Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (41 page)

Nadia’s skin itches.

Later, her boyfriend comes over. She’s still tipsy when she lets him in and they lie in bed together. For hours he tells her about teeth. Molars. Bicuspids. Dentures. Prosthodontics. She falls asleep to the sound of him grinding his jaw, like he’s chewing through the night.

Rehearsals for the Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue happen every other afternoon. The director’s name is Yves. He wears dapper suits in brown tweed and tells her, “You choose what you reveal of what you are when you’re onstage.”

Nadia doesn’t know what that means. She does know that when she soars through the air, she wants to go higher and farther and faster. She wants her muscles to burn. She knows she could, for a moment, do something spectacular. Something that makes her shake with terror. She thinks of her boyfriend and Rhonda and the feel of the nitrous filling her with drowsy nothingness; she does the jump they tell her and no more than that.

The other actors aren’t what she expects. There is a woman who plays a mermaid and whose voice is like spun gold. There is a horned boy who puts on long goat legs and prances around the stage, towering above them. And there is a magician who is supposed to keep them all as part of his menagerie in cages with glittering numbers.

“Where are you from?” the mermaid asks. “You look familiar.”

“People say that a lot,” Nadia says, although no one has ever said it to her. “I guess I have that kind of face.”

The mermaid smiles and smoothes back gleaming black braids. “If you want, you can use my comb. It works on even the most matted fur—”

“Wow,” says the goat boy, lurching past. “You must be special. She never lets anyone use her comb.”

“Because you groom your ass with it,” she calls after him.

The choreographer is named Marie. She is the woman with the necklaces from the first audition. When Nadia dances, and especially when she jumps, Marie watches her with eyes like chips of gravel. “Good,” she says slowly, as though the word is a grave insult.

Nadia is supposed to play a princess who has been trapped in a forest of ice by four skillful brothers and a jaybird. The magician rescues her and brings her to his menagerie. And, because the princess is not onstage much during the first act, Nadia also plays a bear dancing on two legs. The magician falls in love with the bear, and the princess falls in love with the magician. Later in the play, the princess tricks the magician into killing the bear by making it look like the bear ate the jaybird. Then Nadia has to play the bear as she dies.

At first, all Nadia’s mistakes are foolish. She lets her face go slack when she’s not the one speaking or dancing, and the director has to remind her over and over that the audience can always see her when she’s onstage. She misses cues. She sings too softly when she’s singing about fish and streams and heavy fur. She sings louder when she’s singing of kingdoms and crowns and dresses, but she can’t seem to remember the words.

“I’m not really an actress,” she tells him, after a particularly disastrous scene.

“I’m not really a director,” Yves says with a shrug. “Who really is what they seem?”

“No,” she says. “You don’t understand. I just came to the audition because my friends were going. And they really aren’t my friends. They’re just people I work with. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Okay, if you’re not an actress,” he asks her, “then what are you?”

She doesn’t answer. Yves signals for one of the golden glitter-covered cages to be moved slightly to the left.

“I probably won’t even stay with the show,” Nadia says. “I’ll probably have to leave after opening night. I can’t be trusted.”

Yves throws up his hands. “Actors! Which of you can be trusted? But don’t worry. We’ll all be leaving. This show tours.”

Nadia expects him to cut her from the cast after every rehearsal, but he never does. She nearly cries with relief.

The goat boy smiles down at her from atop his goat legs. “I have a handkerchief. I’ll throw it to you if you want.”

“I’m fine,” Nadia says, rubbing her wet eyes.

“Lots of people weep after rehearsals.”

“Weird people,” she says, trying to make it a joke.

“If you don’t cry, how can you make anyone else cry? Theater is the last place where fools and the mad do better than regular folks . . . well, I guess music’s a little like that, too.” He shrugs.

“But still.”

Posters go up all over town. They show the magician in front of gleaming cages with bears and mermaids and foxes and a cat in a dress.

Nadia’s boyfriend doesn’t like all the time she spends away from home. Now, on Saturday nights, she doesn’t wait by the phone. She pushes her milk crate coffee table and salvaged sofa against the wall and practices her steps over and over until her downstairs neighbor bangs on his ceiling.

One night her boyfriend calls and she doesn’t pick up. She just lets it ring.

She has just realized that the date the musical premieres is the next time she is going to change. All she can do is stare at the little black book and her carefully noted temperatures. The ringing phone is like the ringing in her head.

I am so tired I want to die, Nadia thinks. Sometimes the thought repeats over and over and she can’t stop thinking it, even though she knows she has no reason to be so tired. She gets enough sleep. She gets more than enough sleep. Some days she can barely drag herself from her bed.

Fighting the change only makes it more painful; she knows from experience.

The change cannot be stopped or reasoned with. It’s inevitable. Inexorable. It is coming for her. But it can be delayed.

Once she held on two hours past dusk, her whole body knotted with cramps. Once she held out until the moon was high in the sky and her teeth were clenched so tight she thought they would shatter. She might be able to make it to the end of the show.

It shouldn’t matter to her. Disappointing people is inevitable. She will eventually get tired and angry and hungry. Someone will get hurt. Her boyfriend will run the pad of his fingers over her canines and she will bite down. She will wake up covered in blood and mud by the side of some road and not be sure what she’s done. Then she’ll be on the run again.

Being a werewolf means devouring your past.

Being a werewolf means swallowing your future.

Methodically, Nadia tears her notebook to tiny pieces. She throws the pieces in the toilet and flushes, but the chunks of paper clog the pipes. Water spills over the side and floods her bathroom with the soggy reminder of inevitability.

On the opening night of the Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue, the cast huddles together and wish each other luck. They paint their faces. Nadia’s hand shakes as she draws a new red mouth over her own. Her skin itches. She can feel the fur inside of her, can smell her sharp, feral musk.

“Are you okay?” the mermaid asks.

Nadia growls softly. She is holding on, but only barely.

Yves is yelling at everyone. The costumers are pinning and duct-taping dresses that have split. Strap tear. Beads bounce along the floor. One of the chorus is scolding a girl who plays a talking goat. A violinist is pleading with his instrument.

“Tonight you are not going to be good,” Marie, the choreographer, says.

Nadia grinds her teeth together. “I’m not good.”

“Good is forgettable.” Marie spits. “Good is common. You are not good. You are not common. You will show everyone what you are made of.”

Under her bear suit, Nadia can feel her arms beginning to ripple with the change. She swallows hard and concentrates on shrinking down into herself. She cannot explain to Marie that she’s afraid of what’s inside of her.

Finally, Nadia’s cue comes and she dances out into a forest of wooden trees on dollies and lets the magician trap her in a gold-glitter-covered cage. Her bear costume hangs heavily on her, stinking of synthetic fur.

Performing is different with an audience. They gasp when there is a surprise. They laugh on cue. They watch her with gleaming, wet eyes. Waiting.

Her boyfriend is there, holding a bouquet of white roses. She’s so surprised to see him that her hand lifts involuntarily—as though to wave. Her fingers look too long, her nails too dark, and she hides them behind her back.

Nadia dances like a bear, like a deceitful princess, and then like a bear again. This time, as the magician sings about how the jaybird will be revenged, Nadia really feels like he’s talking to her. When he lifts his gleaming wand, she shrinks back with real fear.

She loves this. She doesn’t want to give it up. She wants to travel with the show. She wants to stop going to bed early. She won’t wait by the phone. She’s not a fake.

When the jump comes, she leaps as high as she can. Higher than she has at any rehearsal. Higher than in her dreams. She jumps so high that she seems to hang in the air for a moment as her skin cracks and her jaw snaps into a snout.

It happens before she can stop it, and then she doesn’t want it to stop. The change used to be the worst thing she could imagine. No more.

The bear costume sloughs off like her skin. Nadia falls into a crouch, four claws digging into the stage. She throws back her head and howls.

The goat boy nearly topples over. The magician drops his wand. On cue, the mermaid girl begins to sing. The musical goes on.

Roses slip from Nadia’s dentist-boyfriend’s fingers.

In the wings, she can see Marie clapping Yves on the back. Marie looks delighted.

There is a werewolf girl on the stage. It’s Saturday night. The crowd is on their feet. Nadia braces herself for their applause.

Manipulating Paper Birds

Cate Gardner

A flyer drifted a hundred feet down into the pit where Mack Johnson leaned against a drainpipe, and where the giant Tarasov Baranowski folded paper. Mack’s translucent hand plucked it from the air. He scratched a match against the rock wall and held the flyer up to it.

Stoker’s Distorted Carnival & Sideshow.
Do your intestines dangle outside your trousers? Have you grown a fourth breast? Do your ears pick up signals from other worlds? Then join us and see the world*.

The small print read: *
you will actually travel no further than Ohio, though we do have an excellent postcard collection.

Mack threw the expended match into a fire that was comprised of twigs and dried leaves.

To his left, Tarasov flicked his wrists and the paper birds, attached by string to his thick fingers, danced. The birds were the giant’s deviation. Mack watched them fly as Tarasov flung his arms left, right and above his head. Mack’s thin lips curled back to reveal bone. A large grey disentangled from Tarasov’s fingers and surged towards Mack’s right eye. He flicked it aside. Blood bubbled were the paper sliced through his skin.

Mack sneered. “Careful I don’t set light to you as you sleep.”

“We’d both melt.”

Tarasov plucked the carnival flyer from Mack’s hand and began to fold it—as he did most things that fluttered down from the world.

“We should join,” Mack said, as he circled the pit.

The place was too small for one let alone two men. As usual, Tarasov ignored him. It wasn’t the first time Mack had threatened to leave. The clang of his boots on metal gained the giants’ desired attention.

“You can’t go up there,” Tarasov said.

Mack looked up and met only a pinprick of light. He began to climb the ladder. Liberation did not sit easy on his shoulders.

“You’ll wear yourself out,” Tarasov called after him. “When you fall, I’ll slice off your skin and make birds of it. It’s thin enough.”

It was Mack’s turn to ignore the giant. The bird constructed out of the carnival flyer fluttered by his ear and crashed into the brick wall. Still he climbed. It was a long way up and he would not feel relief until it was a long way down. He’d been here too long. He had scurried down the ladder in the great earthquake of 1875 and Tarasov had persuaded him to stay.

A carrier pigeon swooped down from the world above. A further two followed its smooth course, while a fourth broke a wing against the rock walls and fell into the waiting fire. It would make a tasty supper if he proved coward. Resolved to continue on, Mack reached within ten feet of daylight when fingernails scratched at his ankle.

“We have been too long down here,” Mack said, gaining another step. He should have done this many years ago.

“I agree.” Tarasov’s hand grasped hold of his ankle.

“You can snap the bone off, I’ll hobble or crawl away from here if need be.”

“Who speaks down there?” a voice thundered.

The darkness to which he was accustomed returned as a hulking figure blocked out the sun. A hand reached down.

“Joey Docherty will pull you out.”

As he emerged into the day, Mack Johnson kissed the turf as his jaw slammed against the rim. Joey Docherty was not as burly as his shadow and voice hinted. As both rescuer and rescued sizzled beneath the midday sun, flat on their backs and gasping for air, shadows gathered about them. The expected exclamations were missing. There was no,
he needs meat on his bones and skin on his meat
; or
why, I can almost see his organs.

“Is this Stoker’s Distorted Carnival & Sideshow?” he asked.

Joey wiped sweat off his brow. “It is and you look as though you slipped through its bars.”

Distorted figures gathered. As paper birds fluttered about them, Mack knew Tarasov had surfaced.

Candy striped tents, dulled by dust and years, and a bedraggled collection of man, beasts, and wagons circled. Canvas, stretched between stakes, declared all manner of oddities concealed within—The Exhumed Escapologist, The Terrifying Swords Man, The Electro-Shock Triplets, and so on weaving darker hells with each turn.

A short man, with a snout in place of nose, held out his right trotter for Mack to shake. “Paul Porker.”

“Pleased to meet you. Pleased to meet you all.”

Mack shook every hand, trotter, foot, and claw he met. Blood dripped as a sword-finger sliced through his palm.