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Slicing

The man on the corner is doing strange things with vegetables. "Look how thin I sliced this carrot. Great Scott, you could read a newspaper through that. Even the short words! You could replace the windows of your house."

I'm a pitch man myself -- I do miracle mops and marvelous brooms -- and once we make eye contact, I know he'll try to step up his game.

He's got a crowd and he's pitching knives. Pretty average looking knives, you ask me, with the label "Shinzai" written on the handles in chop-sooey font. At $19.95 for the set you'd pass them up if you saw them on a store shelf. So he can't just offer knives. He's got to serve up some magic.

He saws through a Coke can. Then he slices a tomato, deft as a Vegas blackjack dealer. A murmur passes through the crowd, a kind of shiver, a collective thrill. Hands start going for pocketbooks.

The fact is, almost any new knife can cut through an aluminum can and then slice a tomato with equal ease. Don't believe me, buy a new cheap knife and try it yourself. The pitch man hacks through a tree branch. He cuts a radiator hose. And this ho-hum humbug works. If he hammered a nail with his shoe people would buy nine pair, as long as they came with a free shoehorn and an extra pair of laces.

Then he slices through an atom. There's a flash as white as God's own teeth and a wind blast like He got punched in the gut, and everything within five miles is vaporized or splintered or charred.

But only for an instant. Because then I'm whole again, and the city is whole, and everything's whole.

The entire thing with the knives, slicing the aluminum can and splitting the atom, that was just misdirection. That's not at all what his pitch is really about.

"Okay," I admit, "that was pretty good. That's a new one."

He grins like a preacher with a hundred dollar bill tucked in his Bible. "Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce the Bamco Reconstituter. Developed by the biggest brains in Finland, you won't find this little beauty in stores. Now, say you're a butterfingers and you've dropped Grandma's best china on the linoleum ..."

Ashamed as I am to admit it, I have to move on to avoid getting out my own wallet. He really is a pretty good pitch man.

[Hear the podcast of this story on Escape Pod.]