Fortune

by Aurelia T. Evans

  Maya swallowed a moan and tightened her grip on him as he lavished attention on her lower lip and caressed her tongue with his. Her strokes were slow but firm, and so was his kiss, each of them tormenting the other with how they couldn’t draw attention to themselves by sudden movements or loud noises.

  “Lord Mikhail comes to us from faraway Turkey, where he developed his particular…talents. Without the aid of enhancements, Mikhail can bench press seven hundred pounds and squat nine hundred. He does five hundred push-ups a day and eats up to twelve thousand calories to offset his workouts. He can crack rocks with his hands, lift the end of a truck off the ground and carry this whole tent folded on his back. Our very own strongman, lords and ladies. Are they not excellent specimens, my friends?”

  The area low in Maya’s abdomen clenched with pleasure at the way Derrick had to muffle his groans in her shoulder, his mouth just above the swell of her breast. Maya sped up her strokes, taking the risk in order to bring Derrick to the brink. He tried to nonchalantly place his hand over her thigh and move his fingers against her clit. Maya wasn’t sure how much he succeeded at being nonchalant, but the light brushes sent little waves of arousal through her, each saying not enough, not enough.

  “And now, allow me to introduce you to the rest of the players. We have our astonishingly flexible contortionist, Mistress Valorie. Yes, take in the unbelievable sight of a woman tying herself in knots…on the back of a massive tiger. Fear not our Tiger Lily, burning bright. She is as gentle as a lamb.”

  Maya wished that it were cold and they could wrap a blanket around them and do whatever they wanted under cover of fleece, but they couldn’t. She could only wrap her arm around his neck and massage his scalp as she took him over the climax, wringing his cum out, smearing it over his cotton briefs and her hand.

  “Holy fuck,” Derrick gasped.

  “Still jealous?” she asked. Her husky voice made him shiver.

  “Wasn’t jealous,” he muttered.

  “Brace yourself now for Bale, the Lizard Man, whose reptilian condition is yet to be explained by the narrow lens of science. He does anything and everything that the Lady Sasha wishes of him, charmer that she is—so although you, miss, might look especially tasty to him, he’s on a tight leash—metaphorically speaking. Is he man, or is he monster?”

  Maya and Derrick broke away from each other as the audience oohed and ahhed at the sight of Bale. Since they hadn’t done that for the contortionist, Maya figured it was something worth seeing.

  “Ho!” Derrick exclaimed.

  Maya slipped from Derrick’s lap, hitting the bench hard. Her buttocks briefly protested at such shabby treatment, but Derrick had a point.

  Maya had expected the usual freak fare—a medical condition with the vaguest of connections to the animal kingdom, like the Elephant Man or Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy. However, either this was a true medical and scientific mystery or someone was a helluva makeup artist and Bale himself an incredibly patient man to wait through all the prosthetics application.

  Not to steal the contortionist’s thunder, because…ouch. She was presently sitting on her own head, wearing a black catsuit cinched at the waist with a strappy, brown leather corset. Tattoos covered a great deal of the exposed skin of her chest below her tucked-in chin. And she was performing on a tiger, no less, who appeared less than thrilled at being ridden in the middle of a crowded ring. Although who could tell with tigers?

  But back to the Lizard Man, whose naked torso—partial nudity was a theme, Maya noticed—was covered in thick, spiky scales that reminded Maya of a crocodile. And like a crocodile, Bale’s belly and neck displayed less pronounced armor, lighter in color than the dark brown over his arms, back and even his face and hairless head. Bale also had to be wearing contacts, because he had the cold, golden gaze of an Amazonian predator. He opened his mouth to bare rows of razor-sharp teeth and pointed an indecently long tongue at a young woman in the front row.

  Lady Sasha stroked his head. Bale leaned blissfully into the caress.

  “That is some fucked-up shit,” Derrick said.

  “Give him a break, Derrick,” Maya replied. She wiped her hand on some of the napkins Derrick had brought over with the pretzel. “If that’s all real, this is one of the few places that’d employ him, and I’ll bet he’s even in a lot of pain. I read about this baby that grew nails instead of hair—”

  “After what you just did, do you really have to be such a buzzkill? Really?”

  “Well, excuse me for my basic humanity.”

  “Maya, just stop.”

  “Now, my friends, meet Joanne and Jane, our loveliest sisters,” the Ringmaster announced, “walking in the decidedly odd footsteps of such conjoined twins as Cheng and Eng and Giacomo and Giovanni. Fused at the base of their spines from birth, they must always watch each other’s backs, but never walk side by side. Nevertheless, Joanne and Jane are bosom companions. Inseparable, if you will.”

  “But what everyone’s really wondering is how they have sex. Dude, how do they go to the bathroom?” Derrick said as Joanne and Jane waved from their platform. They wore specially tailored pink Renaissance dresses and identical cheery smiles.

  Maya rolled her eyes. All Derrick needed to do was think about his questions for five seconds and realize he already had the answers. They were conjoined twins, not aliens.

  The more curious question for her was why they hadn’t tried separation surgery. Even medicine twenty or so years ago when they were born had advanced since Cheng and Eng. The place where they were fused together didn’t seem extensive. Maybe they literally shared part of their spinal cord.

  “Up next for your viewing curiosity, feast your eyes on our two most contrasting oddities. Do opposites attract? You decide,” the Ringmaster said.

  Maya noticed the reaction of the audience before she saw the newcomers to the ring—a collective reeling in disgust. She turned to the curtain and hated herself a little for having the same reaction.

  In her health classes, Maya encouraged insecurity-ridden teenagers, who were still getting used to changing bodies and hormonal tsunamis, to appreciate differences—as much as she could in a developmental period that violently emphasized conformity. But when she stepped out of her classroom, Maya sometimes received a sobering reminder that mankind as a whole didn’t change much as they grew older. And she was a part of their ill-esteemed number, whether she liked it or not.

  “Sandra came to us with a scant one hundred pounds on her frame. Since then, she has lost an additional fifteen pounds. She enjoys pizza, hamburgers and ice cream sundaes, but nothing seems to put any meat on her bones, a mystery that—like Bale—has baffled the medical community to this day. It’s worth noting that Arnie enjoys pizza, hamburgers and ice cream sundaes as well,” the Ringmaster declared. He surveyed his colleagues dispassionately, but his face flushed as he looked back to the audience, as though he fed off their repulsion.

  Arnie was eating a soft-serve ice cream cone suggestively, and Sandra ate down the length of a corndog.

  Any trace of Maya’s arousal was gone. In fact, Maya thought she might throw up. She tore her gaze away from the dangerously anorexic and dangerously obese oddities—which, metabolic conditions or not, weren’t oddities at all, but two premature heart attacks waiting to happen—only to encounter train wreck glee glinting in Derrick’s eyes. He couldn’t look away, and Maya could tell that, deep down, he didn’t want to.

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” Maya said. She grabbed his wrist with the hand that had pulled him off.

  Derrick jerked away and looked at it as though he was too good for his own jism.

  “Come on, Maya. It keeps getting better and better. I wish we’d gone down to the freak tents instead of that fucking fortune teller,” Derrick said. “Don’t you want to see what comes out next?”

  “Who,” Maya corrected him. “Who comes out next. They’re human beings, Derrick, and I didn’t want to see them in the first place. I was expecting the tiger to
do tricks or elephants or maybe an aerial act. Not this…reality television crap of more-normal-than-thou. It’s sickening. Literally. I may throw up. Now can we please just go? I need some air.”

  “There’s air in here. In fact it’s cooler under the— Where do you think you’re going?” Derrick asked.

  “Shhh.” One of the audience members glared at them, but Maya didn’t care. She hadn’t lied. Her stomach felt like someone was squeezing a fist around it. Cold sweat shivered from her pores.

  “Maya,” Derrick whispered after her as she clambered down the bleachers and fled down the aisle to the exit.

  She refused to acknowledge the fortune teller, who leaned against the wooden skeleton of the stands, his arms crossed as he watched the performance then her as she passed him by.

  She fell to her knees outside, heedless of grass stains as she braced her palm against the ground and held her hair out of her face. She closed her eyes. Her vision flooded with the memory of her eating the cinnamon pretzel stuck on repeat, superimposed on the tangled, fleshy, strange assortment of circus oddities capering about the ring.

  “If you were feeling sick from the heat and food, why didn’t you just say so instead of making a big noise about the acts?” Derrick said, annoyed, as he stood above her.

  “This isn’t food poisoning,” Maya snapped when the first wave had finished. She coughed the last bit of it out then wiped the back of her hand over her lips in distaste. Vomit coated her tongue, but Derrick hadn’t brought his drink with him for her to wash it out. Which meant that when she looked up at him, she still had that sour taste in her mouth and her nose, remembering why she’d gotten sick to begin with. “God, you like that stuff in there?”

  “Give me a break, Maya. You watch those intervention shows when you’re bored, so don’t get all up on your high horse about how awful it is that these people sell themselves as freaks. Yeah, I think it’s interesting, and I’m pretty sure you did too when the weird people were pretty,” Derrick said.

  The conjoined twins had looked happy enough. The sparkle in their eyes was hard to fake. But Sandra and Arnie surfaced again in her thoughts. “I’ll bet she only eats during a performance. That wasn’t model thin, Derrick. That was concentration camp thin, and it doesn’t look like any disease I know of.”

  “As a middle school health teacher, I’m sure you’d be the expert,” Derrick said.

  “And the man? What these people are doing is killing themselves to be in show business, and it’s… I can’t… What else do those people go through just to stay in the circus? I just can’t, Derrick. Can we please go home?”

  “Everyone else in there is entertained,” Derrick said, pointing into the light emanating from the open tent flap. “You’re the only one here who’s disgusted at those people. I’m not sure how your reaction is any better than what you think mine is.”

  “Could we just fucking go?” Maya asked, managing to stand up in spite of her trembling knees. She was still sweating cold. “Maybe I am just sick, but there’s a reason there are fewer freak shows out there. It’s dehumanizing, for God’s sake.”

  “I’m sure there are plenty of weird people out there thanking people like you right now for saving them from themselves and taking away perfectly reasonable income in the name of humanity. Weren’t you the one just saying that Bale guy probably has trouble getting work outside of the circus?” Derrick said.

  He grabbed her arm to walk her toward the circus entrance and into the faire proper. The booths and tents were dark, the sounds of the circus ring a distant, stuttering hum mingled with the nocturnal orchestra of crickets, cicadas and frogs in the forest surrounding the fairgrounds. With no one around, and only the circus alive, the tents and buildings loomed with shadows. The pervasive, savory scents of incense and turkey suffused the night air. Derrick was pulling her too fast, and Maya stumbled.

  “That shit isn’t dehumanizing. You are. Dehumanizing, dismissive and you know what, Maya? Emasculating. Everything that’s fun, you make it into a PC tragedy just because it makes you uncomfortable,” Derrick said.

  “Well, excuse me for acknowledging that people other than me have feelings,” Maya said, “and that actions have consequences. It’s called growing up, Derrick.”

  “No, it’s called making trouble where there isn’t any,” Derrick replied. “Those people back there looked perfectly content to be there. You were the only one who had to make it an issue. It’s all about your feelings. One of these days, Maya, you’re going to have to learn that your crazy mood swings shouldn’t dictate everyone else’s life.”

  Maya stumbled again, falling out of Derrick’s grip.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he said as he pulled her upright again. “I just wish someone somewhere could get it through your thick skull that it’s not always about you.”

  There were no words. No words in the universe to describe Maya’s complete lack of comprehension. She understood the words, sure, and maybe coming out of someone else’s mouth, they might have made more sense. After all, Maya knew she had flaws. She was human, for Christ’s sake.

  But this…from a man who had received a hand job and given nothing back? This, from a man who threw a tantrum at every little question, every little request and every little mistake Maya might make, as though she was the nagging fishwife in this equation and he not the persistent man-child that he could sometimes be? She couldn’t decide if he was narcissistic or clueless—at the very least, projecting. And goddammit, was he actually walking away?

  If he expected her to just follow him like a chastised puppy dog…

  Then again, he was her ride, and she didn’t want to call a cab just because her boyfriend was a douche. She could save the fare and fume in her own apartment, reassessing her life choices from under the comfort of her comforter.

  “Wait!” she tried to shout, reaching to grab for his hand or arm or perhaps his balls if she could get close enough to squeeze, but nothing came out of her mouth. And as Derrick walked farther and farther away, it was as though the atmosphere had become denser, holding her back.

  Struggling against air the consistency of molasses, Maya tried to run after him, call for him, but he stalked past the blacksmith’s forge and around the corner without looking back.

  She had slowed down, but the world around her continued apace, the trees leaning in the breeze and the toad next to her hopping by her nearly immobile foot. She wasn’t even going forward anymore. The molasses strings of her waking nightmare pulled her back. She silently screamed, struggling on the inside but helpless to stop from slow-motioning all the way back to the circus.

  Laughter—clear, bright and mocking her present straits—came from the tent as the audience flowed from the ring. Happier couples and groups of college friends chattered with each other about how amazing this or that act had been.

  Maya cried out to them, but only in her head. They streamed past her as though she were a rock in the middle of a river, and with about as much consideration. Someone bumped her shoulder without saying sorry.

  No! Stop! Someone help me! I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know what’s wrong. I’m trapped in here. Anybody? Please!

  She could only hyperventilate within the too-slow expansion of her ribcage and watch as every last bright, lively member of the circus audience turned the corner in the same direction Derrick had gone, leaving her alone in the dark.

  Well, not quite alone.

  Three black-clad circus crew gathered like spiders at the circus gate, a tall, spiky, iron work of art that matched the fence surrounding the circus property—durable enough for a stationary job, but also easy enough to dig out of the ground when the circus moved on.

  No! Don’t! Can’t you see me? I’m right here! I’m still here! Don’t close the door on me! Don’t fucking leave me here! Maya screamed as hard as she could think, swimming frantically through the molasses. Her urgency only made her go nowhere at all.

  The latch of the gate clanged violen
tly in her ear. One of the crew jingled the thick chain around the center of the gate and applied a sturdy, metal padlock the size of a fist. The shank clicked into place as though it had closed around her neck.

  Maybe she had faded away entirely. She could still see herself, but it was as though she had passed into another dimension, one foot in her world and the other somewhere else, caught in between and present in neither. She felt like she might be torn in two at any moment. Underneath her almost paralyzed exterior, Maya was more scared than she had ever been in her life, more terrified than at the scariest movie or haunted house, because those things weren’t real. As far as she could tell, this was real and she didn’t want it to be real anymore.

  Then she felt a presence behind her, a shift in the direction of the breeze, warmth against her back and a whiff of sawdust and sandalwood.

  “I apologize if my methods alarmed you, my dear,” the fortune teller murmured in her ear. “But I’m afraid you can’t leave.”

  Chapter Two

  Maya didn’t know what the bar attached to the roof of the luxurious RV was actually for, and she didn’t want to know. But right now, her wrists were bound with the roughest rope Maya had ever had the misfortune to feel against her skin, and the rope had been looped over the bar so that she hung in the middle of the fortune teller’s living room.

  As soon as the fortune teller had wrangled her into the RV and tied her up, she’d suddenly regained her full range of motion as well as her voice. But immediately following relief came new terror.

  Maya didn’t need a vivid imagination to figure out what a man like this might want with her. Lord knew he hadn’t kidnapped her for ransom. His expression had held a trace of apology when he’d tightened the ropes on her wrists, but that didn’t mean the song wouldn’t change after the fortune teller came back from whatever circus people did after the ring torches went out and the red curtain closed.

  She had no idea where her earlier nightmarish experience had come from, but now she had to contend with this one, and this one didn’t need an exotic explanation. Her empty stomach tightened with a different kind of cramp, and her cold sweat came from adrenaline rather than sickness.