Shuffles Barnaby had a gift. Some people saw it like that, anyway. Shuffles Barnaby could pull quarters out of noses. It looked like the most dated kind of sleight-of-hand, but it wasn’t a trick.

It wasn’t something he liked to spread around, but when people found out, as they inevitably did, they were envious. He tried to explain to them that he couldn’t pull quarters out of his own nose, and they just shrugged their shoulders. He tried to make clear the time investment and sheer embarrassment required to pay for something as simple as a meal with quarters from the waitress’ nose, and they just shook their heads. They thought he was lucky.

The worst part, he kept to himself. He had let it slip one night drunk at a bar and had had to move across the country the following week. The worst part was that if someone asked him to pull a quarter out of their nose, he had to oblige.