The Stage Is Not A Crime Scene (Yet)

So there I was, watching the magic show. My eight-year-old niece, for reasons best known to herself, had decided that she needed to sit on my lap to watch the show. Secondborn (five years old) was in the seat next to us, with his Nana beside him and the rest of the family further down the row.

Up on the stage, the magician (who's really, really good) places his assistant (who's also really, really good) into an upright rectangular box, and rolls it around the stage, turning it completely around in the process so we can see that it has a solid back and isn't sitting on any trapdoors in the stage. For added verisimilitude, there are cutouts at (IIRC) the top left corner and the bottom right corner, so you can see one set of toes and one set of fingers from the assistant. (Wiggling, yet!)

Well, the magician then proceeds to slide metal sheets through the center of the box, from front to back along the vertical axis. It's the sort of thing where you'd expect him to split the box in half, and that's sort of what he does... except that instead of actually splitting it, he rotates two of the corners. The box has a central axis of some sort, and he swings the top left corner down and the bottom right corner up, turning the thing from a rectangle into a sort of cross or "t" shape.

At this point, while the magician is spinning the now-T-shaped box around so we can see it from all sides, that my eight year old niece, in a very distraught stage-whisper, bursts out: "He killed her! She's dead! He killed her!"

...And Secondborn, in an effort to be helpful and reassuring, pipes in with, "Dere's no blood! Where's the blood? How did he kill her if there's no blood?"

Meanwhile, I'm sitting there thinking, Damn it, Secondborn, quit telling people that my five-year-old son knows what a crime scene is supposed to look like!