by Jordan Bell
After new bandages and a change of clothing, I followed Micah out into the sun.
* * *
Imaginaire was most assuredly not in Chicago anymore.
Possibly not even Illinois. I stepped out of Eli’s tidy little wagon and into a forest of cedars and hemlocks and oaks that towered immeasurably into the clouds, it’s very green canopy allowing flashes of sunlight through.
Instead of birds and bugs, I heard calling. I heard hammers and shouts and the sound of metal catching weight and clanging beneath it. Nearby there were small personal tents, each very different in shape and color. Wagons surrounded the tents in a protective circle, also all very different from one another. Eli’s reminded me of a traveling medicine man’s wagon, square and ornate with lovely swirling cornices and a crescent moon carved into the door and The Magicians painted but faded along one side.
High between a pair of oak trees someone had strung up a fabric triangle, a sort of hanging fort, each side of the triangle a different colored fabric with panels hanging off each corner almost to the ground.
“Where are we?”
Micah wrinkled her nose. “Not sure. I slept through most of the trip. We’ve stopped here before, a long time ago.”
She said a long time ago wistfully and for a moment she got that look that Eli and Rook both had that made her look young for a moment, then much older. With Eli it was like a trick, but with Micah time just seemed confused. She was mostly like a teenager and then that only in stature.
It was something I’d wanted to mention before, but then there were thugs and swords and it never seemed like the right time.
As we walked between tents and trees, I hedged the topic carefully. “I thought the carnival went dark twenty-two years ago.”
“It did.”
“So you must have been here last when you were really young.”
She answered me with a guarded smile and without warning traveled the next several feet by way of cartwheel.
Beyond the back lot I could see the shape of the carnival going up by dozens of hands. It folded between the widely spaced trees organically, using them as supports or frames for the patchwork tents and larger than life attraction banners.
Un, deux, trois, un, deux, trois - no dammit! Wrong! If you can’t dance at least count!
All on the ropes, hai! Up up! Now now!
The Ferris was easily the tallest of all the carnival spectacles. It crested the treetops and along its star-shaped struts and axels men shimmied about like monkeys building the great thing.
“You’ll like it here.” Micah wrapped an arm around the trunk of a tree and let momentum swirl her around it. “I knew it the moment I saw you, lion charm be damned.”
I tore my eyes away from the builders and followed her further through the back lot. “You noticed I’d been given it but you didn’t act on it.”
I still wore the colorful thread and absently I fingered the tiny charm. It reminded me of Eli’s fire trick, the way the miniature lion walked and roared. That reminded me of the snow globe and that reminded me of my Magician. I wondered where he was in all this, what he was doing. If he was alright.
Castel’s my brother, he’d said. My twin.
In his place, I would not have been alright.
The memory of Eli’s voice, his face turned into my open palm, his breath on my skin, faltered against my memory of Castel. Crazy wide eyes, panicked laughter, his kiss that suffocated rather than pleased. I could still taste him, a little bit, like pickled ginger.
And, of course, I remembered what it felt like to push him off a moving train.
I did not say any of this to Micah.
Micah’s cheeks colored. “Well, that’s not entirely true. Because of what we are, we attract people who may not have our best interests at heart. There are other charms too, but the lion is given to someone has openly lied to a carnival player for their own gain. We are meant to trail the person, keep someone on them until one of us manages to figure out what the liar is up to. Then the enemy can be disposed of, usually out the back gate by the strongman with a stern lecture about never coming back. Sometimes a black eye, depending on how much fight they’ve got in’m. I pulled you aside to do my part in keeping you distracted but it was clear pretty quick that the ticket master got it wrong.”
We stopped in front of a hastily constructed fire pit and pavilion. A bald, bearded man, not entirely unlike what I imagined a leprechaun might look like, turned great slabs of ribs and very red cuts of meat over the flame. He wore and apron which clashed with his heavily tattooed, muscular arms. He was a leprechaun who seemed to have misplaced his biker gang.
“I suppose though, I was wrong in the end. You did have another agenda, it just wasn’t an evil one.”
“Micah Marie Margaret McKenzie!”
We spun in unison towards the angriest tiny blond girl I’d ever seen in my life. She stood five foot nothing, cheeks as red as cherries, shoulders scrunched up to her earlobes.
“You useless lazy selfish self-centered talentless backstabbing uncoordinated stumbler! I’ve got one word for you.” Micah gasped as if slapped while the sprite sucked in a new lungful of insults. “Fired.”
“Annabelle,” Micah huffed. “You can’t fire me. I am a main stage attraction.”
“You’re about to become a main trash picker. We have been in the air for three hours while you’ve been gallivanting around with,” the girl flailed dramatically at me as if I were some gigolo Micah had taken up with. “Whatever this is.”
I frowned and, oddly enough, had to remind myself that Mama George had specified no fist fights. Who knew such medical advice would actually become relevant?
“This,” now it was Micah’s turn to flail in my general direction, “is Serafine. We are not gallivanting.”
Annabelle screwed up her face like she smelled something foul. “I don’t care if she’s the queen of fucking Sheba. We are acrobats. Held to a higher caliber. We put in double practice hours and perform feats three times as breathtaking. We do not waste our time with foundlings.”
Micah balled up her fists and took one step forward. Annabelle took one too. Several lilting, girlish giggles gave away that we were no longer alone and a quick glance showed that several girls from the pavilion had shown up to surround Micah and me. One of them I recognized as Eli’s assistant Katya, though without all her make-up she was considerably less glamorous than I remembered.
I returned my attention on Annabelle. “What is that supposed to mean - foundling?”
The spritely girl crossed her arms over her chest and finally steadied her hot-headed gaze on me. There was something sort of venomous about her the way I remembered girls in high school could get. A cultivated sourness that set the world in two categories - mine and not one worth my time.
Annabelle kindly punctuated her words in case I didn’t get it the first time. “It was an insult.”
“Yeah, I got that. I’m just wondering why foundling. If it’s supposed to hurt, you should try again.”
Annabelle opened her mouth and Micah stepped forward again. “Please don’t, Anna, come on. It’s not right.”
“It means you couldn’t possibly be the fortune teller’s daughter, because Cora was tall and beautiful and powerful. And you…” Katya moved around us like a dancer and came to stand beside the much smaller acrobat. She tucked one arm across her stomach and flicked her wrist pointedly with each ugly word. “You’re pudgy and freckly and very simple. So you must be some poor woman’s mongrel left in a box on Cora’s doorstep.”
I shoved past Micah and Annabelle and crowded into Katya’s personal space. The ballerina didn’t back down and had at least four inches on me, but each of her words felt crammed down my throat. They gave saturation to some of the worst things I’d ever said to my mother when I was angry with her but out to make her sorry for it.
Katya, dumbly, did not back off.
I stilled my voice, lowered it for her and her alone.
&n
bsp; “That,” I said quietly but close enough that Katya would not mistake me, “will be the last time you ever speak of my mother ever again, but if you insist, I will gladly make you regret it, you catty, soulless cow.”
This was what I learned from being a chronic new kid all my life. The bullies only bully in gangs, they know all the best insults, they don’t care if you cry, and they never expect you to actually fight back.
Especially the pretty ones.
Annabelle laughed, but she laughed by herself. Everyone had gone quiet, including Katya. I felt Micah nearby but couldn’t see her.
“She’s got a nasty mouth on her, doesn’t she?” Annabelle said. “How very baseborn.”
“Oh shut up,” Micah snapped. “Who are you to judge? For being the supposedly head acrobat you can’t even walk the tightrope. We know your secret. You have two left feet and the balance of a drunk roustie.”
Annabelle gasped along with several scandalized girls around us. “You dirty traitor! How dare you stand against your own kind?”
Their exchange did not rile the lovely, tall assistant who smiled down at me, the tip of her tongue pressed teasingly against the back of her teeth.
“Words? I’ve got loads of them. Let’s see…how about misbegotten,” she purred. Her mouth worked the words over seductively. She touched a fingertip to her bottom lip. “My favorite -- cur.”
The ballerina experienced a half second of smugness before I lunged at her. A dozen hands clamored to grab a piece of me, my arm, my waist, my wrists. Katya screamed energetically and scrambled backwards so fast she slipped on the grass and fell anyway. I heard Micah yelling and other girls yelling and Annabelle hollering her head off. I heard someone call me an animal, a one woman freakshow, a mutt. I flailed to capture a single one of them, just one that I could childishly beat up to stake my claim on the playground, but a man caught me up from behind, lifted me off my feet and spun me away from the gaggle of girls. I lost sight of them but heard Katya breathlessly recounting, in hysterical exaggeration, how Rook had allowed a violent psychopath into the carnival.
The leprechaun cook turned me out into his pavilion and turned on the girls hovering around the besieged Katya. They flinched back from the burly cook. “Break it up! Hells hounds, you all act like a pack of wild dogs. Go back to work! All of you. My God, women are crazy.”
Micah shoulder checked another acrobat and scowled her way back to my side, though a quirk of her mouth at the last minute gave away a bit of a demented streak in the acrobat. “I don’t care if I get a hundred years on tumbler duty, the look at Katya’s face when she knocked herself out was worth it.”
“I’ve known her for five minutes and it was a bit satisfying.” I grinned, then flinched and grabbed my side where a shock of electricity ripped my injury. The bandages had come loose, I could feel them scraping my stomach.
Pudgy and freckled. She wasn’t wrong, but I’d never heard anyone say it with such abhorrence before. As if what she really meant was kicker of puppies and stealer of husbands.
“Sorry Horus.” Micah offered an almost repentant look when the cook narrowed his beady eyes on her. Almost.
“Don’t bother. I don’t know what it is about you girls when a new female shows up. I’ve seen it dozens of times, weirdest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen.”
“You okay, Sera?” Micah asked as I lifted the hem of my shirt to find two popped stitches across my belly and a new, thin line of blood.
“Damn. So much for listening to Mama George’s sound medical advice.” I sighed and took the napkins Horus offered me to press against the wound.
Micah’s hands flew to her mouth to try and suppress the giggles that bubbled up inappropriately. “She did say no fist fights.”
“Har har. Laugh it up while I bleed to death.”
Horus gave us his best disapproving look. He set his fists on his hips and shook his head.
“One thing’s for sure, you may not look a thing like Cora, but no one will be able to argue you’re not all hers. I once saw her hike up her skirt, walk right up to the bearded lady and knock her lights out in one blow. Over a girdle or some nonsense.”
I grinned, briefly, between scowling over the pain and the blood and another ruined shirt.
Still. Totally worth it.
“That sounds like her,” I told them. “Who do you think taught me how to fight?”
14
__________________
Mama George took one look at me, set her hands on her hips, and declared “Why am I not surprised?” before repairing the damaged stitching without too many lectures on fighting being the purview of small minds. She stuck me with a small amount of lidocaine and then Micah proceeded to distract me while standing on her head and miming riding a bike upside down. When she attempted to thieve items off Mama George’s supply tray with her toes, we were summarily dismissed before we were given the chance to destroy the place.
Her troupe found us after that, though I would have called them a gang if they weren’t all wearing sparkly leotards. Annabelle was nowhere to be seen but it was clear that the events had made their way through the gossip tree. Surprisingly, not all the looks I got were wicked ones. Some seemed curious. A few smiled. They did not seem to take Micah’s new alliance too seriously either since as soon as she left my side to join them, she and four others went into a series of exceptionally timed back flips as some sort of elaborate hello how are you for acrobats.
Alone, I wandered. Everywhere there was activity as booths and tents were erected amongst the trees, paths planned out and lights lifted into the sky. There were things I did not see my first night, like a midway full of odd games I did not recognize and a food court where delicious smells reminded me I still hadn’t eaten anything. I saw a woman carrying a tray of candy apples so invitingly red they looked stolen from some wicked stepmother with a penchant for poisoning princesses. Each food stand was sold out of low, miniature sized gypsy wagons, done up like the fairy tale drawings and lit by dozens of colorful hanging lanterns. They each smelled of popcorn and chocolate, caramel and mint. Hot strawberries boiling in syrup, fudges topped in swirls of cream, homemade marshmallows dusted in powdered sugar and dipped in swirls of peppermint and dark chocolate. Every cart celebrated some decadent, rich combination of sweets.
No one spoke to me, but they all watched me walk past.
I found the Magician’s tent off the beaten path by itself on the edge of the grove. Erected between four curving pines, it looked more unscrupulous than it had when I’d first encountered it. The trees seemed to reach towards each other, never quite meeting, each covered in spiraling, needle-less branches until the canopy where they flourished in heavy, dark green tops. In the branches three men and women strung the fairy lights, each working without nets or ropes with such precision they looked like a carnival act themselves.
Tiny candle lanterns had been placed in the ground leading to the tent where he’d rolled out a shabby blue carpet for guests. Even as I approached I could hear yelling from inside.
I pushed the tent flaps back and slipped in just in time to see dozens of colored balls fall out of the air and scatter across the floor of the room, rolling between seats and under the stage. Eli stood at center stage with his head bowed, hand clasped over his brow as if he’d been afflicted with a debilitating headache. Katya, in short shorts and a pink tank top stood a few feet away with her hands on her tiny hips looking annoyed and unimpressed.
“That’s the second drop you’ve made in the last hour. You realize we haven’t actually finished one full trick yet?”
Eli dropped his hand from his face, made a fist, clearly wanted to say something to his assistant, then thought better of it. “Yes, Katya, I am very aware.”
“Well. I can’t wait to see what happens when you try and levitate me, oh great master magician.”
I slipped quietly into one of the seats by the door. Eli stalked away from his assistant and fell into the couch at center stage. Around him seve
ral men were building the backside of the stage and one woman who reminded me a little of Mama George was pinning Katya’s costume on a dummy near the curtains. They all pretended not to be listening but they were all definitely listening.
Eli rested his elbows on his knees and scrubbed both palms across his face. He looked terrible, exhausted, with blood shot eyes and a sort of sallow color to his cheeks.
“We’re done. Everyone get out of my theater.”
No one moved. The builders shared glances. Katya pouted and jutted one sharp hip out in protest. He didn’t bother looking up when he exhaled rudely.
“I mean now.”
The help scrambled to grab their tools and head for the middle aisle. When Katya hadn’t moved he dropped his hands and shot her a scathing glare.
“You too. Out. I want quiet.”
“Me? This is my stage too and we haven’t even finished one whole show. It’ll be dark in a few hours!”
It occurred to me that the Magician didn’t tolerate defiance well, but even I could tell Katya was grating a little too close to the nerve that turns mouthy girls into small, scaly reptiles. She must have sensed the danger zone and retreated, though she made a show of her irritation by huffing to grab her stuff, sighing when she put on her coat, glowering and stomping as she came off the stage and up the aisle with the others.
She saw me and we had our second chance to glare each other to death.
“You too, mongrel. Get out.”
“Katya,” Eli warned.
She glared some more, then stomped even more dramatically on her way out. I waved.
Then it was just the two of us. Most of the lights were dimmed or not yet installed. It seemed very quiet in the little theater. I got up and followed the aisle to the side stairs and up onto his stage.
