The Hunchback and the Circus Camel

In the camel’s old age, he no longer spoke the language of resistance. The thinly woven rope wrapped itself around his leg, able to be broken by a single step. But the camel had been taught to tolerate hopelessness, and so the old man watched as the camel stood motionless, tethered down by much more than the thinly woven rope that wrapped itself around his leg.

The old man had once been a little boy, just as the old camel had once been no taller than a kitchen table. Every year, the boy’s family took him to the circus as it made its round through his small town. There wasn’t much else to do, and the circus was so big a break from the mundane of the town’s everyday operations that it was treated like its only little holiday. The boy screamed when the clowns came near, laughed when they screamed back. He watched the trapeze artists with wonder, begged his mother for the blue tufts of cotton candy that reminded him of truffula tree tops. But when he got to the very end of the circus lineup, the boy always came upon a single camel, chained down by links two times thicker than the width of his arm. 

The baby camel would struggle under the chains, letting out a shriek as he worked his way towards an unknown destination, only to be pulled back before he could make it to the boy with the blue lips and wide eyes who knew the animal’s pain was no act to laugh at. 

“Mommy, what happens when the camel gets super big? How will they find a chain big enough for him?” asked the boy. 

“I’m sure there’s a chain big enough,” his mother replied, like most adults do - with a momentary answer that shuts the door to any further questions. 

The boy’s name was Gabriel; the camel’s name was Dorcas, though the name was just another way to appeal to his human audience. Whenever Gabriel came to see Dorcas, the camel never answered to his name, but to the pull of the chain, the tautness of the ever fastened rope. The camel responded to the rope like Gabriel responded to his name, shouted in stern tones by a mother who knew with dictatorial ease that shouting her son’s name could grab his attention in a heartbeat. 

Soon Gabriel came without his mother, who grew bed ridden from a lung cancer the numerous anti-smoking ads had foreshadowed. He grew older, handsomer, with a solid build and full lips no longer dyed truffula tree blue. He no longer kept an ear open for his mother’s calls, but he watched as the camel still flinched at the pull of the thin chain fastened around its leg. The last time he saw the camel as a child was when he was sixteen, a lanky teenager who only came by obligation to his mother’s tradition. 

When Gabriel’s mother died shortly after his final circus visit, he had every reason to leave the mundane town that held no promise of a future. And so he packed up and moved thirty miles west to downtown, leaving behind nothing but the memories of long days with no rest, the only break being clowns with practiced laughs and poor makeup jobs entertaining people who knew no better. 

Gabriel didn’t return for a long time. He donned the name “Gabe,” finding that it felt less like a mouthful, more like a sigh, dancing on lovers’ tongues and taking up just the right amount of space on gold tinted nameplates that glistened with corporate shine. Overtime, he felt his shoulders bend forward, his back curve like a question mark. Time creased his face, cracked his lips, stained his teeth. He almost wished that, when the day eventually came, he wasn’t the one moved to the corner office, where he could see the expanse of a city he’d felt small enough to fall in the cracks of. He still felt the pull of that mundane town, the call of his mother’s stern voice, routines that tethered him back to a place he’d been so sure to leave. 

He shared this with no one, immersing himself in the distractions the city was meant to provide for a man perpetually in its tourist phase. He didn’t really belong much more than a sightseer, a man in a great big metropolitan circus of fluorescent street lights amongst mismatched cars and people. He danced at night, drank himself to a blind drunk in hopes it might make the streetlights a little warmer and welcoming, explored the places where the lines between city and country were blurred, hoping to find some sort of compromise that would make him feel less like an intruder and more like a friend. But he still felt the same: empty, a disingenuous version of a fantasy character with the facade, but not the confidence, to pull off the life he assumed he’d eventually live. 

As he grew older, back pains and chronic headaches soon kept him from his adventures, and Gabe realized that in his quest he’d forgotten to finish things off by settling down, marrying someone for their promise of stability, creating his own little community whose walls warded off the larger city. He found himself completely alone, a worn out feeling that could no longer be romanticized in his middle age. He couldn’t travel freely, couldn’t hold his potential in the palm of his hands, couldn’t let adults’ promises fuel his idealism, or make him feel comfortable with the excitement that came with uncertainty. He’d found his career - back bending and back aching as it was, and was “successful” by all standards of society. But he was still alone and out-of-place, tethered down with corporate creases and a body broken by work and visions that remained wishes of the boy who still answered to calls for “Gabriel.” 

Wild camels can live to be 40 years old, but captive camels are often dead well before forty, their corpses engraved with rope burns and spotted by bruises from a life lived for the entertainment of others. Dorcas had passed 50 when Gabriel finally saw him for the first time in forty-five years. Gabriel’s slouch had turned nearly hunchback, surpassing human standards to almost appear cartoonish. He hadn’t originally meant to come back to the town. He’d wanted on some whim to see the circus, which only came to the town and skipped the city itself in a mocking little role reversal of the two. He had nothing better to spend his money on - no partner to treat for coffee, no kids to pay for college educations or grandkids to pay for birthday presents. And so here he was, right in front of a camel two times taller than him, held back by a rope no thicker than the width of his thumb. 

The camel stared at Gabriel through his one good eye, the other one home to cataracts that prevented Dorcas from being able to see at all through it. 

“You’re bigger now huh? And they still keep you in the back here, just to stand like a statue for anyone interested?” Gabriel talked to the camel like an old friend, as if they were grabbing coffee and catching up after having gone their separate ways almost half a century earlier.  

“Rope burns huh? Yeah, and they don’t give you a single break even though you’ve served them through and through.”

Instead of growing larger and stronger, the chain became smaller, turning from links to interwoven strands of rope. The chains were no longer a reality, but the rope remained a reminder of reality, a constant whispering threat of what chains could feel like.

An eavesdropping mother ushered her son away, glancing skeptically at the old hunchback babbling to the giant camel. She’d at first thought it was an act, the man part of the circus himself. Maybe he was some sort of animal whisperer. But he was just plain out of his mind, lost in his own delusioned world. 

“Sometimes, sometimes I just think maybe one step is all it would take. One move and you’ve broken the rope. But I’ve tried that a million times in small ways, but maybe I’ve just been doing it the wrong way, who knows. You never liked the name Dorcas either really? You never answered to it huh? I wish you could tell me what you’d really like to be called. No variation of that? Fair enough, Gabe wasn’t a big enough change for me either to be honest.” The man was mumbling now at the camel, the camel staring solemnly at the man in return. They spoke the same language, layered in only wordless and simple understandings. When the man turned to leave, the camel watched him go, knowing he wouldn’t truly be gone too far from all he knew.