Adventure One Circus

I wake up in the circus.

I don’t remember why.

What letter does my name start with?

“Who are you?”

An inquisitive stare is directed at me; a man I think. I quickly list a few possible names that I like.

“Scarlett Stocking.”

He looks at me imploringly and I notice his chin is unshaven, his eyes have smudges of darkness underneath them and his physique hints at his everyday work. There is something missing from his gaze that once gave him that spark that makes men handsome.

“Look, I don’t know who you are or how you got here but you have to leave.”

“I came for the circus of course! Can’t I work here?”

He closes his eyes and sighs. He mutters something about lost girls always being so hard to say no to.

“Go pack up the tents then. Barry’s over there. Ask him about it.”

He waves his hand in a vague direction and shakes his head as he walks off.

I realise I’m sitting in the middle of a patch of green grass. Its swaying is dreamy and hypnotic. A noise so loud it bursts in my eardrums startles me and I grasp the logic hidden beneath my thoughts that someone is shouting in my ear. His voice is deep, and scratchy like he uses it all the time in this same manner.

“Will you stop shouting? It is disturbing the grass.”

I frown at him. This man has a jagged scar across his arm in the shape of a lightning bolt. His head is shaved really short to the point it’s almost invisible. He grabs my arm and pulls me almost jerking my arm out of its socket. His hand is hard like a smooth pebble. I let him pull me across the field to the striped tents. He has a kindness about him, almost innocent in contrast to how he handles my arm. Its stark contrast is puzzling and intriguing.

“Are you Barry?”

His grunt in reply tells me nothing. 

“Do you like the circus Barry?”

Silence continues to emanate from him like a light in the darkness. The ground is hard and biting my bare feet, like the hot coals people walk across to impress other people. I see the stars twinkle and something catches, a slight movement of light in my clenched hand. I ease the tension and find a paper star faintly flickering speckles of light dancing across my palm. Barry looks back but I quickly hide the star with a slight of hand trick that isn’t a trick. It disappears completely and I find it later in the folds of my velvet midnight blue dress that matches the colour of darkness.

A curl falls across my eye as I pull a peg out. I brush it out of my face and notice the small red drops of blood. Pulling pegs is hard work. I sit down on a frequently flattened patch of grass and will for the tent to fold itself. I close my eyes and imagine the universe and its infinite darkness fills with freckles of stardust sparkling. Colour ribbons across milky ways and the burning yellow and red of the sun spreads itself as far as it can reach like it’s trying to keep the universe from being swallowed up by the blackness that encompasses most of it, and in turn creates the shadows it wishes to eliminate.

I also imagine the heavy stiff tent in space floating toward me and curling in on itself in accordance with each gesture my fingertips make. I feel a power leaking from me and I see a golden thread trickle across space to the fabric of the tent. As the last fold is complete I open my eyes and surprise inhabits me and makes me jump. Two bright blue eyes are a few inches away from my eyelashes.

A little boy is staring at me with a knowing look and I look away uncomfortable. His soft delicate hands reach for mine and I unexpectedly meet them halfway. My hand looks much less innocent in his. As we skip to somewhere else, I glance back and wonder how long I’d been sitting there because the tent was gone.

He lets go and I am directly in front of the man who let me work here.

“I see you’ve met Leo. I’m Derick.”

He holds his hand out and I take it and feel the calluses he has collected over time. There are so many different hands. My hands feel different; they aren’t supposed to be here. I blink and the thoughts disappear.

“Nice to meet you Derick.”

I nod politely and begin a curtsey but he stops me.

“We don’t do that here.”

He looks sadly down at me and wonders why the pretty ones are always lost. I can sense it in the way our hands met just moments before. I feel the connection then, as if without him, I wither with mother nature as the season changes from spring to autumn.  I die as winter ends and I exist no more.

He isn’t old, but is aged with the experiences life gave him. He understands things I will never begin to comprehend. 

I wish he would smile.