Fragile Things

by Neil Gaiman

  “I knew that really,” he told her.

  “Although of course, they’re not prehistoric,” said Miss Finch. “The last aepyornises were killed off by Portuguese sailors on Madagascar about three hundred years ago. And there are fairly reliable accounts of a pygmy mammoth being presented at the Russian court in the sixteenth century, and a band of something which from the descriptions we have were almost definitely some kind of saber-tooth—the Smilodon—brought in from North Africa by Vespasian to die in the circus. So these things aren’t all prehistoric. Often, they’re historic.”

  “I wonder what the point of the saber teeth would be,” I said. “You’d think they’d get in the way.”

  “Nonsense,” said Miss Finch. “Smilodon was a most efficient hunter. Must have been—the saber teeth are repeated a number of times in the fossil record. I wish with all my heart that there were some left today. But there aren’t. We know the world too well.”

  “It’s a big place,” said Jane, doubtfully, and then the lights were flickered on and off, and a ghastly, disembodied voice told us to walk into the next room, that the latter half of the show was not for the faint of heart, and that later tonight, for one night only, the Theater of Night’s Dreaming would be proud to present the Cabinet of Wishes Fulfill’d.

  We threw away our plastic glasses, and we shuffled into

  The Sixth Room

  “Presenting,” announced the ringmaster, “The Painmaker!”

  The spotlight swung up to reveal an abnormally thin young man in bathing trunks, hanging from hooks through his nipples. Two of the punk girls helped him down to the ground, and handed him his props. He hammered a six-inch nail into his nose, lifted weights with a piercing through his tongue, put several ferrets into his bathing trunks, and, for his final trick, allowed the taller of the punk girls to use his stomach as a dartboard for accurately flung hypodermic needles.

  “Wasn’t he on the show, years ago?” asked Jane.

  “Yeah,” said Jonathan. “Really nice guy. He lit a firework held in his teeth.”

  “I thought you said there were no animals,” said Miss Finch. “How do you think those poor ferrets feel about being stuffed into that young man’s nether regions?”

  “I suppose it depends mostly on whether they’re boy ferrets or girl ferrets,” said Jonathan, cheerfully.

  The Seventh Room

  contained a rock-and-roll comedy act, with some clumsy slapstick. A nun’s breasts were revealed, and the hunchback lost his trousers.

  The Eighth Room

  was dark. We waited in the darkness for something to happen. I wanted to sit down. My legs ached, I was tired and cold, and I’d had enough.

  Then someone started to shine a light at us. We blinked and squinted and covered our eyes.

  “Tonight,” an odd voice said, cracked and dusty. Not the ringmaster, I was sure of that. “Tonight, one of you shall get a wish. One of you will gain all that you desire, in the Cabinet of Wishes Fulfill’d. Who shall it be?”

  “Ooh. At a guess, another plant in the audience,” I whispered, remembering the one-handed man in the fourth room.

  “Shush,” said Jane.

  “Who will it be? You sir? You madam?” A figure came out of the darkness and shambled toward us. It was hard to see him properly, for he held a portable spotlight. I wondered if he were wearing some kind of ape costume, for his outline seemed inhuman, and he moved as gorillas move. Perhaps it was the man who played the Creature. “Who shall it be, eh?” We squinted at him, edged out of his way.

  And then he pounced. “Aha! I think we have our volunteer,” he said, leaping over the rope barrier that separated the audience from the show area around us. Then he grabbed Miss Finch by the hand.

  “I really don’t think so,” said Miss Finch, but she was being dragged away from us, too nervous, too polite, fundamentally too English to make a scene. She was pulled into the darkness, and she was gone to us.

  Jonathan swore. “I don’t think she’s going to let us forget this in a hurry,” he said.

  The lights went on. A man dressed as a giant fish then proceeded to ride a motorbike around the room several times. Then he stood up on the seat as it went around. Then he sat down and drove the bike up and down the walls of the room, and then he hit a brick and skidded and fell over, and the bike landed on top of him.

  The hunchback and the topless nun ran on and pulled the bike off the man in the fish-suit and hauled him away.

  “I just broke my sodding leg,” he was saying, in a dull, numb voice. “It’s sodding broken. My sodding leg,” as they carried him out.

  “Do you think that was meant to happen?” asked a girl in the crowd near to us.

  “No,” said the man beside her.

  Slightly shaken, Uncle Fester and the vampire woman ushered us forward, into

  The Ninth Room

  where Miss Finch awaited us.

  It was a huge room. I knew that, even in the thick darkness. Perhaps the dark intensifies the other senses; perhaps it’s simply that we are always processing more information than we imagine. Echoes of our shuffling and coughing came back to us from walls hundreds of feet away.

  And then I became convinced, with a certainty bordering upon madness, that there were great beasts in the darkness, and that they were watching us with hunger.

  Slowly the lights came on, and we saw Miss Finch. I wonder to this day where they got the costume.

  Her black hair was down. The spectacles were gone. The costume, what little there was of it, fitted her perfectly. She held a spear, and she stared at us without emotion. Then the great cats padded into the light next to her. One of them threw its head back and roared.

  Someone began to wail. I could smell the sharp animal stench of urine.

  The animals were the size of tigers, but unstriped; they were the color of a sandy beach at evening. Their eyes were topaz, and their breath smelled of fresh meat and of blood.

  I stared at their jaws: the saber teeth were indeed teeth, not tusks: huge, overgrown fangs, made for rending, for tearing, for ripping meat from the bone.

  The great cats began to pad around us, circling slowly. We huddled together, closing ranks, each of us remembering in our guts what it was like in the old times, when we hid in our caves when the night came and the beasts went on the prowl; remembering when we were prey.

  The Smilodons, if that was what they were, seemed uneasy, wary. Their tails switched whiplike from side to side impatiently. Miss Finch said nothing. She just stared at her animals.

  Then the stocky woman raised her umbrella and waved it at one of the great cats. “Keep back, you ugly brute,” she told it.

  It growled at her and tensed back, like a cat about to spring.

  The stocky woman went pale, but she kept her umbrella pointed out like a sword. She made no move to run in the torchlit darkness beneath the city.

  And then it sprang, batting her to the ground with one huge velvet paw. It stood over her, triumphantly, and roared so deeply that I could feel it in the pit of my stomach. The stocky woman seemed to have passed out, which was, I felt, a mercy: with luck, she would not know when the bladelike fangs tore at her old flesh like twin daggers.

  I looked around for some way out, but the other tiger was prowling around us, keeping us herded within the rope enclosure, like frightened sheep.

  I could hear Jonathan muttering the same three dirty words, over and over and over.

  “We’re going to die, aren’t we?” I heard myself say.

  “I think so,” said Jane.

  Then Miss Finch pushed her way through the rope barrier, and she took the great cat by the scruff of its neck and pulled it back. It resisted, and she thwacked it on the nose with the end of her spear. Its tail went down between its legs, and it backed away from the fallen woman, cowed and obedient.

  There was no blood, that I could see, and I hoped that she was only unconscious.

  In the back of the cellar room light was slowly comin
g up. It seemed as if dawn were breaking. I could see a jungle mist wreathing about huge ferns and hostas; and I could hear, as if from a great way off, the chirp of crickets and the call of strange birds awaking to greet the new day.

  And part of me—the writer part of me, the bit that has noted the particular way the light hit the broken glass in the puddle of blood even as I staggered out from a car crash, and has observed in exquisite detail the way that my heart was broken, or did not break, in moments of real, profound, personal tragedy—it was that part of me that thought, You could get that effect with a smoke machine, some plants, and a tape track. You’d need a really good lighting guy, of course.

  Miss Finch scratched her left breast, unselfconsciously, then she turned her back on us and walked toward the dawn and the jungle underneath the world, flanked by two padding saber-toothed tigers.

  A bird screeched and chattered.

  Then the dawn light faded back into darkness, and the mists shifted, and the woman and the animals were gone.

  The stocky woman’s son helped her to her feet. She opened her eyes. She looked shocked but unhurt. And when we knew that she was not hurt, for she picked up her umbrella, and leaned on it, and glared at us all, why then we began to applaud.

  No one came to get us. I could not see Uncle Fester or the vampire woman anywhere. So unescorted we all walked on into

  The Tenth Room

  It was all set up for what would obviously have been the grand finale. There were even plastic seats arranged, for us to watch the show. We sat down on the seats and we waited, but nobody from the circus came on, and, it became apparent to us all after some time, no one was going to come.

  People began to shuffle into the next room. I heard a door open, and the noise of traffic and the rain.

  I looked at Jane and Jonathan, and we got up and walked out. In the last room was an unmanned table upon which were laid out souvenirs of the circus: posters and CDs and badges, and an open cash box. Sodium yellow light spilled in from the street outside, through an open door, and the wind gusted at the unsold posters, flapping the corners up and down impatiently.

  “Should we wait for her?” one of us said, and I wish I could say that it was me. But the others shook their heads, and we walked out into the rain, which had by now subsided to a low and gusty drizzle.

  After a short walk down narrow roads, in the rain and the wind, we found our way to the car. I stood on the pavement, waiting for the back door to be unlocked to let me in, and over the rain and the noise of the city I thought I heard a tiger, for, somewhere close by, there was a low roar that made the whole world shake. But perhaps it was only the passage of a train.

  STRANGE LITTLE GIRLS

  THE GIRLS

  New Age

  She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon.

  You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood.

  She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here.

  Bonnie’s Mother

  You know how it is when you love someone?

  And the hard part, the bad part, the Jerry Springer Show part is that you never stop loving someone. There’s always a piece of them in your heart.

  Now that she is dead, she tries to remember only the love. She imagines every blow a kiss, the makeup that inexpertly covers the bruises, the cigarette burn on her thigh—all these things, she decides, were gestures of love.

  She wonders what her daughter will do.

  She wonders what her daughter will be.

  She is holding a cake, in her death. It is the cake she was always going to bake for her little one. Maybe they would have mixed it together.

  They would have sat and eaten it and smiled, all three of them, and the apartment would have slowly filled with laughter and with love.

  Strange

  There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won’t remember and that she can’t even let herself think about because that’s when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it’s always raining a slow and endless drizzle.

  You will hear that she has left the country, that there was a gift she wanted you to have, but it is lost before it reaches you. Late one night the telephone will sing, and a voice that might be hers will say something that you cannot interpret before the connection crackles and is broken.

  Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time you persuade the driver to stop. You will never see her again.

  Whenever it rains you will think of her.

  Silence

  Thirty-five years a showgirl that she admits to, and her feet hurt, day in, day out, from the high heels, but she can walk down steps with a forty-pound headdress in high heels, she’s walked across a stage with a lion in high heels, she could walk through goddamn Hell in high heels if it came to that.

  These are the things that have helped, that kept her walking and her head high: her daughter; a man from Chicago who loved her, although not enough; the national news anchor who paid her rent for a decade and didn’t come to Vegas more than once a month; two bags of silicone gel; and staying out of the desert sun.

  She will be a grandmother soon, very soon.

  Love

  And then there was the time that one of them simply wouldn’t return her calls to his office. So she called the number he did not know that she had, and she said to the woman who answered that this was so embarrassing but as he was no longer talking to her could he be told that she was still waiting for the return of her lacy black underthings, which he had taken because, he said, they smelled of her, of both of them. Oh, and that reminded her, she said, as the woman on the other end of the phone said nothing, could they be laundered first, and then simply posted back to her. He has her address. And then, her business joyfully concluded, she forgets him utterly and forever, and she turns her attention to the next.

  One day she won’t love you, too. It will break your heart.

  Time

  She is not waiting. Not quite. It is more that the years mean nothing to her anymore, that the dreams and the street cannot touch her.

  She remains on the edges of time, implacable, unhurt, beyond, and one day you will open your eyes and see her; and after that, the dark.

  It is not a reaping. Instead, she will pluck you, gently, like a feather, or a flower for her hair.

  Rattlesnake

  She doesn’t know who owned the jacket originally. Nobody claimed it after a party, and she figured it looked good on her.

  It says KISS, and she does not like to kiss. People, men and women, have told her that she is beautiful, and she has no idea what they mean. When she looks in the mirror she does not see beauty looking back at her. Only her face.

  She does not read, watch TV, or make love. She listens to music. She goes places with her friends. She rides roller coasters but never screams when they plummet or twist and plunge upside down.

  If you told her the jacket was yours she’d just shrug and give it back to you. It’s not like she cares, not one way or the other.

  Heart of Gold

  —sentences.

  Sisters, maybe twins, possibly cousins. We won’t know unless we see their birth certificates, the real ones, not the ones they use to get ID.

  This is what they do for a living. They walk in, take what they need, walk out again.

  It’s not glamorous. It’s just business. It may not always be strictly legal. It’s just business.

  They are too smart for this, and too tired.

  They share clothes, wigs, makeup, cigarettes. Restless and hunting, they move on. Two minds. One heart.

  Sometimes they even finish each other’s—

  Monday’s Child

  Standing in the shower, letting the water run over h
er, washing it away, washing everything away, she realizes that what made it hardest was that it had smelled just like her own high school.

  She had walked through the corridors, heart beating raggedly in her chest, smelling that school smell, and it all came back to her.

  It was only, what, six years, maybe less, since it had been her running from locker to classroom, since she had watched her friends crying and raging and brooding over the taunts and the names and the thousand hurts that plague the powerless. None of them had ever gone this far.

  She found the first body in a stairwell.

  That night, after the shower, which could not wash what she had had to do away, not really, she said to her husband, “I’m scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “That this job is making me hard. That it’s making me someone else. Someone I don’t know anymore.”

  He pulled her close and held her, and they stayed touching, skin to skin, until dawn.

  Happiness

  She feels at home on the range; ear protectors in position, man-shaped paper target up and waiting for her.

  She imagines, a little, she remembers, a little and she sights and squeezes and as her time on the range begins she feels rather than sees the head and the heart obliterate. The smell of cordite always makes her think of the Fourth of July.

  You use the gifts God gave you. That was what her mother had said, which makes their falling-out even harder, somehow.

  Nobody will ever hurt her. She’ll just smile her faint vague wonderful smile and walk away.

  It’s not about the money. It’s never about the money.

  Raining Blood

  Here: an exercise in choice. Your choice. One of these tales is true.

  She lived through the war. In 1959 she came to America. She now lives in a condo in Miami, a tiny Frenchwoman with white hair, with a daughter and a granddaughter. She keeps herself to herself and smiles rarely, as if the weight of memory keeps her from finding joy.

  Or that’s a lie. Actually the Gestapo picked her up during a border crossing in 1943, and they left her in a meadow. First she dug her own grave, then a single bullet to the back of the skull.