Rafters

Anna does her makeup in the rafters. She dabs her brush in the creamy white paint, slathering it on in fat globs. Once, back when she hid in her parents’ long shadows, she was given the luxury of a mirror. Now, though, her hands paint her face’s canvas so much the movements become ingrained within her, muscle memory. 

The circus, after all, has no private dressing room. This would be the best she could do. Her reputation had to be kept in pristine condition; they couldn’t know that she was human. It would spoil the act. Its magic.

Below her, the stage shines with a clear black sheen, as it has since the circus' conception. One of the newbies--a tightrope walker--sweeps the floor with a broom. The space is a sacred one, as anyone in the family of Mystique would tell you. And though each night the audience dips through the magnificent flaps of the red-and-white pinstriped tent, the black sheen of the floor is the circus’ signature. Only the veterans would remember that before the tent, there was only the midnight floor, and the Mystique would still do what they had to do to put on a show. 

Anna learned about the floor's history from her parents, the former trapeze artists of the Mystique. The ringleader, Gus, used to stand in the middle of the raised stage and introduce them with a flourish. “Presenting, the Aquaivos Pair in their dance across the sky!” Anna takes her forefinger and dips it into the red paint, then her middle finger in the blue. On instinct, she blends them over her eyelids and on her cheekbones as an accentuated eyeshadow and rogue. 

Even without the mirror, she knows the job isn’t perfect. The paint doesn’t sit right on the cheekbones, the eyeshadow too deep, the paint too thick. 

From the rafters, she can hear Gus reciting his introductions for the upcoming show: “Presenting, the Aquaivos’ spawn in her dance across the sky!”

Once makeup is complete, Anna stretches her shoulders behind her, lolling her head from left to right, right to left. Hooking her feet into the rafters, she stretches her quads by leaning into the bar opposite herself. In the spandex leotard, her ribs dig into the elastic, like a cage trapping her heart. Below, Gus continues his bellows like a trumpet on parade. Anna times her arm swings with the tempo of his cries, one arm then the next then a leg and the next. “Presenting--”

“Thirty minutes!”

People begin filing in, two couples leaning into one another like willow trees. Five children run in with various colors of balloons, chased soon after by parents with cotton candy. The sleek scent of hydrogen peroxide quickly dissipates into the buttery notes of popcorn and sweets, the things that her childhood disallowed during her training. “What’s bad for the body is bad for the mind,” her father would recite like an incantation. 

Sometimes, she would fantasize about candy apples in her sleep. The sweet crunch of the skin between her pearl teeth, saturating below the skin and sliding in sticky smooth streaks along her stomach. Alas, she was a performer, and there are certain sacrifices that she makes for her craft. 

To this day, she’s yet to eat any of the circus delicacies. 

From her place in the rafters, muscle memory guides her hands through the spotlights. During her training, her mother taught her how to work the machinery above the tent. “It’s our job to be the sun,” her mother would say, lifting the spotlight above her head in triumph. Even still, she could never finese the light in place like her mother, but she was getting there. Steadily, she’s understood what her mother meant by becoming the sun.

From her bird’s nest, Anna can see the expanse of the spectacle below her. Crowds line the wooden seats, and through her training, she’s learned the difference between the newcomers and the veterans. There’s the difference between the bob of their heads, the lack of excitement mixed with the dull ache for a lost childhood. Past them, she looks backstage, a pinstripe curtain dividing the audience with the wings. The performers rush to strip their everyday clothes with the stripes and sequins of the stage (many of the performers work day jobs now; an artist’s salary cannot cover the expenses of a lifetime, not anymore).

If they would all just look up, they’d see the purple-sequined beauty that is the pride of the circus. 

If they looked up, she didn’t know whether she would be able to continue. 

Up here is her safe haven, the place that only the Aquaivos could come. She was vulnerable here. To take that away, to blast her secret to the world stage, well…that would be cruel, wouldn’t it? 

They’d see her for the girl that she was, the one she craved for yet never wanted to be again. 

All at once, the pearl lights in the tent cut out, casting the audience in dark. Children squeal, and even the adults wail in their excitement.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” 

The crowd cheers and Anna hooks her fingers into the grooves of the spotlight, swirling it in the way her mother taught her. Not quite perfect, but getting there. In his silhouette of darkness, Gus puffs his chest, flashing his black and white pinstripe. 

“Welcome, my friends, to the spectacle of a lifetime” The spotlights grow closer to his figure in the center of the black floor, exposing a foot, an outstretched hand.

“Welcome,” he bellows, “to the Mystique!”

 A fire sparks, and the show begins.

Fire-spinners, contortionists, trumpets, and drums cover the shiny black floor. Per her training, Anna drags the lights along the circus folk, accentuating their acts or the sequined petticoats of their dresses. It’s magnificent, yes, but merely a taster. A warmup, she knows, for one star. 

Anna rolls her ankles, flexing her toes underneath her. Tonight, like every night, she’s painfully aware of the bright purple sequins on her bodice, the jewels intertwined in her hair. Her painted face. The black sheen of the floor.

The long, long drop to the floor.

She feels the whisper of her father at her nape. “Anna, you will catch yourself. It is what you were born to do.”

She picks at the jewels at her neckline.

“It is what we were born to do.”

The lion tamer bows beneath the spotlight Anna cast on his scarred face. Two years ago, the stagehand forgot to feed the lion before the act began. The tamer paid the price; if anything, it made his facade more dramatic. After that day, Gus gave the man a pay raise and the second-to-last slot in the Mystique's nightly shows.

Now, the ringleader steps into the white light, the grand old smile plastered on his face. In his hands, he holds the trapeze, lowered for his convenient grasp.

“My friends,” he says. “We have seen the impossible tonight. Fire breathers, lion tamers, you have seen the greatest feats tonight ever made by mankind.”

The crowd cheers at that, and Gus bathes in its joyous ring.

“Yet there is still one thing left to be seen.”

At that, he tosses the trapeze into the air, and it rises higher and higher, up into the rafters. In the shadows, even Anna watches in awe.

She roll her ankles again, then again, licking her painted lips. Every artist has their ritual: for Anna, she wriggles each finger, then each toe, then taps each thumb to her forefinger three times, then four. She'd stolen it from her father; she would watched him do it every night before he began his running start. 

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Gus announces with his trumpeting cry. “Presenting, the Aquaivos’ spawn in her dance across the sky!”

Anna leaps as the trapeze rises to her arm's length. For a moment, she stretches in the air, weightless. She’s a rubber band, spineless in the air. Below, the audience finally looks up, letting out an audible gasp.

 Every night, it’s the same reaction, but it feeds a primal instinct within her. In her pristine leotard, studded purple and silver, she yowls into the chamber.

It echoes off the tent’s walls. 

Her parents would disapprove, but it’s a part of her act now. 

She grasps the bar easily, and the audience cheers with a silent relief. Through her training, Anna learned each expression that would leave her audience speechless. Now, she bears her teeth, her body slack of life or movement. She is a corpse on the trapeze, swaying listlessly on the bar. 

She is the spawn of the unnatural, a creature of the circus. 

With a manic grin, Anna lets go of the bar, somersaulting in the air.

A woman below her screams.

Before then, it was her parents, her father on one end of the tent and her mother on the other. They were entrancing together, humanoid yet seamlessly boneless. They were meant for each other in the way they floated, like two lilies on the current of a stream. Every night, Anna would watch them from her place on the rafters, trapped in their hypnotic movement. 

She wondered if that’s how the audience saw her now.

The bar swings back to her, and she catches it again on her way down. Now the audience is silent, fixated on the speck of purple swinging like a pendulum on her trajectory through the air.

This was her parent’s act, swirls and spins like flowers. Every night, they would change it, never pairing any two moves together. Together, they were unstoppable.

Until they weren’t. 

For a second, Anna glances at the floor, her heart in her chest. If she looked closely at the black sheen, one spot gleams duller than all the others. She would know; no matter how hard she mopped the floor, the bloodstains wouldn't come out.

In her next spin, two of her fingers miss the bar, and she falters. Now, it’s not just the woman screaming. White paint trickles in its fat globs down her neck, and she growls again, a sick sound weaving its way through the crowd. She wouldn’t make the mistake her parent did that night. She couldn’t.

It all happens so fast. A distraction, a flicker of light, the clap of thunder in the dark.

A simple cough midflight. 

That was the Aquaivos’ downfall, a cold that Anna’s mother was convinced that she could push through. A sneeze during the final spin. She missed the bar, and she fell, falling, spinning not with the grace of a swirl but rather of a bird without wings. Her other half--the oh so noble husband--tried desperately to save her. In the end, they both collapsed on the black floor, the grace of their flight ending in the sharp edges of a quick and quiet doom.

Anna watched in horror in the rafters. 

Yet, in the next heartbeat, Gus spun the story of their tragic demise. He turned their mistake into the spectacle of their spawn’s birth.

The Aquaivos had the intuition of the trapeze; the ringleader has the intuition of showmanship.

The next night, Anna began her first performance. She’s done it ever since.

The Aquaivos’ spawn completes her final spin in the air, catching the bar and threading her legs through the trapeze. Hands-free, she drapes herself down like a chandelier in the air, blood rushing red into her skull and tinting the audience red. At once, the cheers become deafening, a cacophony of whistles whose chants scream loud and clear.

“Long live Aquaivos, long live Aquaivos!”

Tears stain Anna’s eyes, but she bites them down in one last yowl. A sound of anger and desperation, longing and loss. To the audience, her act delights them, a product of their curiosity about her, her legendary bloodline. For a moment, she plays into their suspension of disbelief--she is a creature born of unnatural physical prowess, one whose intuition allows her to fly. 

But then the lights in the tent snap off, and the trapeze guides her back up into the sky. The tears streak her facepaint, but no one can see her up here. Once she takes hold of the rafters, Anna collapses to her stomach, silencing her wails with sweaty palms. Her tears run white with the face paint, but the crowd cheers too loudly to hear her weeping. Sniffling, she brings herself to her feet, gently guiding the spotlight back onto the ringleader of the Mystique’s spectacle.

The show, after all, must go on. 

Gus reappears through the back curtain. He wears a suit of sequins now, blinding and silver in the light. For an instant, his eyes flicker up at her, and the deep sadness in those wells of blue sends a silent shiver through her. He'd seen her slip up. Nothing flies past him.

After Anna’s first performance, Gus climbed up the rafters to see her racked with uncontrollable tears. Together, they’d wept with their feet dangling over the obsidian floor. 

But then his eyes flicker back to the people before him, eyes glassy. He’s the true showman, Anna thinks. Perhaps the only one left in this circus. 

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Gus bellows with his manic grin. “We are the Mystique! Thank you, and goodnight!”