The Magic Poker
By Robert Coover, first published in Esquire
A creator whimsically imagines up his island and decides to add two women and a magic poker. By the time his imaginary characters row away, he is no longer sure who created who.
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Plot Summary
When a creator whimsically imagines up his island, he starts by adding scenes of nature, the sky, cabins, and a presiding silence. Anything can happen on the island, so he brings two female visitors to the shore via a small boat. One woman is dressed in gold pants, and the other is her sister, Karen. The island was once owned by a wealthy family that employed a caretaker and his son, but now it is overgrown and mostly abandoned. Farther inland, there is a mansion occupied by a pipe-smoking man in a blue jacket. The mansion is mostly dilapidated, and the creator has furnished it with a broken, green piano. Aside from the pipe-smoking man, the caretaker’s son also resides on the island. He has a hairy, animalistic appearance and occupies the abandoned guest cabin. As the women walk through the forest, the creator boasts his supreme control, claiming that he dressed them and can just as easily undress them. In a series of small snippet scenes, the girl in the gold pants discovers a rusty poker protruding from the grass. She remarks how strange and beautiful it is. When she picks it up, she is disgusted by all the bugs underneath but then kisses it multiple times until her sister calls for her. They look around the destroyed guest cabin while the caretaker’s son crawls around its perimeter and watches them until they leave. The creator draws the scene back to the poker once more. When the woman in gold pants kisses the poker this time, she achieves the “disenchantment” of a man who suddenly poofs into place. He is somehow freed from the magic poker by her kiss, and she collapses at his feet. At the mansion, the girl in the gold pants tries playing the broken piano, but the keys elicit no sound. She later sketches a picture of the pipe-smoking man, who strikes a pose for her. She claims that she somehow expected him, and he replies that he has been waiting. Back at the poker, Karen is joking around with a man in the white turtleneck. She lifts it from the ground and uses it to imitate a smoking pipe and then a rifle. The man laughs along, until she thrusts it through a broken window. As the island gets warped into different scenes, the creator points out that he is disappearing. Like he feared, the island is taking a concrete place of its own, even though he invented it, just as he invented the reader. The creator runs through multiple ways of introducing the island, from the conception of the magic poker to the arrival of the two women. The creator then breaks into a fairytale about a Princess wearing a pair of gold pants that no one could take off. The King offers her hand in marriage and the famous magic poker to whoever can remove her pants. The caretaker’s son steals the magic poker and removes the Princess’s pants. The princess then kisses the poker, causing a knight to appear and slay the caretaker’s son. Karen and her sister return to their boat and slowly row out of sight and far away from the island.
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