Otto is bending steel, but no one cares.
There’s not much left of the show. The halfhearted clowns have fled, or maybe Sam just gave them the night off to cut down on his overhead. Sam’s fairly dressed up for him in a tattered corduroy suit a couple sizes too small. He’s sitting with Bartholomew, trying to impress, telling his usual stories. He’s washed and brushed out his lush gray mane, tossing it now and then.
Bartholomew has a look of superiority on his face that makes me sympathize even with Sam who as usual has not a clue what’s going down. He probably broke out the good bud for this event.
Otto holds up a rebar pretzel and gets a smattering of applause. He usually gives it to someone in the crowd but this time doesn’t bother. The kid from earlier is sitting right up front, chewing furiously on a mouthful of gum, like he’s trying to make his ears pop. He’s already up there with Alexandra, where everyone looks now and then, tilting their heads back, though all that’s up there is the rigging for Alexandra’s act, the machinery of fate.
Otto starts into his big finale, lying on his back, foot-juggling a refrigerator. It’s not as hard as it looks — the compressor in the refrigerator is a hollow aluminum shell — but it’s still fairly impressive. This crowd can barely manage to give the dancing refrigerator a glance. He tosses it high, balances it on one foot. Nothing.
The kid takes his hand out of his pocket, checks a phone, and puts it back. Maybe the rest of the family is on the way. Wouldn’t want to miss this.
I return to Alexandra. “Otto’s almost done. So who’s Bartholomew?”
“An avenging angel.”
I know better than to smirk. This nightmare is unimpressed by my skepticism. “And Jacob, was he an angel too?”
“Yes. Fallen. Heartless.”
“I want to believe you, but—”
She puts her fingers to my lips. “Don’t. Don’t believe me.”
Don’t love her, don’t believe her. So of course I do, and she disappears into her trailer to change. I hurry into the tent to adjust the Sands of Time. I totally forgot. I use a stopwatch and a scale to add the necessary seconds, the moments of her life, before I set the mechanism. There’s a moment I consider tampering with it, leaving her hanging when the song ends — and it’s my turn to look up, to imagine her there when silence fell and she was still alive, imagine her dying in silence, her nightmare fulfilled. I measure carefully. I set the mechanism, hurrying to finish before her intro begins, and the tent is filled with the thunderous applause of an audience ready for blood.
She sings her opening numbers exceptionally well. She must feel the approach of death with near certainty tonight. The crowd peers at her with unbroken malevolence, some openly grieving for those stolen from them by her song. They pray for her doom.
I imagine life ahead without her, and I don’t want it. I understand what she meant when she said she was trying to save my life, but it was too late. I already loved her. You can’t imagine what it’s like to sing like that! No, but I can listen. She doesn’t just live to sing. She lives to die to sing.
Her song fills the moonlit empty nights, vast and silent otherwise, with beauty, driving through the desert toward the dark horizon into the dark abyss, into nothing. Letting go. When it’s time.
There’s my cue. A spot finds my hand, and I pull the lever. The Sands of Time begin to flow.
Listen. Listen, goddammit. She’s started her song.
I’m ready.
THE LION CAGE
by Genevieve Valentine
The Brandini Brothers Circus roasted peanuts when it set up camp for a show. It was the same batch of peanuts, heated as many times as you could without turning them rancid. If anyone was ever stupid enough to buy some, they’d crack a tooth as soon as they bit down.
I thought it was awful when I went to the circus and saw it, but as I was saying so to the peanut vendor, a man in a green coat tapped me on the shoulder. The coat was velvet, brushed to within an inch of its life, and his hair was blond and shellacked as the peanuts.
“There’s no danger, I promise you,” he said. “The people who come to see us would never buy peanuts for what we charge. Popcorn’s a quarter of the price, and the peanut smell comes free.”
You’d think a thing like that has to be a flat untruth — it felt like one at first — but the one thing the Brandinis did better than run a circus was to never tell an absolute lie.
It was Matthew Brandini who wore the green coat. He introduced himself to me, and explained he went by Matteo for the circus; it wasn’t truly his name, but it wasn’t a whole-cloth fraud. That’s how the Brandini Brothers were about everything.
No one ever did buy peanuts, so far as I could see, but the smell did what it was supposed to do. The popcorn man went through a dozen sacks of corn at every show.
After I joined up with the circus that night, that was the first thing I carried.
I’d grown up the biggest in my family, an inch taller than my older brother, as wide as my father in the shoulders by the time I was fifteen, and that had been ten years gone. I’d been on the verge of quarry work when the Brandinis came to town. If my parents were sad to see me go, they didn’t say anything — it wasn’t as though they could afford to feed me anymore.
You got room and board with the Brandinis, on top of your wages, and as soon as I knew Brandini was going to ask, I knew I’d be saying yes.
(I hadn’t had much experience with employment — it was hard back home, since the war — but you know when work is coming your way: Matthew Brandini told me the truth about the peanuts, and he was looking at me the way men who needed things taken care of had always looked at me.)
It wasn’t bad, as work went. My younger brother was in the quarries and hadn’t come out the same, and my older brother had joined up with the railroads, and barely knew where he was writing from, when he wrote home. At the circus, at least you weren’t working alone, and no one would let you starve, and there were always things to look at that made you feel like the world was exciting.
The clowns I could have done without — they seemed strange and cruel in the makeup even though I knew they weren’t — but we had a team of dogs that danced whenever the right song played, and the four contortionist girls in spangles who always seemed glamorous, smoking outside their trailer wearing thirdhand robes.
I liked all of it, except the lions.
Daisy was one of the loaders: she’d come from lumber country, and swung a hammer twice as fast as I could. She could have spiked the whole tent alone, I always thought, watching the hammer appear and disappear above the line of backs, and from the space the others gave her to do it, they thought the same.
She wasn’t much for talking, but what she said was always frank, and that mattered more, probably.
“They’re only a pair of old cougars,” she said during my first unload. We were laying sawdust, and she’d caught me looking over at the cage. “Nothing to see there.”
But I kept glancing over, because there were shadows at their edges that moved even when they weren’t moving and drew your eye, though there was never anything there, and even before you’d lifted your head you felt like a fool.
Next time I did it, she tossed her braid over her far shoulder to stare me down and said, “Don’t keep looking at them.”
I kept my eyes on my work after that.
That was all she said about it — not one for company — but she was a quick worker. She steered the wheelbarrow like a racecar driver and handled the shovel like a musician’s baton; the sawdust was as even as new snow, except for the crescent she left around the lion cage.