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31_days2007-03-01 06:08 pm
sassafras28.livejournal.com) wrote in 31_days2007-03-01 06:08 pm
[March 1] [Original Fiction]: The Midnight Show
Title: The Midnight Show
Day/Theme: March 1: the heart knows the world's disguise
Series: Original Fiction
Character/Pairing: Original
Rating: PG-13
But he was a liar, you see? He lied with his words and his face and his hands in mine. He lied with his top hat and tails, he lied with his slicked-back hair and his mascara’d eyes. He lied in the center ring and I helped him do it with a smile and a spangle of rhinestones in the floodlights.
He used to tell me I was beautiful, in the darkness before the show. He kissed me on my forehead, gravely, like a beloved uncle and said “You’re beautiful,” with my face in his hands. I couldn’t look away. But that was a lie, too, because I was never beautiful. I was just very fast and shining brightly, half-hidden in the light.
He held my hand in his at the end. He wore gloves, but I could feel the low, excited pulse in his fingers, the pale blue veins that curled and crawled just under his skin. We smiled together and dipped low with our faces close together. I could hear the sound his breathing made, could smell the thick pomade in his hair.
When a crowd was really good, when their laughter, their awe, flowed out over us like water, sometimes, he would pick me up and carry me out of the ring. I would stare over his shoulder in mock surprise, my mouth a painted harlequin O of shock. This was part of the lie too, and as we vanished into the darkness, I pressed my fingers to my mouth and blew red kisses to the front row. Old men eating peanuts, and giggling girl children with barrettes falling out of their hair.
Sometimes, as we walked, my skirt made of sparkling gauze and anchored with spangles, would bunch and ride up until the bare tops of my thighs were pressed against his chest. The buttons on his shirt catching and snagging on my pink nylon tights. He would set me down and pull my skirt out straight. His hands traveled easily around the inside of my waistband, twisting it gently, letting it billow and fall like it should. I rested my hands on his shoulders, and I stood very still. As small and sexless as a child, or a doll.
Louisa rode horses, but you know all about that. Her show was a daylight one, for the most part, and I had never seen her ride until about three weeks before. She was all angles and fluid lines and speed. While I watched, she lowered herself off the horse’s bare back and pressed herself against his side. Slowly, she spread her legs out in a stiff V and let the animal carry her around the circle of the pen. Her hair spread out, caught the wind and tangled up with the horse’s mane. They were the same color, brown and red and shining in the sun.
She pulled herself back up and then up and up until she was standing on the horse’s back, one foot slightly forward like a conqueror halfway in and halfway out of a new world. The crowd screamed for her and as she passed by, she winked at me. I stayed the rest of the afternoon and watched her four more times.
She tried to teach me to ride once. Up close, she smelled like dirt and horse sweat and sunlight. She wore a shirt with no sleeves and thin, faded blue jeans. She wasn’t wearing any underclothes, and I could clearly see the swaying movement of her breasts and she prepared the saddle, pulled the straps tight and patted the horse’s long neck with loving, broken-nailed hands.
“Up you go, girlie,” she said, lacing her fingers into a step for me. She put one hand on my back to steady me, and fit my feet properly into the stirrup for me. She put the reins in my hands, wrapped her own fingers around mine to show me the position. They were efficient, graceless hands. I could feel the calluses on her thumbs. I wondered if he could feel them when she touched him. Did they bother him? The roughness and sharpness of them. Or did he like the texture, the gradation? Was that part of what he loved, the contrast of her?
I was a clumsy horsewoman. I rode a couple of times around the circular pen, but I didn’t like the jittery feeling of the animal underneath me. The horse seemed to understand my discomfort and slowed to a mellow trot. “You did good, sweetie,” Louisa said as she helped me off the horse. My legs shook as I stood in front of her, and she brushed long horse hairs off my shoulders with her long, efficient hands. She had dirt underneath her fingernails.
That horse was how we all knew something was wrong. She never would have left the gate open, let it out in the night like that. And someone had cut off all it hair, right up close to its head. They weren’t very good at it either, they’d scraped too close in spots and its neck was bleeding. The flesh underneath the brown hair was surprisingly pink, like the inside of a lady’s lips. They’d probably used the knife, come to think of it. It’s not a very delicate instrument.
I was the one that found her, you know, and the first thing I saw was all that hair and I wondered for a minute if the person hadn’t shaved her head as well. I couldn’t tell, you see, from the color as it was just piled up there on the ground.
They fought all the time. Their voices carried in the night, and everyone knew. She used to push him and push him and push him, until they were stumbling down the back steps, shoving one another further and further. But by the morning, they were always curled up together, his head on her stomach, her hands spread looped around his neck, her hair spilled all over the both of them. Is that what he wanted?
He came to me first after he saw her. He wasn’t crying, even though he cried a lot later. To the police and newspaper man and Louisa’s mother, who looked just like her. Older and browner and sadder-eyed. He was dry-eyed, and his hair was mussed from sleeping. I watched him in the mirror as he paced back and forth, jittery, restless. He smoothed his hair and I put my lipstick on, drawing in a perfect bow just like he’d taught me to.
He jerked my chair around, and my arm twitched, drawing a line of red up my lip, up my cheek. He laid his head in my lap and I put my hands on his neck. He was burning up, like with fever. He said something, but I couldn’t understand the words and could only feel the motion of his mouth against my skin. I kissed him again and again and left like red imprints all up and down his hairline.
We did two shows the afternoon that Louisa died. I flew through the sky and became a trail of sparkles for their applause. We held hands and bowed low, and I blew long kisses to the old men and the little girls and backstage in the dark, he crouched on the floor with his arms over his head.
It wasn’t so bad as the newspapers said. They called it gruesome, brutal, hideous. They called it an execution, a slaying, but it wasn’t really. She looked like she was sleeping. Someone had curled her all up, so her face was touching her stomach, and her hair was covering her like a blanket. One hand was stretched out, flattened possessively against the ground. Her fingernails were still dirty. There are worse ways to go, that’s for sure. I knew a woman once who fell off the bars in the middle of a routine like mine, snapped her neck on the ground. She screamed all the way down, and the crowd gathered around to look at her while she lay there, with the blood coming out of her nose and her mouth.
If I ever fell like that, I know what he’d do. He’d smile and he’d move the center ring while they scraped me off the floor, he’d gesture for the clowns and the jugglers and at the end of the show, he’d bow low and another woman would kiss the crowd, retreat backstage with red lipstick on her hands.
He shot the horse. The day after the funeral, I watched him. He pressed the rifle barrel flush to its head, still bare and pink, and he pulled the trigger. It think it was relieved, as it folded up, twitching, on the dirt. Its eyes jittered and rolled before they went cold and glass.
I remember the first day he met Louisa, she was standing in the tent’s doorway, and the sun was behind her, casting her all in shadows. She clapped at the end of show, and her hands got lost in all the other noise. He didn’t carry me that day, and he kept looking at her though the crack in the curtains. “She rides horses,” he told me, “she came here for me.”
But he was a liar. I’m a liar too, if you want the whole truth. And we tell the very same story, here in the bright lights.
Day/Theme: March 1: the heart knows the world's disguise
Series: Original Fiction
Character/Pairing: Original
Rating: PG-13
But he was a liar, you see? He lied with his words and his face and his hands in mine. He lied with his top hat and tails, he lied with his slicked-back hair and his mascara’d eyes. He lied in the center ring and I helped him do it with a smile and a spangle of rhinestones in the floodlights.
He used to tell me I was beautiful, in the darkness before the show. He kissed me on my forehead, gravely, like a beloved uncle and said “You’re beautiful,” with my face in his hands. I couldn’t look away. But that was a lie, too, because I was never beautiful. I was just very fast and shining brightly, half-hidden in the light.
He held my hand in his at the end. He wore gloves, but I could feel the low, excited pulse in his fingers, the pale blue veins that curled and crawled just under his skin. We smiled together and dipped low with our faces close together. I could hear the sound his breathing made, could smell the thick pomade in his hair.
When a crowd was really good, when their laughter, their awe, flowed out over us like water, sometimes, he would pick me up and carry me out of the ring. I would stare over his shoulder in mock surprise, my mouth a painted harlequin O of shock. This was part of the lie too, and as we vanished into the darkness, I pressed my fingers to my mouth and blew red kisses to the front row. Old men eating peanuts, and giggling girl children with barrettes falling out of their hair.
Sometimes, as we walked, my skirt made of sparkling gauze and anchored with spangles, would bunch and ride up until the bare tops of my thighs were pressed against his chest. The buttons on his shirt catching and snagging on my pink nylon tights. He would set me down and pull my skirt out straight. His hands traveled easily around the inside of my waistband, twisting it gently, letting it billow and fall like it should. I rested my hands on his shoulders, and I stood very still. As small and sexless as a child, or a doll.
Louisa rode horses, but you know all about that. Her show was a daylight one, for the most part, and I had never seen her ride until about three weeks before. She was all angles and fluid lines and speed. While I watched, she lowered herself off the horse’s bare back and pressed herself against his side. Slowly, she spread her legs out in a stiff V and let the animal carry her around the circle of the pen. Her hair spread out, caught the wind and tangled up with the horse’s mane. They were the same color, brown and red and shining in the sun.
She pulled herself back up and then up and up until she was standing on the horse’s back, one foot slightly forward like a conqueror halfway in and halfway out of a new world. The crowd screamed for her and as she passed by, she winked at me. I stayed the rest of the afternoon and watched her four more times.
She tried to teach me to ride once. Up close, she smelled like dirt and horse sweat and sunlight. She wore a shirt with no sleeves and thin, faded blue jeans. She wasn’t wearing any underclothes, and I could clearly see the swaying movement of her breasts and she prepared the saddle, pulled the straps tight and patted the horse’s long neck with loving, broken-nailed hands.
“Up you go, girlie,” she said, lacing her fingers into a step for me. She put one hand on my back to steady me, and fit my feet properly into the stirrup for me. She put the reins in my hands, wrapped her own fingers around mine to show me the position. They were efficient, graceless hands. I could feel the calluses on her thumbs. I wondered if he could feel them when she touched him. Did they bother him? The roughness and sharpness of them. Or did he like the texture, the gradation? Was that part of what he loved, the contrast of her?
I was a clumsy horsewoman. I rode a couple of times around the circular pen, but I didn’t like the jittery feeling of the animal underneath me. The horse seemed to understand my discomfort and slowed to a mellow trot. “You did good, sweetie,” Louisa said as she helped me off the horse. My legs shook as I stood in front of her, and she brushed long horse hairs off my shoulders with her long, efficient hands. She had dirt underneath her fingernails.
That horse was how we all knew something was wrong. She never would have left the gate open, let it out in the night like that. And someone had cut off all it hair, right up close to its head. They weren’t very good at it either, they’d scraped too close in spots and its neck was bleeding. The flesh underneath the brown hair was surprisingly pink, like the inside of a lady’s lips. They’d probably used the knife, come to think of it. It’s not a very delicate instrument.
I was the one that found her, you know, and the first thing I saw was all that hair and I wondered for a minute if the person hadn’t shaved her head as well. I couldn’t tell, you see, from the color as it was just piled up there on the ground.
They fought all the time. Their voices carried in the night, and everyone knew. She used to push him and push him and push him, until they were stumbling down the back steps, shoving one another further and further. But by the morning, they were always curled up together, his head on her stomach, her hands spread looped around his neck, her hair spilled all over the both of them. Is that what he wanted?
He came to me first after he saw her. He wasn’t crying, even though he cried a lot later. To the police and newspaper man and Louisa’s mother, who looked just like her. Older and browner and sadder-eyed. He was dry-eyed, and his hair was mussed from sleeping. I watched him in the mirror as he paced back and forth, jittery, restless. He smoothed his hair and I put my lipstick on, drawing in a perfect bow just like he’d taught me to.
He jerked my chair around, and my arm twitched, drawing a line of red up my lip, up my cheek. He laid his head in my lap and I put my hands on his neck. He was burning up, like with fever. He said something, but I couldn’t understand the words and could only feel the motion of his mouth against my skin. I kissed him again and again and left like red imprints all up and down his hairline.
We did two shows the afternoon that Louisa died. I flew through the sky and became a trail of sparkles for their applause. We held hands and bowed low, and I blew long kisses to the old men and the little girls and backstage in the dark, he crouched on the floor with his arms over his head.
It wasn’t so bad as the newspapers said. They called it gruesome, brutal, hideous. They called it an execution, a slaying, but it wasn’t really. She looked like she was sleeping. Someone had curled her all up, so her face was touching her stomach, and her hair was covering her like a blanket. One hand was stretched out, flattened possessively against the ground. Her fingernails were still dirty. There are worse ways to go, that’s for sure. I knew a woman once who fell off the bars in the middle of a routine like mine, snapped her neck on the ground. She screamed all the way down, and the crowd gathered around to look at her while she lay there, with the blood coming out of her nose and her mouth.
If I ever fell like that, I know what he’d do. He’d smile and he’d move the center ring while they scraped me off the floor, he’d gesture for the clowns and the jugglers and at the end of the show, he’d bow low and another woman would kiss the crowd, retreat backstage with red lipstick on her hands.
He shot the horse. The day after the funeral, I watched him. He pressed the rifle barrel flush to its head, still bare and pink, and he pulled the trigger. It think it was relieved, as it folded up, twitching, on the dirt. Its eyes jittered and rolled before they went cold and glass.
I remember the first day he met Louisa, she was standing in the tent’s doorway, and the sun was behind her, casting her all in shadows. She clapped at the end of show, and her hands got lost in all the other noise. He didn’t carry me that day, and he kept looking at her though the crack in the curtains. “She rides horses,” he told me, “she came here for me.”
But he was a liar. I’m a liar too, if you want the whole truth. And we tell the very same story, here in the bright lights.