wand,
Roman catacomb, 3rd century

Magic
by Oren Pierce, Guest Editor

“Magic” is not itself a magic word, but just a word to which people attach all sorts of meanings and use to describe a full range of events ranging from the pleasantly unusual, romantic, and gratifying …. through tricks of misdirection and manipulation …. all the way to remote sensing, out-of-body travel, on-the-spot multiplication of loaves and fish, levitation, and what you will.
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Endless Coincidence
by David S. Warren

Ricky Jay must be the best known magician after Harry Potter, and one of the best card handlers ever ........ but his own role model , the magician's magician, and the ultimate Expert at the card table, seems to be the great and mysterious S. W. Erdnase.
Or rather, the man who, under that name, wrote the classic book on card handling , which is generally published as "The Expert at the Card table," although the original title was "Artifice, Ruse and Subterfuge at the Card Table a Treatise on the Science and Art of Manipulating Cards...... " Erdnase enthusiasts in the online magic forums refer to it simply as "The Expert " or "Erdnase", as if the book were the man.
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Moly
by Peter Fortunato
From my journal:
I’ve been anxious about a brown blotch that appeared on the left side of
my nose after a day of too much sun in Oman.

(Oman – ah! Mary and I splurged for three nights at the Al Bustan Palace, a resort paradise of palm trees and pools and volcanic stone outcroppings on a cove of the Arabian Sea. Oman – oh! I hiked away alone into the broiling black hills to meditate, the first time in the Arabian desert I had ever been completely solo, my whereabouts unknown. Oman: like “old Arabia,” a sultanate whose history reaches back hundreds of years to the frankincense trade with India and Africa, to caravan routes old as those the magi traveled on their way to Bethlehem.)
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Tricks are for kids
by Franklin Crawford

My father was magical from the time I could walk and talk until I could almost print my name. He stopped being magical when he showed me, Doc and Johnny, the Jack n’ Jill game. The performance had stumped me up to that day of disillusionment.
On the steps outside his shop Dad wetted two small pieces of tissue paper with his tongue and placed them delicately on the fingernails of his left and right index fingers. Dad’s index and middle fingers were close to even lengthwise. I don’t know if this served him well as a carpenter, but the were a plus for the Jack n’ Jill stunt. (Go to Story)

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Ambient Music in Science Fiction
by Peter Wetherbee

"Ambient music is a genre of music that puts an emphasis on tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. Ambient music is said to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual",or "unobtrusive" quality. According to Brian Eno, one of its pioneers, "Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."
(Wikipedia)

The ever-brilliant Bruce Sterling, in his early nov Schismatrix, describes a futuristic musical instrument
that resembles a cross between a digital sampler and a synthesizer. Sterling seems unable to resist a little editorializing which could be relevant to the use of samplers in contemporary ambient, among other genres:
An artificial morning shone through false glass doors. Kitsune sat in thought, toying quietly with
the keys of her synthesizer.( Go to Story)

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Varieties of Magic
by David Rollow

Humans—homo saps, us—appear to have always had a desire to get control over their environment, which threatened their survival. The first group to have any brains got the hell out of Africa (we are coming to understand) in a single migration, in response to some crisis bigger than the Irish potato famine, more than 100,000 years ago. All of us on the planet today, even Australian aborigines, descend from that original flight. Other research has suggested that the group that first entered Europe consisted of only about twenty families, so you can see in both cases how tall the odds against survival were for these mutants, yet they survived and here we are. (Go to Story)
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Surrounded by

by Sue-Ryn

The abundance of harvest season is a heady experience. The fruits of one’s labors do literally pile up in buckets, baskets, and drying bunches; the miracle of those gritty little seeds made manifest.
The transition from green to all the other colors only ads to the magic. Different scents come up from misty mornings and dry afternoons. The summer was extremely hot around this region and all of nature seems to be enjoying the shift to cooler days and nights and occasional showers.
Recently while escorting my eighteen month old great nephew, Zeke, on a short hill climb in the park, we came upon a purple-leaved tree. Purple, not just a shade maroon.
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Dr. King's Lucky Book
by Professor Booknoodle, Phud

Humans—homo saps, us—appear to have always had a desire to get control over their environment, which threatened their survival

. The first group to have any brains got the hell out of Africa (we are coming to understand) in a single migration, in response to some crisis bigger than the Irish potato famine, more than 100,000 years ago. All of us on the planet today, even Australian aborigines, descend from that original flight. Other research has suggested that the group that first entered Europe consisted of only about twenty families, so you can see in both cases how tall the odds against survival were for these mutants, yet they survived and here we are. (Go to Story)