Nightmare Carnival

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.

I did look right at them once, early on. Someone had abandoned the cage a moment on the way to rolling them into the train car, and I took a corner too quickly and startled them.

They were sitting up, two she-lions, unblinking. They looked at me.

You saw them, of course, you saw them all the time, every night in the ring you saw them. But there’s seeing and then there’s seeing.

I don’t remember what they looked like. I was cold, I remember; I was shaking all over for half an hour. Daisy had to hold the other end of everything I carried that night just to keep it steady, until even Joseph the rigger noticed, from three cars away, and came over.

“Nobody’s business,” said Daisy when Joseph asked what happened, in a tone I’d never heard from her. He left us alone.

I sat in the train car that night and listened to the muted sounds of the circus, drumrolls and applause like a heartbeat, and after long enough it felt less horrible to think what I’d imagined when I saw the lion cage.

(Night had fallen, all at once, the moment I’d surprised them.)

Carvessa was the lion tamer.

The first time I saw the circus, Matthew Brandini introduced him second to last, with a drumroll and the spotlight swinging wildly all over the place before it found him, and I had been distracted by the spotlight and never really noticed the act.

It was for effect, of course, I realized after I joined up. Alice who handled the light already knew where he’d be; they just wanted the audience in suspense.

(I didn’t understand showmanship, the Brandini Brothers were always telling me. Matthew sometimes sighed about it and looked over at Jim with the patience of a saint, like if only I’d come to my senses they could put me in some rouge and a spangled leotard and get me into the ring where I could be useful.)

I did understand it, some ways; it was more exciting for the audience if the light discovered him, so when he cracked his whip and the pair of cats jumped from the pool of darkness onto the stools behind him, it was like magic. Maybe that was the only magic they ever saw in it. Maybe that was what I didn’t understand.

Carvessa was tall and tawny, and had probably been handsome once, but life had happened to him so that his face was hardened something awful. Seeing him standing next to the pair of mountain lions was like seeing triple: the same expression when the light came on, hard to fool and hard to please.

He drove the pair of lions from one stool to another with a single crack and a flower of dust, as everyone sitting in the stands that I’d built clapped and murmured like they were waiting for something.

He made those two cats jump over one another onto an empty stool, and then up teetering onto the same stool, and he made them get down again and dance in the dirt, curling over one another faster and faster until they looked like one animal. The light cast his shadow across them both.

Finally he made them leap from a dead stop through the hoop standing behind him, their claws missing his face by a hair as they passed like thread through a needle.

The audience gasped, because to them out there under the bright light, everything looked beautiful and dangerous.

I didn’t make a sound, because I could see Carvessa’s face as the cat leaped over him, and the lions looked more human than he did.

On his way out he drove the cougars before him, stinging the packed ground on either side of their paws. As he passed, he looked at me, and even though I was a good twenty feet away, the next whip crack took the end off my right shoelace, sure and sharp as if one of those cats had reached out and snapped her teeth.

The audience was still clapping for him, but it was getting softer and softer; the cougars hadn’t eaten him, and they were disappointed.

Back at the bunks I showed Daisy what Carvessa had done, and as she was shaking her head and handing me the flask she’d pulled from nowhere, Joseph leaned in and clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Just keep clear of him, you’ll be all right.”

Joseph was a rigger for the trapeze. Technically we were all working on the tent together on anything that needed doing, but Joseph always ended up with that, as soon as we broke ground. He was one of those people you trusted to make sure something held like it was meant to.

Sometimes he asked me to help with the pulley, and I’d haul things up to him hand over hand, looking up at the shapes his shoulders made as he worked, him so high up he looked hazy from the sawdust and me on the dirt where they’d paint center ring.

To feed the lions, you brought whatever you could catch as near the cage as you dared, then threw and hoped you trusted your own aim.

“I can’t throw to save my life,” Joseph said, the first time I brought back a rabbit. “Let me clean that for you and you can be the messenger.”

His hands shook the whole time the rabbit skin fell away from the meat.

The cats were more mannered than any people at the circus — the crew never had time for delicacy, and the Brandinis might pretend to be refined men of the theater, but they ate with their heads as low as anybody else who’d grown up hungry.

The mountain lions never moved an inch so long as you were standing there; no one had ever even seen them eating. The meat just vanished somehow when everyone’s back was turned. When you tossed the meat into the cage, they were sitting with their paws pressed together like prim little hills, claws quietly appearing and retracting, just waiting for their chance.

I stared at their paws whenever I fed them. My head got so heavy when I was near their cage, like all the blood had drained from my neck; I couldn’t have looked any higher. They were tawny on first glance, and dusted with white, but there was a gray underneath that got deeper the longer you looked, like they were pulled tight over some darkness that had no name, like the pads of their paws were made of stone. When they stretched their claws came out, sickles of bone that scraped the bottom of the cage without a sound, just long enough that you shuddered and turned your head.

The meat was always gone when you looked back.

I learned to hand the rabbits to Joseph for cleaning and then make myself scarce until I knew the feeding was over. Otherwise my dreams were filled with talons.

Some of our crew had their eye on becoming an act. Every so often you’d catch Peter and Richard juggling things at each other, or Allan throwing knives into a block of wood. Matthew Brandini would hover around our train car every so often, watching them practice as if they actually had a chance.

(Even early on, I hated how much it got their hopes up. They all had to know it was useless unless Jim Brandini made a round, looking out at someone in particular from under eyebrows as dark and sheltering as the brim of a hat. Matthew could stroke everybody’s egos and think about flashy introductions all he wanted, but Jim was the one who decided what the circus was willing to be responsible for.)

Daisy said once, “If you’re interested, you’ll have to put yourself forward. Matthew suggested you and I pair up as the Two Giant Nymphs of Olympus. I flicked my cig at him. Nearly caught that coat on fire. It might have given the impression you weren’t interested.”

We were coiling rope around our shoulders to drag a wagon full of benches to the tent, looking like a pair of Clydesdale mares in denim trousers and shirtsleeves.

“Haul,” I said, and she grinned.

Joseph could have performed, I thought. He was surefooted and pleasant to look at, and anything else you needed Matthew Brandini could probably teach you.

I told Joseph so, one day when he was swinging by his knees from the rigging, sliding a joint into place. He laughed and said, “Can’t see under those lights. Pass up the bigger wrench, would you?”

I didn’t think he would have wanted to. For no reason I could name, I liked that I was right. I watched him fasten the support, his fingers living creatures against the sea blue of the tent.

He was kind, and Daisy was kind, which was more than I’d expected — he taught me how to play the crew’s quick-draw card games, and Daisy gave me a little folding mirror one of the rubes left behind, so I had something in my bunk that looked like mine.

The crew all minded themselves, and even though my palms turned to calluses, it was less trouble than most places; it felt safe as houses, mostly.

The lions had to come out of the train car at every stop, same as the team of six trick dogs and the two ferrets and the handful of parakeets that were all in love with each other and couldn’t stop singing about it.

As soon as we pulled into a city, Daisy and Peter and I hauled the train car door open, and all the cages got rolled down the ramp and out to wherever the animal gallery would be, so people could pay to stand in front of them and wait for them to do something interesting.

There were nearly fifty crew who traveled with the circus; we drew straws to see which two of us had to handle the lion cage.

(Once I drew a short straw, and Joseph slipped it out of my fingers and handed me his. Nobody argued it. The back of my neck went hot; he was looking at me.)

Some of the others didn’t seem bothered by the lions, aside from making sure to keep clear of their claws. A few seemed uneasy but afraid to show it — Peter and Richard would sing a dirty song in two parts to cover up their nerves whenever they drew short straws and had to roll the cage out.

Joseph and Daisy never so much as turned their faces toward the cage, any time they were close enough that the lions could see.

Those cats were cougars for sure, to look at. If you were some rube from just outside town who came to the circus to gasp and gape at the acts, and purposely drop popcorn where the parakeets could reach it just to watch them flutter after it, you might pass by the mountain lions and think only how smooth their fur was as they sprawled carefully in the shade of the cage, and keep going.

But I’d seen a mountain lion once, at home in the bitterest winter I remember. The snow was deep and it must have gotten desperate, and one night it came pacing around the house, barely leaving footprints even though the snow was three feet high. We’d brought our pig inside, but it might have been feeling lucky.

When I held out the lantern to frighten it off before my sister had to use the shotgun, its eyes had glinted bright and flat and gold, lamps answering lamps in the second before it turned to run.

These cats weren’t real, maned sort of lions, that was for sure, but they weren’t any cougars I could think of, either.

If you’d held up a lamp to them one night, maybe, when you were on your way back to the train car and feeling brave, their eyes stayed ink black even when they looked at you, two pairs of holes with nothing inside them.

(I dropped the lamp; I ran back to the train in a panic, sank to the ground outside, and gasped into the dirt, hands fisted in the grass, until I had the strength to stand. When I came inside Joseph’s smile died as he looked up, and Daisy watched me without blinking until I thought I was going to scream.)

Wherever Carvessa had found them, he should have left them there.

At the next stop we came to, Joseph drew the short straw. Without waiting to see who had the other one, Daisy stood up and went with him to the animal car, and the cage appeared in a single practiced drag down the ramp, with Daisy pushing the brace behind with her eyes averted from the cage and Joseph in front, staring straight ahead and pulling as if his life depended on it.

They’d been traveling with the Brandini Brothers a long time; when they reached the patch of dirt that would be the zoo, they stopped without having to call out warnings, and locked the braces in tandem without even looking at one another.

Most of the crew seemed to think that there was nothing more to those cats than avoiding sharp tempers, and they were busy enough hauling equipment; I was the only one who saw that when Joseph made as if to glance over his shoulder, Daisy rested her hand on his back and kept him moving straight ahead, smooth as a circus act, away from the lion cage.

I was the only one who took any notice, except Carvessa, who stood in the Brandinis’ doorway, his eyes sliding jealously to the mountain lions.

There’s a disadvantage to being as big as I am when people expect their young women to be quick and sharp, but Father said once that I was so quiet I near disappeared, and it was true; among the dozen of us that were dragging the tent into place, I was just another set of broad shoulders.

He never looked up; he never saw I saw.

The Brandini Brothers train got a wild welcome in some towns. There would be a huge crowd of children as we slowed past the station on our way out to where we could make camp; Daisy and Joseph and I would be wedged into the way car at the back end of the train, shoveling candy out to the Brandinis, who stood on the tiny painted porch grabbing behind them for it, tossing out never- ending handfuls of sweets that must have looked like magic — but it wasn’t an absolute lie.

Those lies they only had one of, and it was Carvessa.

One night, after the tent but before the shows started, Joseph and I sat at the edge of our train car, our legs swinging back and forth gently. He was turned a little toward me, his foot sometimes just brushing the edge of my foot.

I wished I had my little mirror, so I could tell if my temples looked as warm as they felt.

“My hands still smell like candy,” he said. “I’ll be the human sugar wafer for a week.”

“I think Jim hit one of them in the face with a piece,” I said. “You think he’d be more careful of someone who might buy a ticket.”

Then Joseph said, “You have to stop looking at Carvessa.”

At the edge of the trees, Carvessa was sitting with the Brandinis, passing a bottle back and forth. Their chairs faced the rest of the camp, but more often than not he was looking over his shoulder toward the animal gallery. I didn’t realize I had been looking.

“Why do the brothers let him keep them?”

The words were out before I could think about them, and my face went hot, but after a long time he said, “I don’t know,” in a way that gave me strange ideas.

“Look at me,” I said, and he did, right in the eye, for a little too long.

It wasn’t that anything was wrong with his eyes. They were bright, light green against his brown skin, and we watched each other long enough that I knew there was a little gold fleck in his right iris. But something was there all the same; my reflection in his pupils was hazy, like he was trying to remember me from some time long ago.

Joseph had looked at the lions once, and they’d looked back at him, and something was missing from him now.

When Matthew Brandini was watching practices it usually meant Jim was inside doing the books and getting angry, but sometimes he really did seem interested in how things looked. “A true showman,” Allan said sometimes, when he wasn’t calling them both hacks for not giving him a knife-throwing act.

Matthew Brandini watched the contortionists practicing once, a human tower of limbs, and made them do it again more slowly, until it looked twice as hard for them than it had before.

He was right. People clapped harder the harder it looked, without thinking much else about it. They only wanted popcorn; they got the peanut smell for free.

Daisy smoked sometimes, when it was cold outside and she’d fought with Allan (they didn’t get along) or with Joseph (they got along horribly well, right up until they didn’t). Maybe the smoking was to keep her out of fistfights — Peter said it once — but I didn’t think so. She was the kind to level you with a single punch and leave.

When she offered me a drag I took it, an excuse to stay with her a little while. It was deep night by then; only the parakeets and the two of us were left awake. Their song carried faintly on the breeze from where they were, all the way out in the gallery.

Finally, I handed back the cigarette and asked, “What happened to Joseph?”

The lions were in their cage; when I spoke, their ears twitched once, in unison.

She grinned around the stream of smoke between her lips. “Who knows with him. Did he fall out of his bunk again?”

“I mean before.”

“Oh.” She took a drag, let the smoke rise until it vanished. “He went out one night. He was gone so long I went looking for him. Found him in front of the cage slumped like the dead, though he doesn’t remember it now. Nothing at all.”

“What do you think happened?”

“It’s cold,” she said. She dropped the cigarette, hauled herself back inside.

But she’d glanced over at the animal gallery like she couldn’t help it, and the lions hadn’t moved when she spoke, not a paw, not an ear.

For a long time after she went inside I stared at the corpse of Daisy’s cigarette and tried to shake the feeling that the mountain lions were too big for that cage, that it couldn’t hold them, that they should be a thousand thousand miles away from here.

One day when I wheeled the sawdust barrow out, Carvessa was next to the lion cage, peering in and clicking his tongue against his teeth like he was tending a pair of housecats.

“You shouldn’t be looking at my girls like you do,” Carvessa said, still watching the cat and not me, absently scratching behind its ear.

It sent shivers all through me to see him do it, like standing at the edge of Harris Gorge back home and looking down at the tops of trees that were so far down it seemed like a carpet of moss, not pines and oaks and maples anymore.

He shouldn’t have been petting it. That wasn’t just some cougar under his hands; that cat wasn’t his.

“Where did you find them?” My throat was dry.

He looked up at me, finally, and his eyes were as flat and sunken and horrible as those of either of the cats.

“Don’t you like them?”

“They shouldn’t be caged,” I said. I was sure, but the words shook.

“It takes some doing,” he said, low and edged. “That territory’s farther away from anywhere you’ve been that you’d never find it without me. Rough hunting, out where you can catch cats like these, you’d have to be willing to give up an awful lot in that chase. But I could tell you. You want one? I’ll tell you how.”

No, I thought to my bones, like I’d screamed it.

“I want to finish here,” I said, and tapped the broom on the ground until he stepped aside at last and turned the corner of the cage, back to camp.

The cats’ heads swiveled to watch him go. Nothing else moved but the tips of their tails, twitching back and forth in time with each other.

When it struck me that they might turn their heads back and look at me, my ankles felt like they’d gone hollow, and I raced that broom across the ground, dragging grass and dirt with me without ever stopping. I’d been holding the broom handle too tight. My fingers were numb an hour after.

I must have made up my mind then, though it feels now like I must have made up my mind as soon as I ever saw the lion cage.

When rubes came to look at them, they all clicked their teeth, too, and pursed their lips and mewled and murmured to each other about what a pretty pair of cats they were: stupidest people I ever saw.

“Can you get him drunk?” I asked Daisy at the fire, after I’d decided.

She looked at me for a little while. A whole cigarette came and went. Then she said, without asking who I meant, “He already knows how I feel about him. Wouldn’t work. I’ll ask Peter.”

“Have you ever looked at them?”

She shook her head. “Never had the nerve,” she said, her throat so tight I could barely hear.

I said, “Don’t come looking for me, whatever you hear.”

Her eyebrows went up. Then she handed me her flask.

“You’ll need this,” she said.

The Brandini Brothers Circus shut up shop late — card games ran till dawn in the crew quarters, you could slip a key from the Brandini car without anyone missing you. It was dead night by the time the place had settled in to sleep.

My lantern light was shaking all the way out to the cage, because my hand knew better than I did that I was a fool.

The ferrets were tumbling, and a few of the parakeets chirped hopefully when they saw light. But when I approached the lion cage, it got silent.

Not just the birds; the whole night was holding its breath, and as the lions drew themselves out of the dark and sat up to watch me, I could see their claws scraping against a floor that somehow made no sound.

“It’s all right,” I said, like I was talking to the farm dog back home. My key hand was shaking worse than my lantern hand.

I set down the light, unlocked the padlock, took a steadying breath as I lifted it away; then there was just the bolt left, and the cage would be open. I curled my fingers around it.

“What are you doing?”

Carvessa had a voice like a saw even when he wasn’t drunk, and I froze with my hand on the lock despite myself. When I looked up I was looking at the lions, and I saw a tawny slice of cheek and a high arched brow and nothing else.

He was behind me and they were in front of me, and it was no competition at all.

“What you should’ve,” I said, and slid the bolt free.

Then I dodged to put the cage between us, and ran.

But I knocked over the light as I went; it sputtered and went out even before I started running, and in the desperate dark my legs gave out on me. I landed with a sour thud that knocked my sight sideways for a heartbeat.

Then — I couldn’t help myself, I had to know — I turned.

The lights from the train car were far off and flickering, and in the moonless night the lions looked like shadow puppets before a candle as they jumped, and then I didn’t understand what happened.

Carvessa fell between them — he was pulled down under them — they slid on top of him — they blinked out of sight and appeared again without him — Carvessa vanished at the touch of their paws.

Carvessa gasped; he must have gasped, or sobbed, or started to speak, because then there was a terrible sound of something swallowing up all his breath.

One of them turned toward me, licked her lips with a tongue that left no blood behind.

Blood was missing, I thought, so numb with fear that it seemed like a disappointment rather than a horror. If there had been blood, it meant Carvessa would have died from tooth and claw, and mine would be a death like any other death, instead of whatever was about to happen to me.

Her eyes had no reflection; I only knew she was moving because her teeth gleamed close and white as she opened her mouth.

I braced myself, stared right at her as she stepped toward me. I was so terrified I couldn’t force my eyes closed. I knew down to my eyelids that in the next step she’d make a sound and that would be the end of me.

Her jaw slid open and open and open, far beyond what was possible, wide enough to eat the night, and inside her mouth unfurled the warm dark deep.

Joseph told me later — he told me a hundred times — that I fainted, that when they found me my eyes were rolled up so far in my head they could only see the whites.

I woke up surrounded, everyone leaning in like a circle of faces in a musical picture and trying to decide among themselves what must have happened.

“Never met a soul Carvessa wouldn’t try to frighten out of its skin just to see if he could,” Allan said, and Peter said, “I don’t care what the brothers might say, we’re well rid of him,” and they nodded back and forth.

“She doesn’t even remember what happened, I bet,” said Daisy in a tone I recognized, “none of you are helping, move.”

“When you caught Carvessa taking those cats out, it must have scared you something terrible,” Joseph said, looking at me like there was only one right answer.

He still had that little spot in his right eye, a pretty accident.

I said, “I swear they could have killed me.”

No one seemed surprised; they’d figured Carvessa set them on me just to get in one last scare on his way out.

Peter asked me, “Which way did they go?”

“Don’t remember,” I said.

It worked well enough as an answer. It wasn’t an absolute lie.

After the lions, I lost my strength. I was as big as ever, it was nothing so easy to see, but in the first days I wasn’t good for anything but holding something you put into my hands.

“Shock,” Daisy said. “Happened to me once when I dropped a pole and thought it was going to hit Peter, couldn’t get any work out of me for a week. Stop twisting your fingers.”

Jim Brandini never spoke to me again. Matthew came by the crew car a few times when Jim was away, and asked anyone but me how I was doing, with the sort of earnestness that could be equally fake or real on a man like him. Joseph disliked him something serious; he never got anything out of Joseph.

The worst of it lasted a week or two, where I woke up gasping and sweating and unable to even drop out of bed because my legs were just marrow and air, and Joseph would hand me a glass of water and sit with me until I stopped shaking.

Then one day I could help Joseph thread the pulley. A week after that I was dragging things up to him hand over hand, and only my white knuckles gave away that anything had ever been wrong.

He was kind to me, always, but I couldn’t look Joseph in the eye after the lion cage. I knew something he didn’t; I didn’t dare show him.

“Good as new, then,” Matthew Brandini said encouragingly when he saw me, and ran a hand through his glossed blond hair like it was a relief.

(My hair went a little thin in patches, after the lions; I cut it short, eventually, just to give me enough ducks’ feathers to cover the empty places.)

Daisy made a face behind Matthew’s back as he left, but even she took to watching me carefully, then saying, “All right,” every so often, as if to herself.

The lion cage with its gate still open stayed in the zoo car, empty and waiting. No animal ever filled it.

I gave Daisy back the little mirror sometime that winter. She didn’t ask why; she’d looked right at me often enough.

My eyes reflected nothing, now; two dark pools where no light reached.

Sometimes I dreamed of the lion opening her mouth to swallow me.

She’d opened her mouth impossibly wide, until there was nothing else in my sight, until I knew I’d disappear wherever Carvessa had gone, and behind the awful white glint of her teeth I’d see something that would drive me mad if I didn’t strike out and crack her jaw hard enough to close it.

I didn’t disappear — the lions had shown me mercy — but even their mercy burned.

It was an impossible dream to wake up from; before I could scramble awake in bed and try not to breathe loud enough to wake the others, I always had to feel the grass under my hands and the horrible airless dark against my ears, and nothing around me but the blackness and the stars.

I stayed as far from that tent as I could get, once it was standing. It had nothing for me.

When you come to the Brandini Brothers Circus now, you’ll see contortionists and clowns and dancing dogs, and Allan throwing knives at Rachel, the girl Matthew picked up outside Chicago, who has eyes big enough to see from the back row. Sometimes she and Daisy and I play poker.

You’ll buy popcorn; it’s cheaper, and the peanut smell is free.

On your way out, if it’s moonless and cold, you might walk past the animal car and shudder, and not ever know why.

Nothing will be there but the train and the dark; there won’t be a thing to see.