The Circus Life

The scent of stale popcorn and the sound of cheers roar from right behind the curtain. “You’re on in five!” Luther comes rushing into the dressing room and skids to a halt right behind me. He leans down to see me in the mirror and smiles, “Knock em dead”

A grin splits my face as I push the seat towards him and twirl around, “I always do.”

Disassociating from everything around me, I stare at the performer in her tight purple sequin unitard and a top hat staring right back at me in the mirror. With a huff I exhale and shrug my shoulders back, “Show time”.

The red curtain falls back and the crowd cheers and screams as I sashay my way to the spotlight that nearly blinds me. Standing in the light, standing in the veil shielding me from reality, I wave to the crowd. On this stage I am not Asterin Witherfeld, I am Madame Madness. Behind me there are the trapeze artists and the contortionists ready to perform like toys the moment I pull their string. No need to look back, I know they’re there. “Are. You. Ready?” I enunciate every word as the crowd booms at my roar. With a flick of my wrist the stage is on fire. Hoops come swinging down from the ceiling while the floor opens up and lions pounce out. Effortlessly, I grab onto a swinging hoop with a single arm and it takes me sailing towards the left side of the audience. All of the wide eyed witnesses raise their arms in awe trying desperately to touch my boot as I wink and plaster a show stopping grin on my caked up face. The hoop twists and I twirl in midair before twisting and climbing into the hoop to sit in the middle. I swing out my legs and Ace -Or the Fire Lord as the audience knows him- is there to grab my ankles and he swirls me around soaring right above the stage. The crowd hollers beneath us. They stare right at me and smile. Every. Single. Face. Yet, no one sees me. They see Madame Madness, the spectacle, the performer. I am no more than a circus puppet.

“Eyes on me” Ace murmurs through a wide toothy grin. “They don’t even know you’re real.”

He’s right. To them I am a source of entertainment, a dazzling mess they paid to watch. They don’t even know a heart beats in my chest and it’s not even really their fault. My eyes fall to the little nook right at the corner of the stage. The audience can’t see him, but from way up here I can. Reis stands in the shadows, his attention swivels from the performers to the audience’s reactions. Any second now, he’s going to step up onto the stage and they’ll see him as a real person. The veil on the stage only hides us, not him. He is the Ringmaster. He is seen as a legend and a human while we are merely figures in his explosive background. He made it that way. My skin burns at the sight of him and I’m not quite sure if it’s because of the fire spouting two feet away from me or the anger bubbling underneath my skin. The veil he puts up on the stage, the one we can never quite get past, keeps the audience from seeing us as human beings. We are ventriloquists in their eyes to no fault of their own. Ace swings me faster and faster and I’m circling around watching the faces fly by and just before my vision begins to blur and my mind falls into dizziness, Ace pulls me towards him and I swing up to sit on top of the hoop. I hold on to the rope while he dangles upside down beneath me. We keep spinning and the other acrobats join in around us. Swinging hoops surround us as we spin around staying directly in the center. Contortionists holding arrows on fire with their feet swing inside their hoops while acrobats swing from one end to the other, doing flips and getting “ahs” and “ohs” on their way over. I stand up and let go of the rope, simply standing on the hoop as all eyes fall to me. Ace swings the hoop faster while the lions roar from the bottom of the stage. I lift one foot up, dancing on the top, teasing the audience. That is when Reis finally steps out of the shadows baton in hand and walks over to the front of the stage with his arms outstretched. “Ladies and gentlemen!” His voice booms over the flares and sparks and roars and cheers. “Tonight let’s see how spectacularly mad our little Madame Madness can really be!” Cheers consume my every thought as my ears ring. With that, I launch myself backwards letting myself plummet. The lions roar beneath me, their mouths opening wide as I am in complete free fall. I’m falling and their mouths are getting wider and wider. I’m getting closer and closer…and the stage isn’t closing. Shit. Shit. Shit. My graceful fall breaks and I begin to flail. “HEEEEELP!” The acrobats try swinging down and catching me, but I’m too low. I’m falling and falling and any second I’m going to land in the den of lions and above my screaming all I hear is…applause.

“Asterin…Asterin…wake up.” The slight nudge of my shoulder yanks me to consciousness and I gasp, frantically squirming away from whoever is by me.

“It’s me! It’s me!” Ace raises his hands in a motion of surrender. Nothing is making any sense. What is going on? That’s when I jolt and sit up, am I alive? “What happened to me? What happened to the lions?”

Ace looks at me like I’ve grown two heads. “What lions?”

I stare right back at him the same way. How does he not remember? But then my eyes finally glance past his face to the porcelain sculpted pillars. We’re not in a cargo train, my room is not just a bed and a small mirror, it is an entire sanctuary. I’m not under a cotton blanket, I’m surrounded by white silk. No. I know where I am and my heart plummets. Reis bursts through the door. “You’re awake!” He strides to my side and gently sits down next to me. “You had us worried.”

I plaster a numb smile on my face. It was all just a dream. I am no performer. Maybe I was invisible to the world, maybe Reis was still there turning me into background noise the moment he entered a space but at least I was living. Swinging in the air, twirling from hoops, dancing between flames, falling down, swinging up, I was alive. Even if no one else saw it. Well…my eyes flicker towards Ace…someone did see me.

Reis is still talking about how worried he was about me, apparently I hit my head at our engagement party, but I’m not listening to a word he’s saying. It was all a dream. My life is just a pastel calendar with soft dresses and parties and Reis. No flashy colors, no loud music, no flares and sparks, and only moments with Ace. No adventure. I guess I didn’t get eaten by lions and got to stay alive, but at least in the circus I got to live.