Un Souvenir d'Événements

Summer 1835

I was born to my mother and father in eighteen twenty five. My brother Earl was born ten years prior to me; and my younger sister, Octavia, arrived about three years after.

We lived in a small, unimpressive little house though oddly, it didn't feel cramped despite the fact there were five of us at the time. I didn't see my father all that much, he was always kept at work and would often spend months on end away from home. He was an architect and worked on some of the most magnificent buildings in Persia so although he spent months away, he brought in most of the money and by my fifth birthday, we'd moved into a larger and more lavish house.

My mother remained at home to care for the four of us. She was unemployed but with my father a master mason and my brother looking to be a Doctor when he was old enough, we weren't too worried. I was soon old enough to go to school, which was as eventful as any normal schooling was, nothing especially interesting happened. Not in school anyway. For it was when I was in my tenth year that my mother first took me to the fair.

"You realise now that you're ten," my brother told me one morning, "that you can go to the fair."

I was overjoyed. For years I'd wanted to see what spectacles that fair held. All its strange and fantastical things that'd only ever been described to me by my older brother. At times, he'd terrify me with tales about the fair and the creatures and oddities that resided in it. Terrified though I was, I was still intrigued and fascinated by it all and with every story he told to me, that insatiable fascination of mine grew. I had to see it. So, when news came about that the fair had returned to the city, I was begging my mother to go but she wasn't as interested as I.

However, she was the only one who would take me as my brother had work to do and my father was, yet again, absent from the household. Begrudgingly, she obliged and, leaving my sister under the care of Earl, took me into the city.

We walked for about half an hour before we entered the into the large expanse of labyrinth like streets that I would come to know like the back of my hand. Back then though, I saw it as a huge maze of complex and confusing streets that puzzled and intimidated me to no end. Eventually, we reached the fair and my mother payed the entry fee. We showed our tickets and then we walked in. I ran off ahead of my mother, quite forgetting myself as I was enveloped by the want to see everything there was to see.

"Nadir!" I heard her cry, "Nadir don't run off!"

I stopped guiltily and stood in front of her, looking at my feet.

"Sorry mother"

I stayed close to her after that and we started to walk around the place. It was all so amazing yet in some cases frightening. Sword throwers, fortune tellers, fire breathers, contortionists, wild beasts like fierce lions and tigers and even, as I mentioned earlier, a 'real life witch.'

As the day went on and I saw more and more incredible things, my mother told me to stay by her side as we went to see the last exhibit. It sounded miraculous yet terrifying and I was beginning to question whether I wanted to actually see it or not. The crowds around me talked incessantly of 'The Devils Child' saying things along the lines of:

"It's like a vision of hell on earth!"

"It's grotesque!"

"Yet you can't look away."

"Come on! Let's get to the front before everyone else"

They sprinted forward and soon there were masses stood around the cage containing this spectacle. I couldn't see a thing and I jumped up, trying desperately to see but it was no use. I was stood there for an age and I heard the crowds revulsion and horror as they saw whatever it was in that cage. I was pushed and shoved about by the unruly crowd and soon enough, by complete accident, I was at the front. I'd been long since separated from my mother by the crowds, and although I was worried and my instincts told me to look for her, I decided to chance a look into the cage.