Needles & Sins

by John Everson

  “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.

  Blood, blood everywhere. And her best friends’ bodies dead upon the floor.

  She could have named them all, those white faces with red spattered upon their dead cheeks…but Skyy was afraid to name them in her head, as if naming them legitimized their deaths…made them real. She refused to recognize the deaths that her sight showed her.

  Instead, she forced them out of her brain and rolled off the bed. She stood, rubbed hands across her face in a vicious effort to clear her brain, and headed towards the Big Top. She had to find Talman and Jimmy and Carl. Something wicked this way came. Something bad for all of them.

  ««—»»

  “Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please!” the ringmaster exclaimed, when he saw the newcomer. “In this corner, we present the most amazing of…”

  The gun coughed, and the ringmaster fell to the dirt floor, a blossom of cherry growing fast across his white-vested chest.

  A woman in the stands screamed, and the crowd leapt to their feet, frantically looking for the fastest way down from the stands and out of the tent.

  But the man didn’t stay on the boundaries of the Big Top. He strode fast toward the center, and with a deft hand plucked the wireless microphone from the corpse of the ringmaster. He yelled so loud into its tiny face that the speakers crackled in a lightning storm of static: “Sit the fuck down,” his command echoed.

  The audience gasped, and then almost as one, plunked jean pockets down on the rough-hewn plank seats. Parents held their hands over the mouths of young children who opened wide to cry. And wives clutched the waists and shoulders of their husbands and pleaded in their mind’s eye for this crazy man to look somewhere, anywhere, but at them.

  “What’s wrong with you people?” the man asked. His voice was quiet now. Now that the tent had become still as a tomb.

  “Why are you here at a dusty, smelly circus, when you could be at home watching TIVO? You could be running the kids over to a football game or a piano lesson, or maybe you could be off on your own, having a nice steak and bottle of wine while your kids are giving their babysitter a headache for once instead of you?”

  The man waved the dark barrel of a revolver in the air, pointing at the hidden sky and then trailing its barrel along the line of petrified faces in the woefully po
pulated stands.

  “Are you fools?” he asked. “Don’t you understand? The circus is done. It’s over. We don’t matter anymore. None of this…matters. There is no sense of community to be found here, because there is no community, anywhere. There is no frivolity in the freakshow tent. There is only sadness. We don’t entertain…”

  Behind the man, a tent flap moved, and a white-faced clown tiptoed into the Big Top. The clown’s clothes were almost blinding—silver and red in the intense light of the centerstage spots. His mouth was outlined in a wide river of electric crimson limned in black; an exaggeration of the river of speech. His eyes were raccoon-rings. And a silver hat perched forgotten on his head. The clown put a finger to his lips, urging the crowd to be silent, to ignore him.

  But it didn’t matter. Maybe he saw the cloud’s reflection in a child’s eye. Maybe he heard the crunch of a foot on a loose bit of gravel. Somehow the gunman knew. And when he turned in mid-sentence, he didn’t hesitate to fire.

  The clown’s whiteface turned ghastly red, and he fell to the dust, a cloud of grim humor lost like woken dreams or surprised lust.

  “Why are you here?” the gunman asked, waving his weapon again. “Why do you sit here to watch the animals stand on two legs when they’d rather walk on four? Why do you want to see a woman struggling through life with four arms, or the smallest man in the world climb a ladder so that he can be seen? Do you think any of them are happy to demonstrate their deformities to you? Would you enjoy showing us all your darkest shame, night after night? Would you be able to live with yourself if you had to get up each day to show off your weakness and pray for applause for your deformity each time, because maybe just maybe that would mean that you still have an income and could eat this week?

  “Would you work to make your freakishness worse? Maybe if you cut off your arm, people would pay more to see you?”

  The man laughed, and stared down his arm at the tattoo of a skull. “Maybe you could degrade yourself more, and make more money…Maybe if you were the ultimate freak, you could make enough money as a main attraction that you could leave the circus entirely, eh?

  “Well, look around folks. Do you see enough paying customers to send any pathetic clown or freak to Easy Street? Cuz I sure don’t. I see a bunch of pathetic losers who don’t realize that the circus is the last stop for pathetic losers, and you and your kind have been keeping us here year after year with your pity money.

  “You don’t love the circus. You’re drawn to it. You come to the circus to show that you’re better than all this. But you know what? You’re not. Most of the world has moved on. Look at the empty seats next to you. People don’t need this shit anymore. There’s no need to train a bear to wear an apron to make you feel good. Why do you want to torture the bear that way? Why do you want to laugh at the world’s Fattest Woman? Do you think she wanted to be that way? Do you suppose she said “hmmm…well, I could have big tits and a tight waist and wear some rouge so I get paid lots of money to pose in Penthouse and Maxim, or I could gorge myself with chicken fat and doughnuts for years because I’m miserable, until I’m so big I can’t move without help so that the rubes in bumfuck Iowa can pay a quarter to look at the rolls under my chin?”

  The man scowled at the crowd and waved the gun in the air.

  “Well, what do you fuckin’ think?”

  In the front row, a blonde-headed boy opened his mouth and began to cry. His mother, a cherry-red bomb leaned down to kiss the boy’s head and whisper something in his ear.

  The boy only opened his mouth to scream louder as she pressed two thick lips against his head. Her lipstick left trails on his scalp, but it didn’t matter. A second later, the boy’s head exploded, as the man fired one bullet upwards. The redhead screamed as her son’s blood dripped from her forehead, and the ragged gore of his head jerked away from her lips to slop in her lap.

  “Damn,” the gunman hissed. “I meant to take out the bitch.” He grinned and looked out at the crowd. “The kid thought he’d whine and the world would just fall in his lap. He was a spoiled brat, let me tell you.” He pounded his chest. “I could feel it.”

  He raised the gun again, this time sighting the cherry-red head more exactly. “Like I can feel that his bitch of a mother is a slut who looks down on everyone she fucks just as much as everyone she doesn’t.”

  He pulled the trigger and the tent echoed with the sound of a chamber explosion that spattered the audience with the crimson rain of Cherry-Red brains. The people all around the woman screamed and shrank away as her body fell backward between the bleachers. Her leg caught underneath the seat in front of her and so her body dangled and hung there, raining blood to the grass below…still nobody dared stand up and run for fear that they’d be the next target. The stands grew moist with secret stains of piss and sweat as the adults wrestled their fear and struggled to stay hidden while in full view, and children’s cries of fear were smothered by parents’ trembling hands.

  “Let it go,” the gunman whispered. His weapon hung low at his thigh, and with a tear trailing down his cheek, the man shook his head at the crowd.

  “Don’t you see?” he said. “Our time is over. So Let. Us. Go. Sometimes the hardest thing is to say goodbye. And sometimes, the meanest thing is not to.”

  The curtain at his right suddenly shivered, and a woman stepped into the Big Top. She wore an iridescent uniform of eye-piercing ocean blue, and her hair stood up in a tower of brunette ice. A silver comb glimmered in the light like a beacon, but it was her eye that the crowd fastened their attention on.

  Her third eye. Right there, in the center of her forehead like a garish tattoo.

  Only, unlike the drawings on the arm of the gunman, her tattoo shimmered, and teared as it opened and closed. It was no representation.

  Her eye was real.

  “Talman,” she cried out, tears streaming from all three eyes. “Why are you doing this?”

  The circus’ Tattooed Man shook his head and pointed the barrel of the gun at his wife. “No,” he deflected. “Why are YOU doing this? Why don’t you let this die? Let everyone rest. Our time is over. You just refuse to let it go. Don’t you get it? We’re not relevant anymore. The world has moved on. We’re a footnote.”

  Skyy walked into the Big Top. She held out her hand for Talman’s gun.

  “We’re not a footnote,” she said. “We’re an attraction. A diversion. Entertainment. We never were relevant. We were only a place for people to forget, for awhile. A place where people might leave their troubles at the popcorn stand and forget about life for awhile. And now you brought all that trouble back in. You’ve ruined it.”

  Talman raised his gun to Skyy’s third eye. The crosshairs in the sight trembled, but he didn’t bring his hand down. “Sometimes you have to kill the thing you love to set it free.”

  Talman’s finger drew back on the trigger of the gun, priming the bullet for release.

  “Dad, no!” a voice behind him screamed.

  A frown flickered across Talman’s face and his attention wavered and he turned to see Jimmy standing a few yards away, baby Carl in his arms.

  “Listen to your heart,” Jimmy begged, tears streaming down his face. “It used to show you things. The right things. You promised me that life would be better here. You promised me that other people weren’t as mean as my real dad.”

  Talman turned his gun on Jimmy’s face, and then shifted it slightly, until its barrel pointed at the bald head of the toddler in Jimmy’s thin arms. “Dada,” the baby grinned, oblivious to the danger.

  “It isn’t, and they are,” Talman said gripping one hand on his chest. “Life isn’t better, and people are horribly mean. My heart doesn’t lie. But I did.”

  Behind him, a horrible shriek erupted as Skyy broke into a dash across the dusty floor of the Big Top while a ragged audience looked on, too stunned and afraid to interfere in the drama below.

  But before Skyy could reach him, Talman’s gun went off. Blood sprayed up in the ai
r like a geyser of hopeless mist. The audience didn’t wait any longer to see what happened. They grabbed their children and ran towards the exit.

  Skyy reached Talman, but she didn’t stop; instead she kept going to take Jimmy and Carl in her arms.

  “Oh my boys,” she cried, holding them close. In the dust behind her, Talman’s head spasmed rapidly twice, and then again, sending a gout of dark blood pulsing into the ground as his life left him in a rush. Brains and defeat leaked in equal measure through the holes he’d blasted from his jaw through his tortured skull.

  The baby pointed to the ground and grinned at the gory prank. “Dada,” it said.

  ««—»»

  Skyy brushed a lock of hair across the sight of her third eye and pushed the last roll of sideshow tent into the rocky crevice. She had played in these caves once a year every season when she was a kid and the circus came to play here, in Northern Kentucky for a week each summer.

  After burying Angla and Emily and the monkeys and Talman, she had decided that this was as good a place as any to bury the circus. At least for now. Skyy disagreed with his method, but had to admit that Talman’s heart, in its tortured, insane way, was right. Their time was over. The world didn’t need a circus or a sideshow.

  “That’s the end of it,” she breathed, pushing the last of a fabric fold onto the rocky shelf.

  Jimmy nodded but said nothing. He walked out of the cave without looking back. The circus, in its celebration of outcasts, had failed him in offering a safe refuge. But still, it had given him Skyy. In the glare of the day ahead, he followed Carl who ran clumsily ahead, every step threatening to let his body fall. Yet he pressed on, as only toddlers can. Carl chased a bright red and green beach ball.

  “Dada” the baby squealed, still not understanding that Dada’s day was dead.

  How could he understand the end of what had gone before, when his day was just beginning?