Circus

by Claire Battershill

  To Andrew Battershill, for being my first reader and my brilliant lil’ bro. To Kelly Barnard and Peter Battershill, the best mum and dad in the whole wide world. To Cillian O’Hogan, sine quo non.

  Thank you.

  The epigraph is quoted from the e. e. cummings play Him (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927).

  John Keats’s “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” is quoted from Major Works, ed. Elizabeth Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

  The guide to the northern lights used by Edward in “The Collective Name for Ninjas” is Neil Davis’s The Aurora Watcher’s Handbook (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992). The article on the “Little Bang” parenting theory to which Jess refers is “Little Bang Parenting Theory: It All Begins with a Toy Gun” by Monica Hesse in the Washington Post (Saturday, November 11, 2007).

  “Circus” first appeared in a slightly different form in enRoute Magazine in 2008.

  The Latin in “Brothers” is quoted from Horace, Ode 1.9.5–8. Q. Horati Flacci Opera, ed. F. Klingner (Leipzig: Teubner, 1959).

  I have taken some liberties with the particulars of luge life and have added a fictional Canadian team to the Vancouver 2010 Olympics in “Two-Man Luge: A Love Story.” Aerodynamic booties really exist, though.

  The phrase “quite everydaylooking” appears in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).