"Oh look, a cardinal!" Katrina blurted out, pointing up to the tree. "I would love to have a tame one, but I wouldn't have the heart to cage him."
Ichabod unslung his satchel from his shoulder.
"Then I have something for you."
He gingerly pulled out something he had brought from New York. It had absolutely no value for his case, but it was the one item he absolutely had had to take with him, if only because he'd have missed it in the event his apartment were ransacked in his absence. He'd had the item since childhood, a paper disk toy on which sat a bird and a cage.
"A cardinal on one side, and an empty cage on the other. And now..."
He gave the disk a spin. The two figures merged, so that the bird was in the cage.
"You can do magic!" Katrina said with a grin. "Teach me."
"It is no magic. It is optics." He handed her the toy and demonstrated the spinning technique. "Separate pictures become like one picture in the spinning...like the truth that I must spin here."
Katrina held the string. Ichabod watched the toy bird as it stood at the edge, free, unsuspecting, and oblivious to the prison that seemed so safely away.
Katrina gave the string a sharp spin. The cage didn't move from its spot, of course, and neither did the bird. Nonetheless, the trap was all around, the way it is in life. It just depended on how you looked at it.
- from the novelization of Sleepy Hollow
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