Free Candleburn by Jack Hayes

Asp pointed along the shoreline to a car-sized piece of modern art, nestled by the lake edge near the topiary hedges. It was a series of twelve, sharp, upturned shimmering steel spikes, poking from a curved bronze base to chest height like a small section of a hedgehog’s back.
    “You see that sculpture?” he asked.
    “Sure, ” Zain replied.
    “What does it look like to you?”
    The sun was bright in the polished metal of the spikes, reflected back and forth between the individual spines until it shot out like an undirected laser.
    “It’s... well,” Zain struggled. “It looks like the shell or casing of one of those trees you have in England.”
    “A conker?” Asp asked.
    “That’s it. A conker tree.”
    “No, the tree’s called a Horse Chestnut, Aesculus hippocastanum, it means…” Asp trailed off.
    He was quiet and took two sips of his coffee. He continued staring at the artwork.
    “What I mean is,” Asp started again, rubbing his forehead. “What does the sculpture say to you? Not ‘what does it look like’ – think more: ‘what does it mean’?”
    Zain was stumped.
    It didn’t say anything to him. It certainly didn’t seem to mean very much. He could infer from it, and the other sculptures around the park, that Dubai had too much money. It simply bought works to fill its public areas without much regard for quality. Usually, the artists were given only a single criterion for their production – that they must contain no sexual references.
    By the nature of their personalities, that obviously led the artists to push boundaries simply to see what the most ridiculous thing they could get erected was; and erected, in many cases, was truly the appropriate word for the many vaginal cusps, phallic obelisks and random columns with spherical balls at the base and top.
    But what did this piece mean?
    Frankly, Mehr thought it looked like an echidna’s arse.
    “It doesn’t really say anything,” he said after running through the possibilities. “It sort of looks pretty. It’s not deep. It doesn’t mean anything. You’re just meant to experience it, go ‘that’s nice’ and move on.”
    “Exactly, ” Asp replied and began walking again.
    ***
    It took forty minutes for Saleem to arrive at Qasid’s house. They exchanged the traditional greeting at the door and then after a brief discussion in Arabic of the problem, the beautiful artistry of the box and the morality of examining its contents, Saleem pulled out a small, black wallet.
    Cautiously, he worked the brass zip around the wallet’s edge. It opened to reveal a set of lock picks.
    “You’re sure this won’t break the phial?” Blake asked.
    “Saleem is a magician. He’s the best in the Middle East. One of his specialisms is escapology.”
    Saleem said nothing. He simply began tapping a small tool, like a dentist’s sickle probe, on each face of the box.
    “You’ll forgive me,” Blake said hesitantly, “but I thought magic was sorcery and therefore technically punishable by death in most of the Gulf?”
    Saleem raised an eyebrow.
    “Are you sure he’s not secretly a Saudi?” he asked Qasid. “He sounds like my uncle.”
    He took a scalpel from his set of tools and rapped the lid of the box twice.
    “Very clever,” he muttered.
    “What is?” Blake asked.
    “Did you not wonder why there are only five keyholes on a six-sided cube?” Saleem said. “Each of these holes is a fake.”
    He twisted the lid slightly and altered the pattern once again. He dug the scalpel under a newly rearranged tile and delicately lifted it out. Underneath, a sixth keyhole was revealed.
    Saleem placed the device back on the table so they might all see closely the intricacy of its design. His face was genuinely proud of the magnificence of the puzzle box, as though he personally knew its manufacturer or could somehow take credit for its splendour.
    “It’s a marvel of engineering.” Saleem said. “I can’t tell you how unusual it is. The idea