Of Air and Earth: A Sapphic Fantasy Novella

by Pia Morrow

  Chapter 6

  Over the next week, however hard she tried, Myra simply couldn’t sell the necklace. She would walk to the pawnshop as planned, but then from across the road, she would find herself unable to move forward as if blocked by some invisible force field. She stood there, frozen, for a full half-hour before she saw the owner frown at her from inside the store and move towards the door purposefully and rushed away, embarrassed. The next day, she was back, blocked once more by that invisible wall. If she didn’t know her mind better, she would claim magical intervention.

  The third time, the shop owner caught her unawares as she gripped the necklace in her pocket with such force she feared the metal would cut holes in her hand.

  “Can I help you, Miss?” he said from behind her.

  She spun around, caught out. “I’m sorry,” she said uselessly.

  He tilted his head as he scrutinised her. “For?”

  “I - I -”

  “You want a job?”

  She stopped dead. “What?”

  “I’ve seen you out here, staring inside my shop like a frightened rabbit the past two days. You looking for work or what?”

  “Yes,” she said with such enthusiasm the man looked taken aback. “Yes, that’s exactly it. I was…I was thinking about how best to approach you and…I just got a little nervous.”

  “Hmm,” he said, appraising her. “What can you do?”

  She rattled off her organisational and numerical skills, things she had learned over the many years as an unpaid assistant for Aunt Elba, but he interrupted her.

  “Okay, okay, it just happens I need someone to stand in during my dance training on weekday evenings. Would that work? Can’t pay much, but it’s honest work. Mostly. Name’s Rust.”

  The words ‘dance training’ threw her off-kilter, but she recovered a moment later to accept. Rust the dancer and shop-owner. He wasn’t lying when he said it wouldn’t pay much but given she was mostly just watching the shop, selling to the few buyers who came in and only accepting things for sale on a list with prices he had given her, she couldn’t expect more. And it would give her enough money to pay for a room in the most basic of boarding houses, which was all she needed.

  Why? Said a voice in her head. You can go now. Be free. Not hold your breath in fear every time you see a flash of military uniform.

  The other voice in her head, louder and no less persistent, simply said: Wait.

  During the day she stayed in her thin-walled, noisy box of a room in the worst guest house Ketania had to offer, and every afternoon, a little before the sun would set she went down to the shop and sat among all the pieces of others’ lives, detritus that they had sold in desperation or simply because the object had no use to them anymore. As someone who had travelled her entire life and never held on to anything, it stunned her the kind of things people owned, that people would come in to buy. Sometimes she would find herself toying with the necklace in her pocket. From similar items, she could see that she’d be able to sell it for the price of a ferry ticket and then enough to get her settled wherever she stopped. She wondered vaguely why Kiana’s parents hadn’t simply sold it and not her if they were so desperate for money. Perhaps it really had been, in their minds, for her own benefit. The money, after all, would run out. It always did. But who could understand people and their motivations, anyway? She gave herself a headache when she tried.

  A couple of days of this quiet routine had passed when Myra noticed a poster on a lamppost just outside her guesthouse. She froze when she saw it, and everything in her just stopped. It was the same poster for Zello’s circus as before, only this time, above the swirling chaos of the colourful circus, was the finely drawn silhouette of a beautiful tight-rope walker. The poster declared the show was running in the town for an extra week. That meant there were…three days left. Kiana was still in the city, and in three days she would be gone, forever. Myra gripped the necklace in her pocket like a talisman. Was this what she had been waiting for?

  Yes, she realised. She had hated how things had ended with Kiana. The thought of seeing her again, of reliving that moment she had realised what was between them was about to come to an end - it plunged heart into dark, icy depths until the heaviness nearly dragged her down entirely. But she knew if she didn’t see her again, say goodbye properly, she would feel that way every time she thought of her friend. And she wasn’t ready to lose her in her memories as well as in her future.

  So she decided, then and there, that she would go to the circus that night. Her few pennies should be enough to admit her, and if not - well, she hadn’t worked at a circus her entire life for nothing. She could find a way in.

  She would say goodbye, then she would sell the necklace and be on her way. No more regrets.

  * * *

  In the end, no subterfuge was necessary as the dour-looking teen in the ticket kiosk gave her a smudged-ink ticket in exchange for her pennies and waved her away. She streamed in with the other audience members and found herself a place in one of the back rows, where she wouldn’t be seen easily. Already her stomach was roiling, and she felt some regret. The last words she had said to Kiana turned over and over in her mind, a cruel, sickening refrain. Suppose she saw her, and her eyes simply grew cold, confirming that whatever they had had was over? Part of Myra, the cowardly part which had remained passive, never admitting her feelings and pushing them down instead, that part of her wished to simply leave things as they were - unfinished, unresolved. At least that way she might still pretend to herself that there was a chance, however small, that she hadn’t messed things up irrevocably.

  The smells of the circus put her on edge - part sickly sweetness from the brightly coloured clouds of spun sugar they always sold, part wild animals and hay, from the beasts they kept in captivity and paraded around as part of the show. There was quite the crowd at Zello’s - unsurprising for a city show, maybe slightly less common for a second week. Myra noticed the audience skewed towards men, both young and old, many of them in large groups. She huddled further into the shadows. The candlelight dimmed and sultry music began playing from a spot beneath the stands, and a moment later Myra knew why there were so many men in the crowd.

  Contortionist was not an incorrect describer for these women, technically, Myra thought as she watched with a kind of enthralled horror, yet it was not quite sufficient either. As they bent their bodies in unnatural positions, oftentimes wrapped around each other and placed in positions that she was sure the directors had thought artfully erotic, the only word she could think to describe it was exploitative. The women were talented, for sure, but their leotards featured massive cut-outs and what fabric remained was entirely sheer, the buds of their nipples clearly showing through even at this distance. The men in the crowd leaned forward like wolves closing in on prey. Every movement had been choreographed for their gratification only, even as the women closed in on each other, in some sick mockery of performing sexual acts upon one another. There were eight women in the routine. Several of them looked frighteningly young. Myra felt her lunch turn over in her stomach.

  The show continued in much the same way. The posters had shown a circus, but a circus this was not. The men around her grew more and more animated as the show progressed. A woman led out a tiger wearing only striped underthings, another threw knives at an unclothed woman spread-eagled against a bright blue screen, and there were even a pair of almost-naked clowns, soaking each other with pretend flowers then gratuitously coating one another with the insides of cream-filled pies. What had she sent Kiana into? What damage had been done already? Too much, she knew, before she even came out for her act.

  When Kiana came out in what seemed a parody of her red dress - a thin, translucent sheaf of crimson fabric wrapped tightly around her body, Myra thought her heart might actually break - she felt the pain viscerally, tugging at her from her core, threatening to send her reeling to the ground. Somehow she stayed put. She wasn’t sure she could move in her horror, even if she
wanted to.

  Despite the clothes, Kiana’s routine started off much as it used to. A few spritely dance steps, then she balanced on her hands and cartwheeled gracefully on the thin golden rope, just as beautiful as ever. But Myra saw the tightness in her shoulders, the cloud of shame that had never been there before. Her hand flew to her mouth as she lowered her hips to the rope and gyrated, grinding against it and simulating pleasure. The men cheered and whistled. Myra had seen enough. Her courage could only take her so far. She pushed through the crowd, to some grumbling, but most were distracted. She didn’t want to see the cause of their elation. Suddenly, she wasn’t only disgusted by them, but she hated them all, violently. The last few steps out of the tent, she ran and bursting into the night, away from the shouts and the music and sleaziness of it all, felt like coming up for air. She took a few big gasps until her breathing steadied. Her whole body was shaking, she realised.

  She walked away from the circus without another look back, walked in a daze until she reached her guest house and curled under the thin covers of her hard bed. She was still shaking slightly, she realised, as if from very far away, but not with fear anymore. No, now she was angry. She was furious. And she was going back.

  Chapter 7

  Myra did not, in fact, sell the necklace after watching Zello’s show. But she had good reason this time, and a plan. There were two more days remaining before the show moved on to god knows where and tracking it down would be all the more difficult. The day after the show, after a sleepless night spent furiously turning over all the ways she might torch Zello’s circus to the ground and not be caught, she went and spent her meagre wages on a variety of seeds from a plant seller at the market. Before she would return to the shop that afternoon, she walked far out of the city centre until she found an empty and secluded bit of scrubland wedged in between some abandoned looking warehouses. There, for the first time since childhood, she planted her seeds. She carefully noted times taken to sprout, to root, to grow to full length - all supernaturally speedy under her hand.

  It was the first time she had ever done it in the knowledge that she gave them the power of growth, of life. The feeling it gave her was unfamiliar but welcome. It felt like coming home. She felt in charge of herself and her life in a way she rarely had been in her twenty-four years as she watched daisies and hydrangeas bloom beneath her fingertips. By the time she left, the half-dead bit of scrubland was no more - now, nestled between the grey warehouses there was an explosion of riotous colour and life, a garden of flowers in full bloom.

  By the next morning, she was ready.

  She rose early, before the pawnshop opened, and using the key given to her to lock up after hours, she crept in. To her relief, the wooden case of gleaming knives hadn’t been moved and was tucked away behind the bust of a big-haired lady, exactly where she had left it. She pushed down her feelings of guilt as she took it - she would bring it back before Rust even noticed it was missing.

  She waited then, until a little before her shift began before she made her way to the entrance of Zello’s circus. When a man at the entrance stopped her from entering, saying the show wasn’t allowing admissions yet, she opened the wooden box.

  “I’m here with a delivery,” she said in as bored a voice as she could muster. “For your knife-thrower?”

  The man’s eyes widened at the pearl-encrusted handles and for a moment she wondered if they were too opulent, if they might arouse suspicion. But the guard simply waved her through, apparently unable to think of any nefarious purpose behind her visit.

  She snapped the lid shut and as soon as she was a reasonable distance from anyone; she swerved to head towards the performance tent. She grabbed a broom which was leaning against one of the rows of seats and though there was no one there that she could see, she made to be sweeping the ground where the performers would later gather. Being back there reminded her of the show she had witnessed there before, and she was seized again with a sudden desire to burn the whole place down. But no, that wouldn’t help Kiana.

  As she swept, she occasionally stooped down, as if to dislodge a particularly stubborn grain of lint. Only close up would anyone see that she was carefully placing a seed in strategic locations. When she was done, she simply put the broom back, picked up the box of knives, concealing them under her cloak so the guard wouldn’t notice she hadn’t made her promised delivery and left the circus.

  As promised, she returned the box of knives (as inconspicuously as she could manage) on her return to the pawnshop. She itched through the hours remaining - she only went as a kind of courtesy to Rust, who had trusted her with the job and paid her as promised. She wouldn’t be collecting her last day’s pay, which was always given the next afternoon as she clocked in. She wrote a note, thanking him for taking a chance on her and telling him that she wouldn’t be back the next afternoon because she was leaving the city. She left it by the register and felt a little sad as she locked up and slid the key under the doormat.

  Then she made her way back to the circus. It was an unnaturally warm, balmy night for an evening well into autumn, but she shivered as she got closer. She could hear the music already. She was a little late, but the same gangly teenager sold her a ticket and the guard waved her through. She doubted he would remember her, but she drew her hood up, nonetheless. Nothing could go wrong tonight.

  She scanned the area. The same guards stood in front of the smaller emerald tent - Zello’s she bet - but now it was dark inside. He would be in the main tent to watch his finale tonight, she was sure. Good.

  She entered and took a seat close to an exit, not tucking herself away at the back this time. She would need to get out quickly. The show had already begun, and she only regretted that she hadn’t missed more. She tried not to watch the acts this time, though it was hard to ignore the hungry whoops of the men around her. Instead, she concentrated on the ground, the places where she had planted her seeds, looking for any sign of disturbance. There was nothing.

  Had she been too ambitious that her power failed her this late in the game? Perhaps she could only grow common garden flowers, or perhaps they only grew under sunlight. She should have tested more in the garden she had grown. If only she had more time…

  And before she knew it, a piece of music began that made her heart sink into her stomach. She felt slightly sick before Kiana even came out. This wasn’t going to work, was it?

  In a last desperate attempt, as Kiana stepped onto the rope in her barely-there clothing, she scrambled to the ground. Everyone was distracted, their eyes focused far above her. She sunk her fingertips into the packed soil that made up the ground beneath the tent. She closed her eyes and focused on the feel of it in her fingertips, of her breaths flowing from her and into the ground. At first, she felt nothing at all. She nearly sank to her knees and gave up. But she held on a moment more, and then she felt it.

  It was like a heartbeat - a steady pulse of power and life that flowed through her. Through her fingers and deep into the ground. She focused on that beat and the sounds of the rowdy crowd, the gaudy music all faded into the background until it was just her, the soil, and that unrelenting pulse of life. She let it flow into the ground, which became a part of her, let it latch onto the little nuggets of potential - her seeds - and she focused all her thoughts, her power on them. It took her a few moments to notice the sound in the tent had changed. There were still the same raucous shouts, but there was a layer of concern there now. And then a growing, frenzied murmuring. She looked up and saw four saplings growing out of the ground before her. Kiana hadn’t noticed yet, was still doing her dance as if her soul had left her body to go on a much-needed holiday. But the audience had started to notice. She pulled her fingers from the ground and was relieved to see the trees kept growing. Somehow, she knew they would continue without her there. She didn’t need the ground to anchor her any longer, she could feel their life within her, could continue to feed them with her power without that physical connection.