You Will Forget to Cry

                                                       

Red. Black. Black. Red. Mitzi dropped her brush. Finally! The famous four-checkered lips were ready to be unnoticed. Smoothing the stubbly sequins of her leotard, she rushed to the ring.

"You're late," the assistant hissed. Mitzi squinted. She was a plumpish white girl with flaky lips that curled and creased like playing cards. What was her name? Selma? Velma? Whatever. She didn't need to ask.

Red. White. White. Red. The tent's fly-wing walls were writhing, frenzied from flu, festooned with slimy silver ribbons and chessboard faces. Every blink and breath fused, forming a shallow ridge that curved into prickly shadows. A week oozed from the tubas, rumbling through baton-twirls and bellies with the same oblivion. Every sparkle and stumble crunched the air into a rickety wheel of voice. Hands clapped a century. The sweat of sands nearby made a towel of every eye. Each dowdy drumbeat gasped until its voice flattened. Ugh! Every voice's creak and rattle squeezed through the splosh of song! Sounds whirled and scraped the air, until they seared into bristly spikes against her skin. Blurs. Buzzes. Slaps. Pulpy patches of numbness. The ringmaster tiptoed and roared:

"Ladies and gentlemen, I present you Mitzi Saxon, the Cherokee Constrictor, and her assistant, the stupefying Thelma Dial!"

Weee-oooh! A crusty chime of jaws, choking out hours. Mitzi dug her chin into the earth. It burned sharply, suddenly, but the pain melted through something stronger. She quivered. Her foot was there, its reddish scratchy sole sipping at her eyes. Thelma set the bottle onto it. Schriff! The sudden chill of glass shoved slow ripples through her skin, splitting hot frantic sinew from the rawness of bone. Any scream or whistle flared viciously through her ears, her limbs, her veins. Meh. Now there was no rhythm to balancing, as fingers and toes vanished over a nodding glow along the flimsy walls.

A man stood by it and stared. Funny. Nobody stood out, aside from the inevitable screaming toddler or frog-mouthed teenager. This man was simpler, stranger. He carefully plucked a tuft of cotton candy and tucked it into his mouth. He did not look away--eyes rambling, roaming, reaching. Chipped white-green beads, clattering across the floor! So round, so glossy, so still...she half-expected a splotchy tanned lady to slip them around two fingers, to bombard her ears with their impossible price. Mitzi's heart rattled. He was a slimy grayish-white. Crepey lines inflated his forehead into an oily, bubbling pulse. Nose like a dented fire-poker with two holes scooped into it. Cheekbones bulged out, perpetually stretching the soft, waxy regions of his scar-sunken skin. Crinkled cords of honey-smudged hair, stringing the silvery silk-glints of his sharp shoulders. Hands perched into watchful grasshoppers.

Perfect! she thought, This is my chance! Without thinking, Mitzi tore her thighs with an extra twist. Dammit! The soft burn spilled from her sinews all the way to the busiest muscle of her back. It rolled. It dragged. It pressed. And split! Not again! She sank into the sand, pain about every

"O-h!" cried the crowd. Every voice tumbled into feathery ticking. She sighed. Tah-ick, tah-ick--wispy, coiled, and eager to take what she didn't have...

"Get up!" Thelma hissed. "What're you thinking?!"

Not about you, bitch. Mitzi wobbled to her elbows and knees, as whispers flitted below the sun-gasped ground.

"Bravo!" roared the ringmaster, folding his grease-gloved hands. "They never fail to amaze!"

Woo-hoo! Yippee! Swollen, coded claps. A cyclone of roaring praise, which most men mistook for sweat. She frowned. Today's crowd was clever. This yawn glistened into gummy flecks around their fingers. They split like a family in a parable--the silk-bathed wealthy hobbled out first, then every smirking sort of middle class, then the chuckling poor. There stood the same man, his hands leaping like nervous grasshoppers.