Harper wants to say no—his tongue presses to the back of his teeth because he means to say it, but the word evaporates under the heat of the flames, and is washed away entirely when he drinks from the goblet of crimson wine making the rounds. The outside world is so distant, it may as well not exist; in this place, there is the fire and there is the music. Harper gives himself up to both, because this way lies the person he remembers, the woman who moves without hesitation or doubt, the woman who is wiser than he will ever be.
In the old stories it was said that no fire could burn a maenad, that no iron weapon could injure them. Harper walks through the crackling fire, flames licking his legs and chest, and emerges unburnt. He reaches the other side of the flames naked and steaming, feeling cleansed and whole. Women drape him in linens of ruby and gilt that smell of cloves. A snake twines around his waist, and fennel flowers sprinkle his hair.
Harper falls to his knees in the dirt, gasping for breath though he’s breathing better than he has in years. His body responds to this world in a way he has tried to forget; these women are him; he is these women. His fingers claw at the dirt as he tries to stand and milk bubbles up from the ground under his touch. It floods the ground, surging around the dancers’ feet, until they’re stomping in it, celebratory, milky and muddy both.
The night is eternal and leopards prowl the shadows. At some point, Harper sleeps, but it does not feel like rest, for the music thrums through his body the entire time. He is aware of the way his heart matches the rhythm of the drum, aware of the way Delilah’s fingers on his ankle match the twitter of a flute. It isn’t sex, though it could be, the twining of a thousand bodies in this place; it’s something deeper, more primal. It is a thousand bodies in synchronous motion, each knowing the impetus of the other, each understanding there is no deceleration—there is only acceleration in an opposite direction, because the dance does not stop. If they were birds, they would be a murmuration in the sky, a thousand separate pieces moving as one.
It is early when he returns home—or maybe late, Harper isn’t sure. He sits on the porch steps, watching the sun begin to color the sky, and feels as though he has never truly seen the colors before this moment. He knows their names, can list them as gold and peach and sienna in the clouded shadows, but they reach beyond their names today. They evoke the colors of the fire that burned him clean, the fire that made him whole.
The linens haven’t evaporated, nor the chains of gold at his neck, nor the hoops of silver in his ears. He is not Cinderella, whose finery evaporates at midnight. He wears rings that belong to other dancers, and is streaked with soot and dirt, makeup and perfume, when Sam finds him still sitting on the porch steps. Harper thinks to explain, but the words stick in his throat. Sam knows, surely Sam knows, because he left the marmalade, all those jars nestled in the cupboard, a waiting invitation. It’s like a fist in Harper’s throat. He can’t speak.
Sam kisses Harper before Harper can muster anything, licking soot and lipstick from him in equal measure. Sam’s teeth catch Harper’s lower lip and it is as primal, if not more so, than the night before. Something (the bees that would turn the air to confetti, he thinks) inside Harper responds to Sam the way he did to the fire, to the dancing. He knows Sam’s tongue would wash him clean like the fire did, hot but not burning, until his true self was exposed.
But this idea is as revolting as it is compelling. The longing inside Harper nauseates him, and he pushes Sam away, staggering down the porch steps. He tries to catch a breath and waves Sam away when Sam would follow, but Sam doesn’t listen. Sam lunges for him, enclosing Harper’s wrist in his iron hold. Harper tries to wrench away, but Sam will not let go, and so Harper comes to face him again. Their eyes are furious, breaths hard.
“Don’t you know,” Sam says, his voice rough and breaking. “It’s you. It doesn’t matter what the world sees—it’s you as you are that compels me. I would have you however you are.”
It is this that terrifies Harper. Sam’s hand eases just a bit and Harper takes the opening; he pulls himself free and steps back, earrings and chains surrounding him with their own music. He sounds like bells, brief church bells ringing over clear hills. And Sam—oh, Sam. Sam looks as though he’s been punched, his beautiful face smeared with tears. Once, there would have been makeup running down his cheeks, too. How they have changed, Harper thinks. And yet, how they have not.
Who decides normal?
Harper doesn’t know, but decides to leave the house just as he always does, through the back door and toward the path cut through the field where, in the summer, the bees hold court. Their boxes stand quiet now and it is still but for the leaves dropping when the air moves through. Harper feels as hollow as the old log he sits on, dry on the outside, but filled with dark, rotting life even so. He sets his pack near his foot and does not look at it; he stares toward the ridge of the hill, beyond which sits the city and now the circus. One does not know who he truly is; the other knows and would revel in it the way he longs to.
He means to leave entirely, to run as he has always run, but finds himself reaching for his pack. It holds six and a half jars of marmalade and the sun glints off the small rounded jars as he opens the flap. Each jar and lid are the same and he thinks that surely by now time will have made the oldest of them inedible, but he opens one at random, and it smells as sweet as the newest Sam brought him.
The marmalade is firm under his fingers, but he scoops out a taste, and then another. He does not know how it is possible, but the marmalade carries him backward in time, and he’s standing at his mother’s bathroom vanity. The bathroom is tiled in pink and black, a realm his father has never entered. Harper doesn’t know if that’s a rule and doesn’t care. His mother’s coffee and toast sit nearby and he takes a big bite of the marmalade slathered toast before looking over her cosmetics.
Once he’s painted his face on, Harper exhales. He doesn’t know what it is about the face that looks at him from the mirror, but it is better. It is more ... him.
Barefoot, he walks to his father’s den, a room that sits dark amid the rest of the house. Usually, Harper only comes in here when he’s in trouble, but when he’s in trouble, it’s the vast shelves of vinyl albums that cover the far wall which interest him. He has heard the music only through the closed den door; only through the floorboards, for his bedroom sits above the den.
Barefoot, Harper crosses the wood floor and stands before the shelves, and tells himself it is not him who is touching the spines of the albums with his carefully painted nails. It is not his mouth pursing in delight, but someone else’s. Here, he is not Timothy Spencer.
His fingers rake over the albums and he thinks about a harp, about a harper, and this is what he calls himself from this moment on. It is Harper who slides a pristine album free, its paper liner whispering as the vinyl disk comes free. It is Harper who sets the needle into the groove, and Harper who loses himself in the music, who loses himself to the point his mother finds him passed out on the den floor that afternoon, the record skipping in its final track.
Oh, if your father knew ...
His mother’s whisper is a soft warning of all there is to hide. Harper knows it’s not the trespass she worries about, but everything else. The lipstick, the nail polish, the sweet marmalade in his mouth. She helps Harper clean up, until all appears as it should be, vinyl and son never disturbed. But all through dinner, Harper thinks about the music, and the way it filled his bones; the way he allowed it to carry him far away from the life he knows and into another. A life where bodies gave themselves up to the dance, a life where the dance was all. He knew that life once; he’s sure of it.
His father died before he could know any of it, albums sold before Harper could find the voice to say he wanted them. As Harper walks back to the house, the day fading into evening already, he wonders if that’s part of the reason he’s chased the music so long—to reclaim what he let slip away through silence and inaction. It is this thought that grips him as he comes i
nto the kitchen where Sam sits at the table.
Harper sets his pack beside the door and crosses the room to Sam, where he kneels and folds Sam’s hands into his own. Sam draws in a breath and does not exhale.
“I would like to go to the circus,” Harper says. And in the silence that follows adds, “With you.”
Harper and Sam walk through the circus gates together, the round bulb lights shining like stars that have come down from the heavens, close enough to touch. Within Harper’s fingers, they crackle. The air itself is electric and the barker’s welcome feels like a homecoming, though Harper never called this place home, not really. Not yet.
Under the circus lights, Harper watches as Sam is transformed; as the quiet mask he wore for the outside world is stripped away, and he becomes what he has always been, a sharp-cheeked libertine in a long dark coat, ready to carry Harper into the night. Harper can see himself in Sam’s eyes, can see the way he has changed. No longer Timothy Spencer, but well and truly Harper who wears ribbons in his hair, and a long flowing gown that is the color of a solstice midnight sky.
Sam takes Harper’s hands and kisses them and—
Harper wants to go slow, but cannot. He lassoes his love’s libertine spirit and pulls Sam into the circus depths, into the mounting frenzy of the maenad camp within. In the bonfire-blurred air, he sees the woman who makes the marmalade, and watches her dance among the maenads, though she is not one of them. Harper does not yet know what she is, but her skin shimmers with a thousand thousand stories she has yet to tell. Stories that are not her own, stories her sisters have woven and she has cut when they are at their end. The way she cuts citrus rinds. He feels his life sliding through the hands of her and her sisters, as if he, too, is being peeled. He can see in her the end of every thing and it is as compelling as it is terrifying.
He spins away from her still face, as if he can stop the march of time. With Sam in his arms, and the dirt between his toes, the fire blinding him to all else, he thinks perhaps he can. There is only the dance, only the weight of Sam against him as they orbit the fire.
Every season, the circus comes. The train winds its way across the land, into and out of lives as it will, disregarding every clock and calendar, every mountain and every ocean. The circus goes where it will.
Every season, Sam buys one jar of marmalade—sometimes lemon and sometimes orange—and brings it to Harper. They take turns devouring it within the circus train car they share. With fingers and spoons, they eat until the jar is empty. Until they have remembered what it is to live, what it is to truly be alive.
Inland Territory, Stray Italian Greyhound
The end of the world
At the end of all things, there remains this: the battered circus train moving through a smudged charcoal world. This train—those who know the train best call her she, her, Lisbeth—serpentine and sure, knows that at the end of these rails—even if broken—there will be something, someone, somewhere. The train says so.
High above in the clouded sky that is never broken with sunlight, Gabrielle circles. She is a woman, she is a brown bat, she is both things at once. She once could not fly, only gliding where the air would take her, but now she has made lovers of the wind, the ragged clouds. In the remains of this ruined world, her small and once-broken body gleams amber, beautiful and strange, like and unlike every other creature on the train below.
The train crossed low tracks just that morning, tracks submerged in salt waters that were thick with algae bloom; the train said it could be done—the train did not lie, for the silver sisters who knew metal better than any threaded their fingers beneath the toxic waters, to heat the tracks to burn the algae and despite the stench (oh, they had smelled worse), the train plowed through. The water fanned out, gray with the dead, blue with sorrow, edged in foam that tries to be white.
More waters now and Gabrielle circles down and down, plunging through clouds the way she loves best: headfirst, eyes wide. She bullets downward, red tide spilling over the track they follow. Within the waters stands a dog, a skeletal greyhound who is as thin as ribs and as gray as hope. The dog stands up to her bony knees in the filth and shakes, small ripples moving ever outward from the bones. Gabrielle touches down on the roof of the still train and while others clear the red tide, she watches only this dog. She clicks her tongue and those proud ears perk forward.
“Dogness,” she says, her own voice gone strange to her in this wet air.
The dog does not move, so Gabrielle does. She falls with grace from the roof, wings unfurled to slow her toes when they touch and break the water’s surface. The dog steps backward, as if they are dancing, and Gabrielle approaches slowly, wings tucked, not daring, not hoping, until the dog bends her head, dips her cold and shaking skull into Gabrielle’s cold and shaking hand.
And so onto the train comes the dog—the dog who is called Drowned, who is called Lake and Tremble, who is called a thing Gabrielle never dared hope for (Future, Running, Reaching), but the train always knew—there would be something here, a someone, a somewhere.
So onward they go, where track and train lead, at the end of all things, through a smudged charcoal world.
* * *
THE END
Acknowledgments
In the late 1990s, I spent a lot of time writing in online RPGs, many of them bulletin board-based, or even email-based. Essentially, we were writing short stories that just lasted for a year or longer. We built worlds. We made maps. We developed characters I remember to this day. We made mix tapes. We drew art. We wrote, and we wrote, and we wrote.
These friends would inspire me to try new things with my writing—I knew nothing, had published nothing, but I wanted to publish very much. Every segment of story that was posted made me wonder how I could do that thing in my own fiction. And then, everything changed.
Someone new joined a game we had going, and added a layer that we absolutely had never had before. Grit, oil, voice. Reading posts from this player was astonishing, because I’d never been drawn into a story quite this way before. Prior to his arrival, our characters absolutely occupied all the posh uptown spaces we knew we’d never enter; this new player introduced gritty downtown characters who transformed the game and challenged my writing.
I wrote “Vanishing Act” as a challenge to myself, and a tribute to that new player—to he who became a friend (and later introduced me to Cowboy Bebop, which was its own influence!). Jackson’s Unreal Circus and Mobile Marmalade would not exist without Jay Knioum, who brought his A-game and dared me to bring mine. Neither would this universe exist without Ellen Datlow, who read “Vanishing Act” and bought it for SciFiction. Selling the story gave me the courage to write more stories.
Editor Scott H. Andrews of Beneath Ceaseless Skies is also to blame—my circus stories seem to have found a natural home in his magazine. A.C. Wise must also be acknowledged, for she has been a tireless supporter of this world and its adventures for years. Writing can be so solitary, and knowing that someone wants to read the next story is huge.
Editors Jason Sizemore and Lesley Conner also harbor some share of the blame, because when I finally pushed myself to write Jackson’s origin story (The Kraken Sea), they had the audacity to publish it. And now here they are, publishing a collection!
My travelling circus stories have come to be vastly important to me. Much as I wanted to pay tribute to a friend’s use of voice in the first story, other stories came to be small tributes to other friends, to loves, and losses, things I wished I had said, and things I wish I could do. These stories are tiny glimpses of things readers may never fully understand, but they are tiny glimpses into my heart.
* * *
E. Catherine Tobler
March 2020, Colorado
About the Author
E. Catherine Tobler has never run away with the circus, but there’s still time. Among others, her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Apex Magazine. She edited the World Fantasy and Hugo-finalist Shimmer Maga
zine, and co-edited the World Fantasy Award finalist anthology, Sword & Sonnet. You can find her website at www.ecatherine.com.
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