Circus Mirandus

by Cassie Beasley

  “Are you sure about that?” she said. “Because I’ve seen them. The children. They leave believing well enough I suppose, but one little accident, one little misstep and—” She snapped her fingers.

  “And if they do believe for their whole lives, what of it? They can’t do anything useful about it. They just pine after what we have. If you think about it, it’s cruel to tease them.” She drew herself up to her full height. “I don’t want to waste myself here. I want . . .”

  “Power?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” she admitted. “Is that so wrong?”

  His silence was as good an answer as any.

  Victoria huffed a laugh. “Now you’ve gotten me off track,” she said. She picked up an ivory comb from her dressing table and ran her fingers over its teeth. “I didn’t want to argue with you. You’re my closest friend, you know.”

  “You are not the easiest person to befriend,” he said.

  “I’m perfectly lovely, and you know it,” she said, pointing the comb at him. “In all seriousness, though, I was hoping you would be the one to come and yell at me for skipping those shows.”

  The Man Who Bends Light crossed his arms over his chest. “Victoria—”

  “Come with me.” She leaned toward him. “Let’s find others like us. I’ve got a few contacts, and there must be others out there. You want to make a difference in the world. Well, so do I. Just imagine what we could accomplish together!”

  “Dear Victoria,” he said. “You are so very young.”

  She opened her mouth, but he held up a hand to silence her. “If you truly consider me your friend, please listen to me now. I have traveled the world many times over, and I have learned many hard lessons over the years. I would spare you my own mistakes.”

  He gripped her shoulders and looked into her eyes. “Stay for one more show. Give one final performance. Put everything you have into it, and after it’s over, stay a while. Speak to the children. See how you have changed them. That is power.”

  He stepped away from her. “If you don’t agree with me, then you can depart, and I hope that we will part as friends.”

  She stared at him. “I thought you would understand,” she said. “You really won’t come with me?”

  “No,” he said. “I won’t.”

  For the first time since he had entered her dressing room, Victoria was at a loss for words. She examined the comb in her hands as though it held a great secret. Then, she shook her head and cast it aside. “One last show,” she said. “Don’t come. I don’t want you there.”

  The Amazing Amazonian Bird Woman’s final show took place on a warm, sunny afternoon, and the crowd was as large as it ever had been, in part because many of her colleagues were in attendance along with the children.

  The children had come to see a marvelous show. The other performers had come to bid Victoria farewell. Mirandus Head had come because he was the manager. He watched as she spun through the air so far above the crowd, and he wondered how a person who had been given so much throughout her young life could be so determined to give nothing back.

  But even Mr. Head had to admit that the Bird Woman’s final performance was going well. She had a way of holding the crowd’s attention that was almost unmatched. She soared, white feathers fluttering around her, and the children cried out in astonishment as she swooped low over their heads. When Victoria began to sing, wonder stole across the faces of dozens of boys and girls. Their eyes widened in delight when her flock entered the tent. Several of the children reached up, longing to touch those magnificent birds.

  That was when Victoria spoke from high overhead. “Do you like my flock?” she asked in a sweet voice. She stood in the air as though she were standing on a sheet of glass, and the sunshine pouring through the tent’s skylight made a halo over her head.

  The children cried out with a chorus of yeses.

  Victoria held out one hand and trilled a series of diamond pure notes. One of the silver swans swooped toward her. It was a beautiful creature, fatly elegant with platinum wings and a graceful neck. It nuzzled Victoria’s hand.

  “They’re all very rare,” she said as the flock circled her. The beat of their wings made her hair whip around her face. “Some of my birds are the only ones of their kind in the entire world.”

  She stroked the swan’s beak. “This one is named Eidel. Would you like to see her up close? I’ll need a volunteer.”

  The tent burst into excited chatter. One little girl raised both of her arms over her head and jumped up and down.

  “You in the brown dress,” Victoria said, pointing at her. “Come to the center of the floor please.”

  The girl scampered forward and looked up eagerly at the Bird Woman and the swan.

  “Now, don’t move,” said Victoria. “I don’t want you to frighten Eidel.”

  The girl nodded, and Victoria bent her head to the swan. She cooed gently, and the bird looked down at the girl. It dove. The audience held its breath as the swan fell like a shooting star.

  Down, down, down the swan dove.

  The girl in the brown dress watched with huge eyes. She was still smiling when the swan broke itself against the ground at her feet.

  It hit the floor in an explosion of silver feather and sawdust, and in the half second of silence that followed, the sound of its wings scrabbling against the ground as it died was enough to tear a hole in Mirandus Head’s heart.

  The girl screamed. She staggered away from the fallen swan.

  As though her scream was the signal, the birds in the tent went mad. Some of them pelted toward the earth as the swan had. Others turned on their fellows. The hawks and the eagles ripped into the songbirds, and feathers rained down.

  Mr. Head leaped out of the way as a phoenix hit the ground next to him and burst into flame.

  “Victoria!” he bellowed. “Stop this!”

  The tent was filled with screaming now. It was a nightmare of crumpled birds and fleeing children. In the midst of the chaos, Mr. Head spotted one of the Strongmen shielding a group of children with his broad back. “Get them out of here!” he called. “Clear the tent.”

  Bibi appeared next to him, roaring loudly enough to rattle skeletons out of their skins, but she couldn’t do anything to stop Victoria from the ground. Nor, for that matter, could Mr. Head. They stared helplessly up at her, standing on thin air, and the manager was chilled to his marrow by what he saw in her face.

  She did not look furious as she murdered her own companions. She did not look enraged as she terrified an audience full of innocent children. She looked satisfied, as though she had just proven something important to herself and to the rest of the world. He had allowed a monster into Circus Mirandus, and now the children were paying the price.

  “DO NOT PANIC!” The voice rang through the tent.

  Rang? No, ringing was something normal voices could do. This voice pulverized the very air.

  The Man Who Bends Light stood in the tent’s entrance, and his coat billowed as though caught in a rising wind. “NOTHING IS WRONG.”

  The children stopped screaming.

  Their expressions smoothed into mild curiosity, and they turned to look at him. The birds were still fighting and flailing overhead, but the children, even the ones who had tears running down their cheeks, were suddenly unaware of the chaos. The performers and the Strongmen had been left out of whatever illusion had taken hold of Victoria’s audience, but they recognized the Man Who Bends Light’s magic for what it was at once.

  They leaped into action. They hustled the scratched and bruised audience out of the tent, and within seconds, only the illusionist, the manager, and the Bird Woman were left.

  “What have you done?” the Man Who Bends Light asked in a fractured voice. His eyes took in the dead and dying birds that littered the ground. “Victoria, why?”

  She glar
ed down at him. “I tried to tell you,” she said. “One little accident, one little misstep.” She spread her arms. “And everything Circus Mirandus works for is destroyed. Now do you see how pointless this place is?”

  Mr. Head knelt to pick up a dazed bluebird. “As if we did not already know that faith is such a fragile thing,” he murmured.

  “You should have agreed to come with me,” Victoria said to the Man Who Bends Light. She was so bold, so certain that she was far beyond their reach. “You could have been someone who mattered.”

  Mr. Head knew the moment the Man Who Bends Light made his decision. Resolve replaced the devastation in his features. He strode forward until he stood directly beneath Victoria.

  The manager closed his eyes.

  “What are you doing?” Victoria sounded more curious than nervous. “I know better than to fall for one of your tricks.”

  “But you are falling, Victoria,” the Man Who Bends Light said in a soft voice. “Did you think you could fly?”

  Magic. Faith. Mr. Head thought it ironic that Victoria had never made the connection. Nobody had ever touched magic without believing that they might be able to do so. And very few people could believe in something if the Man Who Bends Light wanted them to think it wasn’t true.

  Victoria dropped like a stone.

  The manager opened his eyes in time to see the magician catch her before she hit the ground. She scrambled away from him as though his touch burned.

  “What did you do to me?” she screamed. “What did you do?”

  “Such a fragile thing,” Mr. Head said quietly. Perhaps the effect would last months, or even years, but Victoria obviously thought it was permanent. She sucked in great gulps of air and stared down at her costume.

  “W-what did you d-do?” She choked the words out again between sobs.

  “What was necessary,” said the Man Who Bends Light. He refused to look at her.

  She stumbled to her feet and fled the tent.

  “See that she leaves the circus,” Mr. Head said to Bibi. “For good.”

  The tiger growled her agreement and stalked after Victoria.

  Mr. Head approached the Man Who Bends Light cautiously. The magician was watching the surviving members of Victoria’s flock retreat through the skylight. Every line of his body was etched with grief.

  “We should call you the Man Who Bends Minds,” the manager said. “I’ll admit it’s not as cheerful, but it would be more accurate.”

  “I am sorry.” He gave his words to the sky. “I am so, so sorry.”

  The Lightbender led Micah and Jenny into the main section of the tent a few minutes before his show was due to begin. Micah was still clutching his bottle of orange soda. It was as frosty cold as it had been when the Lightbender had first given it to him, but he was feeling so subdued after learning about his grandmother that he had forgotten to drink it. How could he be related to someone like that? How could someone even be like that?

  And Grandpa Ephraim—how had he even married Victoria in the first place? It sounded like after she left Circus Mirandus nobody knew where she’d gone.

  “You might want to finish that now.” The Lightbender gestured toward the soda as he ushered them to two front row seats. “I tend to be a little distracted when I am performing. It might disappear on you.”

  Micah took a big gulp.

  Jenny looked around the tent curiously. She examined the stage and the walls. “Do you really not use cameras? Is what you do really . . .?” she trailed off, but the word magic hung in the air almost as if she had said it aloud.

  Micah shot the Lightbender an apologetic look, but he only shook his head at Jenny’s question. “You will have to tell me what you think after you’ve seen it. I do not often perform for children with your particular point of view. The pressure is a novel experience.”

  He looked up at the ceiling, and the lanterns hanging overhead dimmed as if he had given them a silent command. Micah heard the excited chattering of the children outside increase in volume as the golden rope began to dissolve.

  “Thank you,” he said. “For telling me about Victoria and for Grandpa Ephraim and for, well, everything.”

  “Pay close attention to my show, Micah.” The Lightbender began to fade into the shadows of the room. “Remember that I promised your grandfather anything within my power.”

  The frigid air stung Micah’s cheeks. He couldn’t understand how it was possible. How could he really be standing beside Jenny in Antarctica watching emperor penguins slide down an icy hill on their bellies? But he was there. He was so very much there that for a moment he forgot he had ever been anywhere else.

  The Lightbender’s tent faded from his memory like a dream, and he woke up in a land of ice. Then that became the dream, and he woke up to find that the world was really the sun in his eyes and a crowd cheering and the thunder of racing horses in his chest. That was what the Lightbender’s show was like—waking up again and again only to find that every new waking was more perfect than the last.

  Micah woke again, this time to find himself deep in the jungle, and he immediately began exploring. He stepped between two bushes with leaves as large as Big Jean’s ears and found a twinkling green pool. He drank in the lush sight. Flowering vines swayed over the pool from the branches overhead, and a tiny waterfall splashed down into it from the rocks above. Fish as bright as Easter eggs played among the reeds.

  Grandpa Ephraim never mentioned this.

  Micah was surprised to realize that he hadn’t thought about his grandfather since Antarctica. The jungle was one of his favorite parts, he reminded himself. This is the Lightbender’s show. I’m supposed to be paying attention.

  It was more difficult than he had thought it would be to keep that in mind, especially with such a tempting pool right in front of him. Curious, Micah took his shoes off so that he could dip one of his toes in the water. It was just the right temperature for swimming. The moment he decided this, he found that he was wearing swimming trunks.

  That’s funny, he thought. Didn’t I have on jeans?

  He waded into the cool water, and the fish darted away from him. At its deepest, the pool only came up a few inches over Micah’s head. He swam back and forth under the waterfall and dove down to touch the bottom. When he cracked his eyes open and looked up toward the surface, everything was a blur of shimmering color and light. He rose back up again, and shook his head to get the water out of his ears. Droplets flew away from his hair like sparks.

  He would have been content splashing around in the tropical forest forever, but eventually the world around him began to change. This time, Micah forced himself to pay attention to the transition. Between one blink and the next, he was standing not in a humid jungle but in a dry and windy desert, and he stared up at a pyramid as tall as a skyscraper.

  It wasn’t like waking up from a dream this time, maybe because he was trying hard to focus. He was disoriented by the shift. He half expected the blowing sand to stick to him. Surely, he was still wet from his swim.

  Only he wasn’t wet at all. He was completely dry and wearing a hat with flaps that kept the burning sun from roasting the back of his neck. That was when Micah finally started to understand. That was when he started to worry.

  “Anything within my power,” the Lightbender had promised. But what was the Lightbender’s power exactly?

  Micah wasn’t wet. He never had been, really.

  He bent to pick up a handful of sand, and he let it run slowly through his fingers. It’s got to be real. His thoughts sounded desperate even to himself. It can’t feel like this and not be real.

  Eventually, the pyramid faded out of existence, and he found himself standing at the edge of a lake. It was nighttime, and fireworks exploded overhead. The air smelled like gunpowder.

  Micah’s hands were empty.

  “Usually,” said a s
ad voice, “this is the part where I show you your heart’s desire coming true.”

  The Lightbender appeared beside him. The flashes of light in the night sky painted his face in shadows. “In your case, I fear that is not a good idea.”

  “You’re an illusionist,” Micah said. His throat had gone dry.

  The Lightbender nodded.

  “I knew that. But I didn’t realize . . . None of this lasts. It’s all in my head?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Micah tried to breathe, but he was being crushed from the inside out. “Grandpa Ephraim?” he choked.

  “He knows,” the Lightbender said softly. He took a step toward Micah. He lifted one arm, as though he planned to reach out to him, but then he dropped it back to his side. “I am sorry.”

  The fireworks were fading. The Lightbender’s tent was coming back into view.

  Micah felt like a kite with a cut string, tumbling through the air, the ground falling away beneath him. He barely noticed Jenny trembling in the seat next to him. They were the only children left in the stands.

  “He said you could help us, though.” Micah’s voice was hollow. “Grandpa Ephraim said you could help.”

  “Not in the way you want me to, Micah. I cannot trick death.”

  “What good are you then?” Somehow, Micah was on his feet. “What good is any of this?”

  He wanted the Lightbender to argue with him. He wanted him to scream at him so that Micah could scream, too. But the illusionist never raised his voice. “I’m sorry I can’t give you what you want. Go to Rosebud. She lives in the wagon behind Mr. Head’s tent. She will give you something to make Ephraim feel more like himself, for a little while.”

  “I don’t believe you! You have to be able to help. All of this . . .” Micah waved his arms to encompass the whole of Circus Mirandus. “It’s perfect and amazing and . . . and it’s everything. You can save him somehow. If you would just come back with me, if you saw Grandpa Ephraim, you would help. I know it!”

  He shook his head. “I can’t, Micah. And I try not to leave Circus Mirandus. I maintain the illusions that keep us hidden from the world. If I leave, things become difficult.”