Magic Eye
By William Musgrove
Below the Magic Eye poster were the words The Meaning of Life. The poster itself resembled waves of crinkled aluminum foil. I crossed my eyes, let my mind go slack. Nothing. I got up and pressed my nose to the center of the poster. Nothing. Focusing on looking through the image instead of at it, I slowly walked backward until I bumped into the opposite wall. Nothing. Figured that was all anyone could see. Figured Jerry was pranking me.
“See anything yet?” Jerry said, carrying a tray of rings to be marked up. He hung the poster in the break room after I’d complained for the hundredth time about how there had to be more to life than buying and selling people’s crap. I shook my head, clocked in, and went back to work.
Every day, people came in and pawned a piece of their lives to keep living. Sometimes they bought it back. Sometimes they didn’t. But I always saw them again. No one ever left with more than they originally had, including me. Everyone was scraping by, and the only thing that separated us was I stood behind the counter. Otherwise, we were basically the same person.
The bells tied to the entrance jingled, and a middle-aged man entered the pawnshop. He placed a guitar case on the counter. Inside the case was a cheap-looking Fender. I rotated the guitar in my hands, revealing the name Billy written in Sharpie on a strip of masking tape. Under that and on a screwed-in metal plaque: Property of Lincoln Middle School.
“You look a little old to be going by Billy,” I said, clicking the case closed.
“Can you do $150?”
“Best I can do is $50,” I said, pointing at the slew of almost identical guitars dangling behind me.
“Okay, gimme a second.”
The man pulled out his cell phone and started dialing. He paced at the back of the store, quietly shouting, his free hand waving like he was hailing a taxi. I wondered who he owed money to. Then I notice the repeating red-and-green swirl pattern on his sweater. I squinted, and an image formed in the fabric: shedding pine trees, bushes, a gravel path leading into the woods. The image sank into the man like someone had carved out his torso. When I blinked, it vanished.
“Just give me the $50,” the man said, approaching the counter.
I filled in a pawn ticket and gave it and a fifty-dollar bill to him. He stuffed the bill in his wallet before squealing out of the parking lot in a beat-up sedan. The guitar surely belonged to his kid or someone else’s, and we weren’t supposed to take suspected stolen goods, but I did if the person seemed extra desperate. I planned to give him the thirty-day grace period to buy it back, but I couldn't keep it at the shop just in case Jerry found it and asked why I bought a lifted guitar.
On my drive home from work, Billy’s guitar resting in my backseat, I thought about the Magic Eye poster hanging in the break room, about not being able to see anything, about how there was probably nothing to see. Then I drove past some shedding pine trees and some bushes and a gravel path leading into the woods. I slammed on the brakes. It was the image from the man’s sweater.
I crept up the path to discover the man’s sedan parked in a clearing. I got out of my car and went deeper into the woods, deeper into the man’s torso, and there he was staring over a ledge. There were no counters in the woods, so I was staring over the ledge, too. He took a step forward. Sticks snapped under his feet. I told him not to move and ran back to my car and retrieved the guitar. With his back facing me, I placed the case on the ground and opened it. When the man turned around and saw the guitar, he fell to his knees and wept.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he said, cradling the guitar’s neck.
The next day when Jerry asked if I’d seen anything in the Magic Eye poster, I told him I had, I told him I’d seen a cheap-looking Fender.
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About Author
William Musgrove is a writer and journalist from Northwest Iowa. He received an MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Penn Review, The Florida Review, Passages North, Wigleaf, and elsewhere.
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Website: williammusgrove.com
Twitter: @Will_Musgrove