Skyy ran from the tent to her trailer. It was too much. The tears let go, and the summer night turned a blurry mess of black velvet sky and running reds and yellows. The circus was a maze of primary colored signs and tents, and they all turned to a viscous swirl as she ran. Somewhere, she heard the chimps screaming in irritation, but she couldn’t go check on them now. Her breath came in great hitching gasps, and she needed to lie down. She needed to let it out. She needed Talman to hold her.
But he was working the ticket counter out front. The ticket booth that nobody was visiting. That nobody had visited in the last dozen towns.
Skyy threw herself on the bed and cried. She and Talman had been running the Barnett & Staley Circus now on their own for a few years, but every season had brought fewer and fewer patrons. Every town brought her stronger premonitions of empty stands and starving performing animals. And Talman’s heart—which once found empathy in the visions of others’ hurts—had grown hard from the insistent defeat as each town brought fewer patrons. And even those that came seemed as if they came out of duty. Perfunctory. The circus seemed to have no place in today’s world.
Ms. Katrina was amazing at what she did with the lions…but nobody cared enough to come see the act anymore.
And ever since Yvette, the three-breasted woman had died, the circus had lost its top-drawing “naughty” freak show. Talman’s “illustrated man” act simply didn’t draw that many people anymore; what interest is there in an Illustrated Man when tattoos were all the rage these days among regular people? You could see guys and girls with more tatts than Talman had managed to accumulate on the pages of magazines in any bookstore…and sometimes just walking down any street. In a culture obsessed with body modification, he simply wasn’t that much of an oddity anymore. And as for Tonya, the smallest woman, and Yvette’s kids, Wen and Wong well… lots of people had met and seen dwarves. They just weren’t that unique.
Media killed the circus star.
Barnett & Staley’s had plenty of things you don’t see in the average subdivision of Beloit, Wisconsin or Loveland, Colorado. But the fact was, that didn’t matter anymore. You could see weirder things on 500 channels of cable than you would ever assemble in the circus, and with HD TV, you could actually see most of them better from the comfort of your couch than if you came, parked your car in a rutty field, paid your ticket price, bought your popcorn and sat on the bleachers behind some fool with B.O. and an unwieldy collick.
Kids went to the mall and played sports and battled addictions to X-Box and Nintendo. They didn’t go to see lions and monkeys and musclemen and dwarf women at the circus. It was passé. Their fathers might have gone to see a three-breasted woman and dragged them along…but those days were gone. And Yvette’s always mutated children had never seemed to live long enough to take her place as a centerstage attraction that could have truly brought in some spectators for the freakshow.
She’d had some doozies, that was for sure. Her daughter Yvonne still showed off her extra set of legs and arms… but…somehow, it wasn’t enough.
And so Skyy and Talman had continued to take the circus from city to town to village, first following a long-travelled route, and then gradually moving to less traveled markets as the old venues found reasons not to have the circus come back.
The towns, and the attendance shrank and shrank until now, she and Talman had had to dip into their savings to pay the performers after recent shows. And they didn’t have much themselves. It would only take another bad date or two to bankrupt both them
and
the circus.
Skyy clutched her pillow and pressed it to her face, a swollen mask of heat and painful tears. She had grown up in this circus and had no other skills if the bigtop stopped putting down spikes and putting up marquees.
She opened her lips against the wet pillowcase and let out a long, drawn out sob. Her cries drowned out the sounds of bullets just a few yards away.
««—»»
Desperation is an insidious thing. You can live with it for a long time, and probably not call it desperation. You’ll say, “yeah, I’m kinda down today,” or “it’ll get better” when someone asks you how you are. You’ll tell yourself for a long time that the blackness that gnaws at your neck and threatens to engulf every word you try to utter before it can get out is just a phantasm. Ephemeric pathos. You’ll drink a lot, and think a lot. You’ll consider how long it might really take for the blood to leave your body if you draw a sharp object across your wrists. You might consult physics texts and arithmetic to arrive at a formula to determine how long it will actually take your heart to bleed your body dry with open veins. And when that seems a pointlessly extended option, you’ll consider the odds of surviving should you somehow manage to find yourself standing in the path of an oncoming train. Is a 5% chance of survival as a quadriplegic worth the risk?
Throwing out these uncertainties as foolishness, you’ll instead concentrate on first making your surroundings better…and then you’ll convince yourself in resignation that the world you inhabit is certainly better by far than that of many and you have no right, no fuckin’ right to complain.
And then you’ll drink again.
Mind you…the world did not change. It stayed the same as it ever was. But somewhere along the line, you came face to face, not with a bit of “oh bummer” depression. You came face to face with desperation.
And it haunted you because you refused to acknowledge it head-on.
But when you did, you didn’t take the pussy-boy way out. You didn’t finally drag the blade or stand in front of the iron horse for release. You decided to change your world. You were going to get out…but still stay. And you bought a gun.
Okay, maybe
you
didn’t. But I did.
Because I knew in my heart that the circus was dying. I could feel its horrible gasping breaths struggling for intake and release every day. But I was a merciful guy. As much as it was going to hurt me, I knew what I had to do. I had to put it out of its misery. Euthanasia.
The zebra was only the first in a long line of mercy killings on my agenda tonight. Biting back the tears, I started towards the elephant tent. I could almost feel the fuzzy hide of Emily slipping between my fingers from the last time I’d given her baggy neck a hug.
««—»»
Jimmy slipped out of the trailer with his stepbrother when he heard Skyy crying. The baby opened a fist and pointed at the moon as Jimmy stepped onto the dark path that led to the midway. Something popped and popped again in the distance, and Carl jumped.
“Shhh,” Jimmy soothed the child, stroking the wispy dark down on its head. “We’ll go see the lions. You know you like lions.”
The baby made a roaring sound at the word “lion” and grinned, showing all four of its teeth.
“That’a boy,” Jimmy said, and moved faster down the path. The night was quiet, but for the occasional cheers from the Big Top. Quiet and cool. He shivered at the goosebumps that rippled up his arms, and hugged the baby closer, enjoying its burning warmth, and sweet baby smell.
In answer, the child wrapped a chubby arm around his neck and pulled at a lock of the hair by his ear.
“Luv ya, buddy,” Jimmy whispered and slipped into the Big Top from the side. He carried the baby up the rows of weathered wooden planks, and sat high in the tent, away from the paying customers.
Above the center ring, Reind walked the tightrope, his mouth a tense line of pink concentration, as sweat beaded in glinting lights on his forehead. The small crowd drew in a breath as one and exhaled, as the performer wavered on a step, threatening dramatically to fall to the nets below, but then recovered his equilibrium.
“You can do it, Reind,” Jimmy whispered, scratching the baby’s back to calm it as it fidgeted. “Steady as she goes…”
And then the tent erupted in ragged, meager applause to celebrate Reind’s final step from the rope to the platform. The tightrope walker bowed, and quickly slipped down the ladder to disappear out the back of the tent. Reind always left a show and went straight home these days, ever since that nasty business his wife had caught him in with Melienda. There was still evidence of Reind’s deadly affair floating in formaldehyde in the freak show. Not that anyone ever visited that tent these days.
Jimmy held the baby close and tried to stop the fluttering in his stomach. Talman had rescued him from a horrible place and brought him to the circus to live with Skyy. And then they’d had a baby, Carl. But lately…for quite awhile now actually, the circus had felt thin as a leaf in fall. As if it might all blow away leaving Jimmy with the taste of cotton candy and an empty cardboard cone. Or maybe not thin. Maybe it felt heavy. As if it could collapse in upon itself at any moment, a towering construct of concrete supported by a frame of kite string.
Skyy sometimes cried about it with Talman at night when she thought he couldn’t hear the two of them talking, but he could. That’s why he’d taken Carl out of the trailer tonight when she’d started letting go in the other room. She needed her time, and he needed to find a place where there were no tears. For awhile, he’d found it here at the circus. But then his bad luck had caught up with him, and his newfound parents were suffering because of it.
“It’s all my fault,” Jimmy whispered, rubbing a tear into the baby’s soft shoulder.
“And in this corner, we bring you the exotic safari tricks of Angla, our magical Zebra!”
the ringmaster was promising. He pointed towards the tentflap at the end of the Big Top, but nothing came through.
Jimmy tried to pull himself from his funk, and pointed at the animal entryway.
“Look Carl, here comes Angla,” he said.
But the tent didn’t open. No zebra trotted through. The ringmaster gestured again, and then, with a slight rustle, Perry came running in, eyes so wide you could almost see the veins in them from the top of the stands. He ran to the ringmaster and whispered something, then tripped and sprawled headlong on the dusty ground as he tried to run back the way he’d come.
“Angla isn’t feeling well tonight,” the ringmaster covered, and pointed at the far stage. “So instead, we’ll bring out Concertina, and her amazing Band of Monkeys!”
“Here come the monkeys,” Jimmy grinned at the baby, whose eyes opened wide at the word. The baby loved the monkeys and together the two boys bopped up and down on the bleacher and imitated the monkey sound, “ee-ee-ee.”
But moments later, Jeffrey from the stables came running into the center ring and whispered to the ringmaster, and again the flustered director in his gaudy sequined red cape had to announce a delay.
“It looks like our monkeys won’t be joining us tonight either. But that’s ok, because Emily, the most talented elephant ever to take the stage in a circus is on her way, and she’s going to show you all what it really means to move a trunk.
The tent grew silent in anticipation, as the crowd waited for the next act to arrive. But no elephant was forthcoming.
As all eyes trained on the tent flap at the north end of the Big Top, nothing could be heard but for the occasional sniff and sneeze of a child. The ringmaster stood helpless in front of the vacant stages, waiting for someone, anyone, to come help him entertain the meager crowd.
But when the tentflap finally moved, it wasn’t entertainment that entered.
It was a man. With a gun.
««—»»
The elephant was hard. She’d kissed my neck with the wet ridges of her trunk a thousand times. Truth be told, I hated the fuckin’ monkeys, so that was easy. They were like shooting clowns in a barrel. Good riddance. Fur puree. Whip ‘em up and coat the cake.
But Emily…damn it was hard to hold the gun to her grey hide. She looked at me with complete incomprehension as I whispered in that gigantic ear that it was all over, it was time to bring down the curtain.
One beady eye looked over at me as her trunk dragged a load of hay to her mouth. She was comfortable with me, completely at ease.
“Irrelevant elephant,” I said. “Just like the rest of us. We’re all irrelevant.”
I whispered “Irrelephant ”as I pulled the trigger and sent a hunk of lead straight to her stupid, trusting brain.
She didn’t struggle like the zebra. She fell hard. And fast.
I was glad.
After I wiped the tears from my face, I slipped out of the tent and started down the path to the center of the circus.
To the Big Top.
««—»»
Skyy stared at the black tears on her sheets and knew she had to lift her head. The show must go on. And it was…right now…without her. Talman was working. Jimmy had taken Carl somewhere…and she was here, crying in her bed. She had to stand up and pull it together.
And that’s when her third eye chose to open.
It was unpredictable, her secret sight. But when it did show her visions, they were always true.
And as Skyy pushed herself up from the sheets tonight, she felt a veil lift in her mind, and suddenly, she saw, not the dark shadows of her rhinestone costumes hanging in the corner, but the heavy flow of fatal blood. She saw Angla’s black and white stripes turned ragged and gory, and the troop of screeching monkeys lying still at the floor of their pen. She saw people too, and she screamed, struggling to close the sight of her third eye. Her vision ran red, and her stomach threatened to release itself on her bed as she realized the import of her sight.