How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly

by Connie May Fowler

  The supreme attempt; that was how this forty-two-year-old man—real name William Hunter—who held a PhD in literature but who, because of his stature, was denied a job in the academy, came to think of life as a human pincushion: consciousness melted, measured resistance, great spaces traversed with the entry of each pinpoint. He set aside the book, reached for a shortbread cookie—the closest he could get to a madeleine—and bit down.

  The rain having passed, Ulysses sat three yards out from the base of the golden cannon, which Nicolai was polishing with car wax. The dog was waiting for his owner to become distracted. Understanding human nature as he did, he doubted he would have to wait long for such a lapse in attention to occur—Gloria would traipse by in her ass-cheek leotard or someone would pause to tell a dirty joke or the guys would simply drift off into inane conversation about women, booze, or cars, and that would be Ulysses’ chance.

  While the roustabouts shouted, hammered, and tugged the final preparations into existence and as Nicolai polished the golden cannon to an eye-squinting gleam, the distraction that Ulysses was gifted with turned out to be of greater consequence than anything the diminutive dog had imagined.

  The dwarfs parted when Clarissa busted through the front gate, screaming for help, with Iggy following twenty paces behind. The couple looked quite mad—both of them bleeding about the head, wild-eyed, and shouting curses the wind stole.

  Well versed in the dangers of becoming involved in domestic disputes, no one attempted to outright stop Iggy or even shelter Clarissa. The Human Pincushion, however, worried that he was too late to catch a glimpse of Gloria swinging naked, hurried out of his trailer, leaving the last twenty-five pages of Remembrance unread, saw the disturbance, did not like Iggy at first glance, wasn’t about to get trampled by the giant man, and decided that quick, decisive, unorthodox action was needed.

  He closed his eyes and willed his mind to Proust’s place of nothingness, which was where he went every time a pin punctured his skin. When his mental landscape was clear and he heard no sound—not the shouting of the roustabouts, not the giggling of the dwarf lovers next door, not the clang! clang! clang! of small motors and large egos—he imagined the bad man’s giant feet and how difficult it was to traverse the earth’s surface with such large appendages; he watched the spastic feet grow larger, more grotesque, saw how the man simply could not remain upright given the enormity of his problem. He watched the man go down, face first, in the carnival sawdust.

  When Happy, the Teensy Human Pincushion, opened his eyes, the bad man was trying to scramble back to his giant feet. The woman he’d been chasing was nowhere to be seen.

  Clarissa knew where she would make her last stand: the fire tower. Iggy was afraid of heights. She wasn’t. Having not run this fast and this long since she was fifteen was taking its toll, but she figured Iggy—who was probably also shoeless—wasn’t faring much better. As for the carnies, she wasn’t focused on them. All she wanted to do was survive, and in desperation decided the fire tower was her ticket.

  She reached the base of the huge monolith and gazed upward. Its zigzag superstructure of steel stairs piercing the sky reminded her of an Escher nightmare. She looked at her wounded hand; the bleeding had nearly stopped. She glanced over her shoulder, remembering Adams saying that none of us were going in a straight line, and found his observation particularly prescient given her predicament. She saw Iggy round the corner of the corn dog stand. He yelled as if possessed by the literary ghost of Stanley Kowalski, “Clarissaaaaa!”

  Clarissa. Clarissa. That was her cue. She ascended the tower, moving as quickly as she dared. But her left foot was bleeding, her skull was cracked, and the steel was wet. Twenty feet up and out of breath, she slipped and fell, hit her mouth, and split open what remained of her lip. She gripped the railing and, careful not to look at the ground, pulled herself to her feet. The ovarian shadow women, sensing catastrophe was at hand, yelled, “Faster! You have no choice!” And she moved on.

  The higher she climbed, the closer he got, just like that freaking nightmare serpent. She was no match for him, no match. What had happened to his fear? Finally, when she could not climb one step more, when the ovarian shadow women were too exhausted to offer a single word of advice, much less encouragement, Clarissa thought, Holy crap, I haven’t even finished my book; my agent is going to kill me.

  She managed two additional steps and then felt his hands on her ankles, legs, shoulders. He grabbed her by her arms and began shaking her. “You stupid little bitch!” “I do not want to die,” she said, tears falling.

  “I am not my father’s son. His sins are not mine. Say it!”

  Clarissa feared that her skeleton was coming unhinged one bone, one joint, one tendon and ligament at a time. As he shook her, she felt as though she had no choice but to measure the long distance from whence she’d come. She forced herself to look past her husband and to the earth below. People were gathering (they seemed even smaller from this great height), running and shouting, pointing and jostling. She made out what appeared to be a giant bug with human legs—very short legs—wobbling in one direction, then another. She and her husband were, evidently, creating a great commotion.

  Her ovarian shadow women, terrified and speechless, were being jostled so violently, they felt as if they had been tossed into Satan’s demonic washing machine.

  “Say it!” he yelled, shaking her one final, violent time.

  Clarissa looked at Iggy—the wound she had delivered to his cheek was gaping and oozing—and she knew the time for half-truths and lies was long past. “You are your father’s son. We all carry the burdens of our ancestors’ sins. But some of us try to rectify and rise above. You, you, you secretly wallow.”

  The hand she saw coming at her was huge—his hand—and this time she was more than willing to take it. And survive it. She heard her eardrum pop as he made contact.

  “Let me go!” she screamed, but she did not hear the words. She tried to wrench out of his grip, and as she did she saw him—her hearing gone—mouth, “I love you. Don’t do this, Clarissa.”

  She pulled away and ascended three more steps before she tripped and—with her equilibrium gone thanks to her busted eardrum—began her long fall over the edge of the tower rail.

  Iggy shouted, “No!” and he reached out to her. She did not reach back. If she was going to die, she decided, it would be an independent act. He would not divert or delay the inevitable. She damn sure wasn’t going to allow him to save her.

  This is not to say she wanted to die. Over the past twenty-four hours, in fact, she had figured out that she very much wanted to live.

  As she tumbled, weightless, time—as it is rumored to do—slowed to a glacial crawl. The wind whipped her hair, and she wondered where in this entire big world her father was and if he ever thought of her. Did he know she existed? Did he, perchance, stop by a bookstore and, simply out of paternal instinct, find her books? Was his soul stirred at all by guilt? Pride? Wonder? She saw her mother as a young woman, fresh and alive with desire for her father, and decided—just decided—that her mother had indeed loved her. Loved her with her whole heart. She saw herself as a little girl: Clarissa in the trailer, standing before the cracked mirror, pushing on those teeth, those hideous teeth. From her high, failing perch, Clarissa saw that the little girl was beautiful—just as Adams had insisted—radiant in full measure, deserving, like any other child, to be cherished. As she approached the earth and what she was sure would be her death, Clarissa, for the first time in her life, was filled with love for that little girl. And she fully understood—deep in the inner sanctum of her conscience—that the child never deserved to be beaten or called useless or stupid or ugly or even Bucky. As she saw the end near, Clarissa knew that all those things that happened to her as a child were not of her own making. And she knew that Iggy probably did love her but that he was a broken man, and she hoped he would rot in jail and she did not experience one moment of guilt over said hope. As she followed the ea
rth’s curvature, which took her slightly away from the zigzagging fire tower, she said to herself, in the quietude of her mind, I love myself. I love myself. I love myself. And of all the things that came to her—gifts of the dying—she knew one final thing: She did not want the landing to hurt.

  She decided she wouldn’t feel it—that her conscious self would end in tandem with the awful thud, and though she had lived a vicarious life through her characters and her superhero meanderings, the last few moments of her life would be spent fully aware. So, with her ovarian shadow women having retreated into the dim glow of her subconscious, Clarissa opened her eyes and her arms and her legs, and she felt the wind blow over the length and breadth of her. She looked at the sky—the astonishing blue sky—and the trees at the edge of the green. She was on her back, wishing for one more glimpse of the moon, when she hit. And all the air left her.

  While Clarissa and Iggy fought on the tower, Ulysses jumped into the mouth of the cannon. Inside, it was warm and dark, and he could not crawl out because he could not get a foothold on its smooth, interior surface. He whimpered and barked for a time, but with all the excitement surrounding the presumed lovers’ spat, no one heard him. So he curled up, nestled in the cannon’s movable cylinder, ignorant as to the effects of compressed air, and took a nap.

  Nicolai, unimpressed with the fighting couple, never suspecting the deadly turn the woman’s run up the tower would take, made his way back through the gawking crowd. Being shot out of a cannon was a serious endeavor. He cleaned, and shined, and double-checked the cannon’s integrity before each show. He also, always, because he was a superstitious man, tested the compressor.

  People thought that human cannonballs were launched by gunpowder. Nonsense. Human cannonballs did not possess death wishes, and most of them, Nicolai knew from experience, were smarter than the average carnival act. So the boom and poof, supplied by firecrackers, not gunpowder, was just for show. What propelled him through the barrel and catapulted him through the sky was nothing more than pressurized air. A cylinder—a contraption that slid up and down the cannon’s barrel—was, in essence, a human bullet casing. Nicolai would enter the cylinder, and his apprentice, a young wannabe from Wichita named Corey Smith, would flip the switch, blasting the barrel with one hundred pounds per square inch of the stuff we breathe. The cylinder never left the barrel. The human bullet always did.

  Finding the right amount of pressure had been a scary process of trial and error. Full-size human cannonballs relied on at least 150 pounds per square inch to fling them to the sweet spot. But that would send a sixty-pound man into the next county. This cannonball business was all about physics—mass, trajectory, speed, that sort of thing. So Nicolai consulted Happy, the guy with the pincushion act, because he was the smartest person he knew.

  Happy’s initial calculations proved a little off, and Nicolai overshot the giant landing pad of an air mattress by a good twenty feet. The only thing that saved him? The big top tent. He hit and rolled and almost shit himself, but the canvas held.

  The last thing Nicolai wanted, besides making a bad landing, which of course was how human cannonballs died, was for the compressor to fail as the drumroll hit its clichéd but required fever-pitch furl. So it was not superstition alone that led him, before every show, to test the compressor and visualize the flight: he in his fabulous silver suit and the safe landing on the air mattress (its location meticulously calculated) that was emblazoned with the likeness of himself and Money Dog.

  Nicolai turned on the compressor and listened as the machine hummed to life. He loved the sound of the cylinder blasting—as if a hollow rocket ship—up the cannon’s barrel. Everything occurred just as it was supposed to. He heard both the propulsion and the sudden halt of the cylinder. And then something truly terrible happened.

  Out of the mouth of the cannon came Money Dog, blasting through the air, a look of profound surprise on his little doggy face.

  Stunned, but a man of action, Nicholai made the sign of the cross and ran through the crowd of dwarfs who were now watching, horrified, both dog and woman fly through the early morning sky.

  Ulysses, it cannot be denied, was shocked when the blast came. But once he realized what had happened, that he was fulfilling his life’s desire, he nearly enjoyed himself. He liked the way the wind and all the crazy scents—cooking oil and sugar and cookies and crotches and blood—rushed through him as he catapulted, ass over end. He managed to spy the air mattress (for some reason it had been moved farther out and rested nearly at the base of the fire tower), and he—being a dog—instinctively understood the trajectory.

  But he had to stabilize, had to quit the ass-over-end thing. He did not witness his mother get run over by a lousy excuse for a human being, he did not drink swamp water for months on end while he wandered motherless through the world, he did not survive infected buckshot wounds (he never again bothered with that cat food on the back stoop of that stupid cat lover’s porch), he did not escape that fucking rattlesnake, to die now, especially since he was fulfilling one of his deepest desires.

  Becoming truly mighty, he stretched his foxlike tail long and even, and used it like a rudder, taming the turbulent air. As he flew, a furry arrow, his eyes bright, he knew with a certainty only dogs have that he was going to make it.

  On June 22, 2006, at 6:33 a.m. in a place called Hope, Florida, a convergence of events took place that the locals and religious nuts would—for the rest of their lives—call a miracle.

  Clarissa Burden, a middle-aged woman of faint confidence, had been pushed or jumped or perhaps she slipped (each witness had his or her own version) from the Hope fire tower. Her husband, an Afrikaner, was arrested. No one liked him, and his fate, in large part, would be left to the kindness of strangers.

  What no one could have known was that Clarissa Burden, as she fell the fifty-two feet to her destiny, discovered during that long fall that she was a woman of immense potential, that she wasn’t ready to die, that she had many books left to write, that she wasn’t ugly or stupid or any of those other cruel things her mother and husband had accused her of, that she desired many more friends and at least three more lovers. She even discovered the secret to her mother’s blackberry cobbler (this was one of the finest things about her mother, that cobbler), and as Clarissa fell, she cried over the prospect of possibly never knowing if she was right: It wasn’t a cobbler at all, but a blackberry-and-dumpling divination.

  No, the folks watching could not have known what was in Clarissa’s mind as she fell. But here is why they whispered and shouted of miracles. Clarissa Burden landed nearly dead center on the World’s Smallest Human Cannonball’s air mattress—the very same mattress that required thirteen roustabouts to set it in place. The landing knocked the wind out of her, but her body broke the fall of the miniature chow chow, who—had the mattress not been moved in a peripatetic attempt to save Clarissa—would have overshot it and surely perished. And that was how he acquired among the carnies yet another moniker: Lucky Dog.

  Out of either great appreciation or a sense of civic duty—Clarissa would never be sure which—the chow chow licked her face, brought the warmth back to her skin with his silky tongue; indeed, he revived her.

  As Clarissa rose to full awareness, she knew she would never let this little dog go; he was hers now. And one other happy thing happened as she lay there, oxygen and freedom vanquishing the fuzz lining the interior pathways of her brain: All the letters of the alphabet lined up in a sacred order. Finally, after all these months, they made sense.

  Lying on her back, the earth’s good air slowly filling her lungs, the dog cleansing her wounds, Clarissa imagined the beginning of her long-sought novel. With her fingers moving along the keyboard of the sky, she remembered:

  On June 21, 2006, at seven a.m. in a malarial crossroads named Hope, Florida, the thermometer old Mrs. Hickok had nailed to the WELCOME TO HOPE sign fifteen years prior read ninety-two degrees. It would get a lot hotter that day, and there was plenty of
time for it to do so, this being the summer solstice. But Chase Baxter, a thirty-five-year-old woman who’d moved to Hope six months prior with her husband of seven years, trapped as she was in a haze of insecurities and self-doubt, was peculiarly unfazed by summer’s pall. Indeed, as she gazed out the kitchen window into her backyard, she felt an undoing coming on that was totally unrelated to the heat. It was as if her brain stem, corpuscles, gallbladder, nail cuticles, the mole on her left shoulder, the scar on her knobby shin, the tender corpus of her womb—the whole shebang—were about to surrender. But to what, she did not know.

  Acknowledgments

  Using the creative license fiction affords, I rearranged the north Florida map, creating, among other things, a county that does not exist. Whenever the book was served by doing so, I moved highways and landmarks.

  Writing is a courageous act committed by obsessed souls. Joy Harris and Deb Futter saw me through the process with wit, tenacity, and deeply appreciated honesty. My husband, Bill Hinson, brought me hot tea, rubbed my feet, tended my fears, checked facts, provided data, and never doubted. Michael McNally rebuilt my foundation metaphorically and otherwise. Rane Arroyo perceived in the first fifty pages the final three hundred. Mike and Zilpha Underwood offered sage and timely advice in addition to good cheer. Jerry Wayne Duncan reinforced my research and suggested roads not traveled. Baby Jalen taught me through the eyes of a child what pure joy truly is, inspiring Heart Archer to rise through the muse’s murky depths. Olga-Villada Barnes’s transcendent love for her husband, Al, even in his passing, helped shape her namesake’s passion. Peter Ripley provided ballast, insight, and Mexican food that fueled the journey. Dianne Choie, Adam Reed, and Sarah Twombly meticulously guided me through the must-do’s. My writing students stirred up tiny dust devils full of miracles. Deidre, Phil, and Sean were there whenever I needed to feel solid earth beneath my feet. To all these people and their many gifts, and because they helped Clarissa fly, I am forever grateful.