Asimov’s, May/June 2026
What the committee does not know is that Montecarlo is himself a fraud of a different kind. Born Wolfie Moskowitz, a Jewish locksmith’s apprentice from the Lower East Side, he has constructed the persona of Winston Montecarlo — self-made orphan, midwestern farm boy — as carefully as any escape apparatus. His physical performances are not merely entertainment; they are acts of identity erasure, a way of escaping himself.
The séance that evening is a masterwork of controlled tension. Montecarlo personally binds Livermore inside the spirit cabinet, secretly attaching a garter tourniquet to his own calf to detect her movements through the vibrations in the wood. He identifies her techniques — a dexterous foot slipped from the bindings, a confederate doctor planted among the investigators — but before he can act, she channels a spirit that speaks in a foreign language and addresses him as “Wolfie,” making clear she knows exactly who he is. The threat is unambiguous: expose her, and she will expose him.
After the séance, Montecarlo hires a private detective who confirms that “Madame Livermore” is actually Pearl Homer, a Florida woman with no aristocratic background and no deceased Welsh husband. More unsettling is what the detective cannot explain: how Pearl knew his secret. The story’s answer arrives in a remarkable pivot. Pearl Homer is a genuine telepath — not a spirit medium, but a woman who has always been able to hear other people’s thoughts, a gift that has made her both powerful and profoundly lonely. She built the Livermore persona around what she could actually do, skimming true things from the minds of the grieving and performing them back as contact with the dead.
The climax arrives at a second séance, months later. Montecarlo exposes her publicly, but Pearl — rather than revealing his identity — simply runs into the ocean. She nearly drowns. So does he, pulled under when he follows her into the surf. Both are rescued. And in the aftermath, Pearl discovers that her near-drowning has extinguished her telepathic ability entirely. She is, for the first time, alone inside her own skull.
The story closes a year later. Montecarlo has been hearing a voice in his head during his tank escapes — mocking, intimate, unmistakably Pearl’s — and has armed his assistants with her photograph, convinced she is stalking him toward some final exposure. Instead, he finds her waiting in his dressing room, her gift gone, her identity still being assembled from scratch. The voice in his head was not hers. Neither magician nor medium can explain it. Their final exchange — her kneeling beside him, his voice shaking as he asks whose voice it is — refuses resolution, leaving both performers, and the reader, suspended between the rational and the inexplicable.
The story is a layered meditation on performed identity, the violence of self-invention, and the loneliness of people who see too clearly. Both Montecarlo and Pearl are escapologists in the deepest sense — each trapped by a truth no audience would accept — and Feldman draws their mutual recognition with precise, unhurried irony.
Stephanie Feldman is the author of the novels Saturnalia, a Locus Award Finalist, and The Angel of Losses, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, winner of the Crawford Fantasy Award, and finalist for the Mythopoeic Award. She is co-editor of the multi-genre anthology Who Will Speak for America? and her stories and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from Asimov’s Science Fiction, Catapult Magazine, Electric Literature, Flash Fiction Online, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Rumpus, Uncharted Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Weird Horror, and more. She lives outside Philadelphia with her family. Her collection The Night Parade and Other Stories is forthcoming in 2026.