The Mythic Dream

by Dominik Parisien

  Almost without thinking about it, she lifted a foot, set it down, and was standing suddenly outside the chalk, outside the carnival, outside the shell of everything she’d ever known. Aracely gasped. The wind took the sound and made it disappear.

  She took another step. Then she took another step, and another after that, and she was suddenly running across the open field, that thieving wind blowing through her hair, urging her onward. The delicate spring grass bent and broke under her feet, filling the air with the smell of green, growing things, of life beginning and ending in the same careless, carefree step. She didn’t stop. She didn’t slow. She was running—for the first time in her life she was running—through a world that didn’t know her mother’s name, that didn’t know she was the flower of the midway, too precious to pluck, too delicate to—

  The stone that turned under her foot knew nothing of malice, nor of carnivals, nor of runaway midway princesses fleeing gilded cages. It was an accident, nothing more, but it was enough to send Aracely tumbling head over heels down the slope, over and over again, until a strong hand caught her ankle and jerked her to a sudden, bone-jarring halt.

  Aracely lay facedown, panting, trying to reconcile the end of her flight with the way the world had turned itself upside-down and wrongside-up all at the same time. Her chest was tight. Her knees burned, and she knew when she looked at herself, she’d find grass stains and mud and a hundred other proofs of her transgressions.

  “My mother’s going to kill me,” she moaned.

  A voice—a new voice, a strange voice, unfamiliar as a motel room in the light of morning—laughed, and the hand holding her ankle let go. “Maybe I should have let you keep rolling, then. A broken neck isn’t pleasant, but nobody’s mother ever killed them after they were already dead.”

  Aracely stiffened. New voices meant townies, and townies meant danger. She’d listened to the older ladies talking when they didn’t think she was close enough to hear, cigarettes cupped in their hands and secrets hidden in every honeyed syllable. They were her oracles, the grand dames of the carnival, and when she was old enough and wise enough to know everything they knew, she would be allowed to go wherever she wanted. That was how it was, for flowers. They were delicate when they were fresh, but once they’d had time to dry and wither, they were strong. They could perfume the world.

  “It’s all right. I’m not mad at you or nothing. Lots of people fall down in this field.” The voice paused. “Well, I suppose not lots. That would take having lots of people hanging around, and that doesn’t so much happen anymore.”

  Aracely hesitated. Whoever it was didn’t talk like any townie she’d ever met. Carefully, she pushed herself up onto her hands and twisted around to look over her shoulder.

  The girl—woman—girl behind her offered a lopsided smile of greeting, raising one hand in the smallest possible iteration of a wave. “Hi.”

  She was striking. Not beautiful: there wasn’t enough softness to her for beauty. There were girls at the carnival that everyone agreed were beautiful, who could stop traffic when they walked the midway, who could talk townies into anything they wanted. This girl wasn’t one of them. She wasn’t quite a woman yet, either; she had the same softness and smokiness that Aracely had, like she could still decide to go in any number of directions, rather than growing up to be one singular thing.

  Sometimes girls who weren’t beautiful could be handsome, but that wasn’t this girl, with her hair like coal and her eyes like cinders, with the scars of a bad burn pulling the skin of one cheek upward in a permanent, secretive smile. There were men at the carnival who would say that scar had ruined her, and even without hearing them speak aloud, Aracely felt a wave of hot, terrible hatred for them and their judging eyes. They didn’t have the right to judge. They never could.

  “Something wrong?” asked the girl, smile fading.

  Aracely’s hate turned into horror in her belly. She thought—the stranger thought—she thought Aracely was staring at her scars. It was plain as anything.

  It was awful.

  “No,” said Aracely. “I just took a worse tumble than I thought, I guess. I’m sorry. I’m . . .” I’m away from the carnival for the first time in my life, I’m scared, I’m not supposed to be here, I’m never leaving again. “. . . I’m Aracely.”

  “Pretty name,” said the stranger, and offered her hand. The only one she could offer, Aracely realized: her other hand was as burnt as her face, and hung, stiff as an old tree branch, at the end of a motionless arm.

  I want to kiss her scars, Aracely thought, and her ears burned as she took the offered hand and let herself be tugged to her feet.

  “I didn’t choose it; my mama gave it to me,” she said.

  “Still, it suits you,” said the stranger. “I’m Joanna.”

  “That suits you, too.” Aracely realized she was still holding Joanna’s hand and dropped it, cheeks flaring red. It felt as if there wasn’t any blood left for the rest of her body, with the way it was rushing to her face. “I—I mean, you—I mean, do you live around here?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” Joanna jerked her chin, indicating something beyond Aracely. Aracely turned, and there was the house—the big, white, impossible house that had lured her away from the carnival. The mansion in the middle of nowhere, the house that shouldn’t have existed.

  “I came back after the fire,” said Joanna. “I couldn’t think of anyplace I wanted to go. This was home. Didn’t matter if it had gotten a little singed-up and smoky. Same thing happened to me. It didn’t seem right to leave without fixing what we’d lost.”

  There was a story in every sentence, and Aracely knew if she peeled them back, if she looked them straight in the eye, she’d find things she didn’t want to see. Instead, she smoothed the wrinkles from her skirt and sighed.

  “I’m with the carnival that’s setting up over the ridge,” she said. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”

  Joanna raised an eyebrow. “Carnival?” she asked. “I own the land for a mile around here, and this is the first I’m hearing of a carnival.”

  The blood that had been rushing to Aracely’s face drained away, leaving her pale as paper. “I . . . Our frontman was supposed to make sure everything was in order,” she said. “He has the papers.” Or did he? She never left the carnival boundary, not under normal circumstances. How would she know if everything was being done correctly?

  There was never enough money. She knew that. There was never enough money, and the Ferris wheel needed repairing, and half the games were privately owned, they came and went like flowers in the fall, undependable, nothing you could pin a midway on. Her mother had been making concessions on their rent for years, letting them have their spaces for less than she should have, just to be sure of having steady attractions to sell towns on allowing the carnival to stop there. A big, empty field, near a house that had almost burned down . . . it would have seemed like a good place to set up without paying.

  News of disasters travels fast. They could have been states away when the fire happened and still have heard about it, her mother filing the information for a dry spell, a time when an unguarded field would be a necessary thing. News that it had been rebuilt, that someone was living there, well. That wasn’t as interesting. It wouldn’t have traveled nearly as fast.

  “I have to go,” said Aracely.

  “I suppose you do,” said Joanna—and was it Aracely’s imagination, or did the other girl’s face fall, just a little, the expression dampened by her scars? “No one lingers here for long.”

  Aracely wanted to tell her no, no, she wasn’t running away from Joanna; she was running toward the carnival, toward her mother, toward the answers to the uncomfortable questions she was asking herself. She wanted to stay where Joanna was more than almost anything she could think of, wanted to keep looking at this beautiful girl with her tousled hair and her suspicious eyes, wanted to daydream about what it would feel like to run her fingers down both sides of her face at once
, to read the secret stories tangled in her scars. Her throat was dry; her tongue was strangled. All she could do was shake her head, and turn, and flee.

  When she reached the ridge, she looked back.

  Joanna was gone.

  So was the house.

  * * *

  The carnival had continued to unfold while Aracely was running, was tumbling, was falling, although she did not know it yet, into the fringes of a thing that looked very much like love. As she walked along the familiar, ever-changing aisles, lights twinkling on every side, the Ferris wheel turning gently in the distance, she worried.

  To any other girl, it might have seemed strange for a house to be there one moment and gone the next: houses were meant, after all, to be rooted, stationary things. But Aracely had grown up with the carnival. It moved. If it stopped moving, it would die. She hadn’t heard of houses that did the same: that didn’t mean they weren’t out there. Maybe the house had simply wandered off for a little while, and would be back when it felt like it.

  The entrance to her mother’s tent was closed, but the buzzing of the needle had stopped. Aracely tugged it aside and peeked through. “Mama?”

  Daisy looked up from cleaning her needles and smiled. “There’s my girl,” she said. “Everything coming together out there?”

  “Not from anything I’ve done,” said Aracely, stepping inside. “Mama, did we pay to set up here? Do we have permits?”

  “Aracely, what . . .” Daisy stopped mid-sentence, eyes narrowing. “What have you done to your dress?”

  “It’s not nice to answer a question with a question,” said Aracely. “You taught me that.”

  “I also taught you to respect your mother, and not to go getting grass and mud all over your clothes. Where have you been?”

  Aracely lifted her chin, trying to look brave. She wasn’t sure what brave looked like, but she thought she could do it, if she didn’t flinch. “I went running in the grass. It’s beautiful out there, Mama, you wouldn’t believe how—”

  But her mother was on her feet, eyes wide and horrified, cleaning rag and tattoo gun forgotten in her haste to cross the tent and grasp Aracely’s shoulders, fingers digging in until they left paths of pain behind them. “You went outside the carnival?” she asked, and her voice was as shrill as the screams from the roller coaster, the ones that hung in the air like a promise of bigger fears to come. “You left the boundary?”

  “I wasn’t hurt! I met the girl who owns this land, Mama, and she’s beautiful too, she’s not like a townie at all. She lives in the house past the ridge.” The house that wasn’t there. But that was all right, because it would come back. Right? That was probably the real difference between a carnival and a house. Houses had to stay on the same land all the time, planted like roses, while carnivals went wherever they wanted to go, like wildflowers.

  “Did she touch you?” Daisy’s hands grasped tighter, tighter, until Aracely gasped and pulled away, shoulders throbbing.

  “Mama, stop! You’re scaring me!”

  “Answer the question!”

  Aracely took another step back, and did the unthinkable.

  She lied.

  “No, Mama. She didn’t want to get her hands dirty.”

  Lies are meant to be false things that seem believable, but this lie didn’t seem believable to Aracely. She couldn’t imagine Joanna—beautiful Joanna, with her house that is and isn’t there—being afraid of a little mud, especially not when that mud came from land that she already owned.

  Daisy relaxed, and Aracely did the same, knowing her deception had been successful. A pang of pain shot through her heart. She was a bad girl now. She was a girl who could deceive her mother, and not even feel a little bit sorry for it.

  “Good,” said Daisy. “I don’t know what possessed you to leave the carnival, but you must never, never do that again, and even more, you must never, never let an outsider touch you. You’re delicate. People like that, in places like this, they don’t understand how to be kind to delicate things. I won’t have you risking yourself like that. All right?”

  Aracely didn’t answer. Daisy grabbed her again and shook her by the shoulders, seeming to have forgotten her own warning.

  “All right?” she repeated.

  “All right, Mama,” said Aracely.

  This time Daisy let go of her own accord. “Good girl,” she said, voice barely above a whisper. “Good, good girl.”

  Aracely turned and fled the tent, and Daisy did not pursue her.

  * * *

  The sun dipped lower in the sky. Not quite sunset, when the midway would light up like a summer morning and the townies would start rolling in, drawn by the lights and the sound and the promise of something better than their quiet, ordinary homes, but getting closer. Dawn was a distant memory, the moment closer to tomorrow than yesterday.

  Aracely stumbled between the familiar attractions, clutching the front of her gown and trying to swallow the fear that had grown in her breast with every panicked word that dropped from her mother’s lips. Daisy wasn’t supposed to lose her temper. Not with her. Daisy was her mother, her sole protector in a world full of dangerous things, and if Daisy was a danger, too, well . . .

  Aracely didn’t know what she’d do if her mother had somehow become another danger in a world she’d always known was out to do her harm. She was innocent, yes, and she was delicate, but she was both those things because it had been safer than the alternative. If she allowed herself to be innocent and delicate and naïve, her mother would take care of everything, and the dangers of the wider world would never be able to consume her.

  “You look lost.”

  Aracely froze. Charlie emerged from the shadows between two tents, a bandage on his arm and a rolled cigarette in his hand, sweet smoke drifting up to tint the air. He looked at her frankly, assessing her fear. Aracely clutched her gown tighter, the fabric bunching under her fingers.

  “What happened, Aracely?” he asked, and his voice was kind—kinder than her mother’s had been, kinder than she would ever have expected it to be. “Somebody hurt you?”

  Silent, she nodded, unable to make her traitor tongue admit who had done the hurting.

  Charlie sighed, taking a long drag on his cigarette as he considered the mud on her hem and the grass stains on her skirt. When he spoke again, it was to ask, “You go off the grounds?”

  This time, her nod had a sliver of defiance in it. She glared at him, her fingers unclenching from her gown as she silently dared him to say something, anything, against her going wherever she liked.

  Instead, he smiled. “Good girl. You’re almost grown. You have the right to leave if you want to. It’s not right to keep you cooped up. You’re not the first person born to the midway, and I daresay you won’t be the last—the world may be shutting shows like ours down as fast as it can manage, but people keep making babies, and we’ve got a little time yet. That doesn’t mean you have to stay here. You can’t choose the carnival if you’ve never once been outside it.”

  “Mama says I do,” said Aracely.

  “Your mother . . .” Charlie paused, choosing his words as carefully as he could. “Your mother worries about you. That’s all. Mothers always worry about daughters. Yours maybe more than most. But she has her reasons.”

  “What are they?” Aracely narrowed her eyes. “Everyone says she has her reasons, everyone says she’s doing the best she can, but everyone also acts like it’s normal for me to always be in the carnival, even when they come and go as they please. I’ve never even been inside the Walmart!”

  Her last complaint was delivered with such an indignant wail that it was all Charlie could do not to laugh. He sobered quickly enough, regarding her with steady eyes.

  “You know it wasn’t easy, birthing you,” he said. “Your mother thought she’d lost you, a whole bunch of times, both before and after you were outside her belly and looking at the world. If she’s a little protective, you can blame it partially on that.”

  �
��But I didn’t do that,” said Aracely. “It’s not my fault if I was sickly when I was born. I didn’t decide any of that, and it’s not fair to keep holding it against me. I’ve never done anything wrong, not on purpose. I just wanted to see the house.”

  Charlie stilled. Finally, in a soft voice, he asked, “The house?”

  “On the other side of the field. I met the girl who lives there. She didn’t know we were coming. Charlie, did we not pay our rental fees? Are we here when we’re not supposed to be?” Aracely looked at him anxiously. “I don’t want to have to move along when we’ve just gotten everything set up, but if we don’t have permission, I guess that could be what we have to do.”

  “There’s no house there,” said Charlie, voice still soft, like he was afraid that to raise it would be to shatter some thin and impossible peace. “This field . . . the people who owned it all died. The bank owns all the land for almost a mile, and we did all our rental paperwork through them, exactly as we’re meant to do. I don’t know who you met, girl, but there’s no way she lived in a house that doesn’t exist, and there’s no way she gets to say whether or not we’re allowed to linger here.”

  Aracely stared at him, eyes gone wide and heart gone narrow until it felt like it was barely beating at all, like she was on the verge of toppling over. Then she turned and fled, not deeper into the midway, but out, toward the boundary line, toward the vast and formless freedom of the fields behind. Charlie swore and ran in the opposite direction, fleeing toward Daisy’s tent.

  Two figures running, both as fleet as fear can make them, one heading for a secret, the other for a story. See how they run, these children of the carnival sky! The man, with his fresh tattoo still aching on his skin, who remembers rumors, yes, stories that will linger after he is gone, who knows that everything is about to change. The girl, as guarded and sheltered as any hothouse flower, perfectly adapted to the climate of the carnival, where walk things that are neither here nor there, now nor then . . . living nor dead.