The Moth Tents

Indiana Drop

Happy *late* Birthday to my great friend, Akeel! I'm dedicating the book to that lovable dude.
Love, your favorite mutt (you know it, too),
Shanna

•••

I kept thinking about those two girls...Sisters. But they didn't look alike. The blonde one was...different, in a word. But I guess we all were.

Her eyes had been a soft shade of blue and filled with this childlike wonder that didn't match her age.

Her face was sprayed with freckles along a round pale face.

She wasn't as thin as the other, just a bit plump, but still cute, adding to her youthful charm.

The other one looked tougher, more mature. Her muddy brown hair had been tossed in dirt and blown in the breeze.

Her skin was tan and her eyes, the same color of moss on trees, were wild and animal like, always looking cautious.

Her face was intense, all strength and endurance and hard lines. She reminded me of a soldier, but it didn't take away from her looks.

If anything, it only made it better.

"Still thinking about those two girls?" Wendy was always able to tell what I was thinking. I guess it didn't hurt that she was a psychic.

"I don't need to be psychic to know what you're thinking, Jamie. Its all over your face."
"Oh really?" I say, raising a defiant brow.

"Yeah. You look constipated whenever you think about pretty girls," she replies in a mocking tone. I scoff at her remark and look on at the dirt road.

"Do you think we should have let them stay?" I couldn't get it out of my mind. It didn't seem like they had anything new to bring the circus.

But Wendy looked like a normal girl, until she rolled her eyes to the back of her head and started screaming bloody murder. That didn't happen often, though.

"I don't know. I've been having a block since we left Texas. No nervous feelings, no bad premonitions."

Akeel kept driving, completely oblivious to our conversation. The next stop was Indiana. And the next after that would be Pennsylvania.

It would keep going until we ran out of states. Then came Europe. Donnabella said that's where the goods were.

We just needed to get established in America first. In Europe, she'd said, circuses were still flourishing, still thriving.

Here, they were, in her words, a dying art.

We passed the 'Welcome to Indiana' sign. Here we were.

We usually found a nice clear spot of land to set things up. Mostly in small towns, where there weren't many buildings.

We were headed to a nice, secluded, sunny field. Again.

For the first few years, it was my favorite thing about being with the circus, the landscape and seeing the world.

But it had gotten old. The blue skies and golden fields had lost their luster. The world wasn't beautiful to me anymore. It was just another stage.

We drive for another few hours, reaching the field finally. It was a good enough place.

There were endless miles of woods to the back, golden oats that would surely go up to my ankles.

No more dusty red dirt to coat my already cheap clothes anymore.

"Did you hear that?" Wendy has that familiar look of concern on her face. "No," I say.

"Hm. Must've just been my imagination," she says.

You can hear the doubt in her voice, wearing down the sincerity of her words. I'm sure she's said those words many times before and been wrong.

Question is, why say it at all anymore? Why not go with your gut after all these years? I guess no matter what, none of us could really accept who we were.

We'd been conditioned that way from the kids who made fun of us and the adults who were secretely afraid of us.

There would always be a part of us, no matter how small or big, that would doubt the things we could do.

•••

"Go to the back cart and unload the rest of the supplies," orders Jack to the Bellrose twins, two conjoined sisters with opposite personalities.

Yvonne smirked crookedly and narrowed her eyes, and Annette looked down submissively. They both walked away to the back cart.

Everyone kind of took orders from Jack when Donnabella wasn't around. He was the second in command, in a way.

Jack was wise and he could be funny. When we first arrived, one by one, he helped us adjust. He'd lived a simple life, I guess.

He told these stories when we were younger and just starting, featuring pieces of his past life.

He was from New York, originally, and had left to find himself when he was twenty. He was four feet tall when he'd left. Twenty years later, he still hadn't grown an inch.

He and Donnabella, whose ambition was in entertainment, teamed up and formed the Motley Circus.

I'm sitting on the weak, foldable steps of our crisp blue RV, picking absentmindedly at the field's grass and twisting it between my fingers.

The sky is blue and nearly cloudless, the sun beaming down wave after wave of summer heat. The heat is balanced out, though, by a nice even breeze.

Suddenly, I hear a pair of identically shrill screams. The twins must've found something.

Jack and John and a couple of the others run towards the sisters' cries, and curiousity calls me to follow.

There's a silence more sweltering than the heat, adding to the already thick tension.

"And what do we have here," Tommy says with a devilish grin, who had run to the scene of the incident.

I look down to the ground, and who else do I see but the two Texan sisters.

"Vincent," Jack says in a stressed tone, "go tell Donnabella we have a couple runaways on our hands."