Issue 23

Dan A. Cardoza

From near the top of the mainstay, ten feet below the bale ring, boney metacarpals slip the clinch.

It’s a failed triple somersault. Within the acoustics of the big top, the singular sound is that of a matchstick tossed in a fire, a blaze no one sees coming. Gasps rise in a collective vapor and illusionary smoke above the trembling wood bleachers. The sky is an earthquake.

There is no safety net to catch our lovely Antoinette Concello, trapeze extraordinaire. She’s falling. It’s such a sad day.

Certainly, other world-renowned acts will go on. They all do when such a tragic thing happens.

Ursula Blutchen, the Polar Bear Princess, comes to mind. She’s going strong. And let us not forget the amazing and steely Zasel, the very first estrogen Cannonball?

Except for Zasel, most young sister acts do high wire or flips. When you are up there, you have to be as light as a hummingbird feather.

All the adults intuitively understand this somehow and go on. Simple water cooler talks for Monday. They’d turn their backs for good, on this twentieth-century dinosaur assemblage. But for the children, there wouldn’t be another circus. Madison Avenue knows full well, image and death sell tickets.

Not to worry, there will always be two-headed frogs.

Starving to death rarely happens right before your eyes, especially under a big tent. It’s such a novelty. There has to be a perfect storm.

Before any attempt at the triple flip, young girls must meet the following criteria. They must demonstrate an aversion to eating and have an obsession with the perfection of flight. Strong excuses are a prerequisite to redirect any presentation of carrots, tomatoes, and potatoes. You must be able to command Red Armies of radish that once marched May Day parades to stand down in their barracks. Beef, pork, and carbohydrates have to suffer humiliating defeats on every battlefield.

Our Antoinette imagined her delicate arms avian, skeletonized with hyaline feathers. Her life is flight. As she hits the sand in the main ring, bally girls gasp in the long corridors. Next to the bleachers, kinkers and other circus performers move forward, ready themselves as trained to distract all the lookie-loo’s.

She’s only four, but Melissa is fascinated by the yarrow-colored Pickle Punk in the oversized jar. It’s a sideshow abomination you are unable to resist. The Pickle Punk is a wax reproduction of a human fetus, exhibited outside the main tent in the esplanade. The large pickle jar is filled to the lid with the frail bones of the unborn, floating in rubbing alcohol.

Melissa hears all the shrieks and screams in the main tent. Startled, she drops her cotton candy and her tiny shellacked purse daddy bought her just for the circus. Sticky, cotton candy fingers make the letting go and hanging on so difficult. Melissa will hate clowns for the rest of her life.

A tall Sword Swallower and the Puppy-Faced Man clinch arms to form a human barrier to shield Antoinette from all the chaos, and mass exodus.

The Balancing Ripleys, a six-member juggling act, chip in by forming a human curtain to shield Antoinette from the gawkers. Towners run like Zen monks, ass over teakettle for the exits. The circus is anarchy.

The best part of Antoinette’s act goes unnoticed. But for those up close and personal, they can see she’s a translucent pile of bones: femur, scapula, and vertebrae. When weighed at her autopsy, she’ll be twenty-three pounds, including her invisible soul.

On the dusty ride home at twilight, Daddy tells little Melissa, now yawning in the rearview, “I’m so sorry, honey.”

Melissa, having none of it, stares out at the raging darkness, running toward her on sky-stilts. Wishing answers were wings, she replies, “Its okay, Daddy, I just want to fly as high as those windy bats up there.”

Melissa points at the sticky tar through the shiny window.