Belatedly, I realized that my children’s story "Smoke and Mirrors" is up at Spaceports & Spidersilk for their Fall 2009 issue.
As a kid I always loved the stories that didn’t dumb things down for me–Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain (that’s The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron, etc.) are the best example–so I was going for simplicity without condescension.