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| JEANNIE SERVAAS/Daily |
Your sister is still showering. The fire eater is wearing a pair of leather pants and white boat shoes. He has no shirt. He has a tattoo of a sun across his chest, except that the tattoo is blue like a butane flame. He frightens you.
"So, uh, you want something to drink, Paul?" You look at him intently as you say this, your arm reached back over your shoulder as if to indicate that the refrigerator and all of its contents are right there within reach.
"No thanks." He smiles, yellowed teeth, cracked lips.
"So, where are you and Rebecca going tonight?"
"The circus."
"Oh, how?" your eyes distant, searching.
"Fun."
"Yeah, fun." You nod, heavy, hard, your chin hitting your shoulder as you turn to call, "Rebecca?"
Silence.
Head craned over your shoulder, not wanting to return without a response, persistent, straining. Silence. You look at the dining room table, the clock on the wall but not the time, the collection of oil lamps that your sister has amassed like a city.
The sound of water running like the rain in the sky, or the rushing roar of a video recording of a flamethrower being played in reverse.
"She must be still in the shower," you grin, sheepishly.
Paul, the Fire Eater, sits up straight on the couch, his tough gasoline-soaked hands clawed around his bulging black knees. He smiles tight lipped, nods, bobs his head staring out across the carpet at the world.
"So, do you like the circus?" It's an obligatory question and your face hates your lips for saying it.
He looks at you as though you are someone else and you have asked if he likes his hands or his feet and then he focuses on your face and he sees your eyebrows maybe, or the way that your jaw is set on edge, and those details tell him who you are. That you are Tom, Rebecca's brother. And then everything is clear to him and he smiles, "Oh, sure, the circus, great, couldn't be better, it's the best life really. Love it."
"Really?" You look at your hands, the soft nails and the clean well-managed cuticles.
"Oh, by far, definitely." He seems disinterested as he looks around the room, over your shoulder, up at the ceiling.
There is a moment like a year. Power lines hum in the air. Sweat on your brow like a wash of battery acid. The sun sets. Green to gray, gray to black, white to a limp blue.
You stare at Paul, the Fire Eater. You don't even realize that you are doing it, counting the bleeding cracks in his lip, imagining what his rough stone hands would be like against your sister's breasts, scraping her skin, the bulge in his leather pants like a bottle rocket, the chipped and gaudy teeth in his head like rotten eggs, the finely chiseled nose and smooth jaw beneath, a sheen of kerosene sweat. He's as sexy as a car crash: no shirt, just broken glass and a blue sun.
"Uh? yeah, Tom," he stammers again, feeling your stare on his chest, "it is really the greatest place in the world. Its every place in the world."
He smiles, laughs, smiles, eases back into the art of talking, rotten eggs for teeth. "For example, I'm bi-sexual" your heart skips a beat and sweat forms on your brow "so being seduced by the bearded lady is like meeting God, right? Rough hands, a tough kiss, stubble, but all woman, you know what I mean?"
He laughs and leans forward. You can smell him.
And you find yourself nodding.
"But that's not really the best of it." He smiles again, warming to you, leaning forward again, swinging his stone hands around, the oily sweat building up on his brow. "The circus is like a church without religion. It's a temple to man where men make miracles: we absolve your sins of lust and desire, we buy your faith with fear, we take your money and you let us blind you. It's where your faith in the mysteries is re-forged." He looks at you, cracks his neck, a string of fire crackers. "What about you? What do you do?"
You flinch, the sudden shift of focus like a short circuit in the air.
"I write."
You look at your hands again, small, soft, pink.
"Oh, then you must know what I mean." He sits back, stretches a feline arm down the length of the couch. A painting of the devil, painted by your great great grandmother, hangs over him. It is all done in fiery red pastel chalk, so that it is both tender and angry like shards of glass frosted pink.
You find that you are on the edge of the seat. You scoot back. You slump down, fall into the plush recliner, look at the ceiling, look at the floor, crack your neck, the popping of flash bulbs.
"Not really, actually. Why do you say that?" You find your voice sounding assured, calm, strange to your ears.
"Well, you know, God was a writer. Gods ARE writers. Circuses are miracles without Gods, writers are Gods without miracles. 'Let there be light' you know? 'In the beginning there was the Word and the Word was God.' You get it? Creation is the Word. Words are real. Not miracles. Miracles are like love. God loves man, but men suck dick. That's a miracle. Creation is real."
He hits the arm of the couch with the palm of his hand to indicate its realness. He smiles at you and pulls a cigarette from behind his ear, where it was hidden by long black hair. "Words are solid. Miracles are like smoke." He lights the cigarette and you don't even think to stop him or say anything. You just watch the little star at the end of the stick hang there above the blue sun: the devil painting, the Morning Star smoking, the blue sun, his bottle rocket penis wrapped in the blackness of night, the stone hands, the leather, the white deck shoes though it is well into October.
Where is Rebecca? you suddenly wonder. You hear the shower still running. Doesn't she know that Paul is here? Should you tell her? Do you want to?
"So, are you a good writer?" He cocks his head, the long star of his cigarette hanging out over the carpet, waiting to fall.
"I write nothing but observations."
"Observations, huh? Are they any good?"
"I live with my sister. She pays for my food and for my paper. What do you think?"
"Yeah man, that's a bad trip. You should join the circus. Circus'll set you free."
You smile at him for the first time that evening. He smiles a return smile unlike all of his grins and smirks up to that point. It's a thrilling smile, like death.
"The circus is about illusions. I tell the truth. People hate the truth." You say, hanging your head.
"Bullshit, people masturbate to the truth. They get off on it. They eat it up. What do you think I do, man? Fire IS truth. Where the hell do you think the burning bush came from? God didn't just eat fire or breath fire, man, he WAS fire."
"I'd miss my sister."
"Shit, yes, so will I. Circus is everywhere, but it's no where, right?
I've got to go somewhere else and meet your sister all over again. But that's just reincarnation sped up, so it's all good. You could have as many sisters as you want, man. Sisters with beards, with dicks, with hair in their ears, with scales, with fur, with muscles like bags of stones, with faces like the moon, with eyes like rubies and lions for children."
His words trail off and he draws deep on the smoke, letting it fill his eyeballs. Then, suddenly, "Let's hear an observation."
"I don't know?"
"Shit you don't." He barks. He lets out a quick laugh, then snaps his fingers. "C'mon, an observation. Tell me something I don't know."
You smile finally and get up, unlock the secretary which is filled with neat stacks of paper. You shuffle through them, some of them type written, most printed from a computer, a handful scrawled in inks of different colors. You glance some titles: The Horn of Africa, Inside the Strongest Man on Earth, Sports Cars and Bullets, Wrecking Ball, Electricity, Penknife, Tom Cruise's Illegitimate Soul?
The fire eater is glancing around, cracking his knuckles, breathing. Madness, fear, fire, you hand a sheet to him at random. He snatches it out of the air and flips it over, then turns it around, squints at it, turns it back the other way.
"'Electricity,'" he sounds out the words, enunciating them clearly, holding each long e sound a breath longer than the other syllables, enjoying the word. "'An observation.'"
You place your hand on the back of the chair and stare at him. His lips quiver as he reads, and he licks them and they are pink for a brief moment, new, then dried and bleeding again.
"'Electricity kills us a little bit more every moment of every day,'" he barks out, eyes fixed to the page. You rock back and forth on your heals, walk behind the chair and lean on the back, stand up, walk back around and sit down, start to stand, sit.
"'We are automatons?'" He looks up at you for a second.
"Yes, robots, integrated circuits." You tap your forehead and he nods, back to the page.
"'A cloud of sound swirling around our heads, fighting for entrance,' I like that. Sound like flies, it's good." He nods to himself. He reads. You sweat.
"Ah! This? this is good shit!" He leaps from the couch like a comet, the page crinkles in his huge fingers. He begins to bellow out your words, right back at you, feedback. "'Bathing in the light of the television, beneath the power lines, our cellular phones, our microwave ovens, our stereos and compact discs, all accomplices in our suicide of the soul. But not just the soul, the very nature of our us-ness. The electric batters down our finely woven skin of thought and memory, weaving its own ionized shroud. And me, writing this on a computer, telling my woes to the barrel of the gun.'"
It's like he's singing, roaring, singing.
You sit on the edge of the seat, slide back, the painting of the devil smiling.
"'Telephones are an extension of the ear but conversation has died. In a world of telephones it is startling to realize that no one is talking!' Fuck yeah!"
He keeps his nose right to the paper, his fingers tearing it slightly as they squeeze it.
He reads. The cigarette hangs out from his fist smoking.
He paces around the room, he smirks and laughs and nods and pauses for a second to take a drag on his cigarette. Then he strides back to the couch, sits down, holds the page back up, looks at it again, sighs.
"Electricity," he says again, nodding.
He sets it down on the coffee table and sits back on the couch, twirling his hair around his index finger.
"Shit, you already are in the circus, you just need to admit it."
You grin. "Your turn, show me yours."
He smiles back at you. He smacks your leg in a conspiratorial way and it is a sharp, sweet sting that runs up your thigh. Then he takes the cigarette out of his mouth. He turns it around and presses the cherry deep into his mouth on the back of his tongue and you hear him gag and the sound of flesh hissing and then the smell fills the room and smoke pours out of his mouth. You bite your lip but his face is calm. He extracts the extinguished cigarette. He lights the remainder and smokes it quickly in two long drags, then, with it still lit and smoldering he tosses it back into his maw and swallows it. Your thigh still tingles, warm, strange.
"There," he says, "that's truth."
He sits back in the chair, blank faced.
"You want that drink now?" You say finally.
At that moment you hear your sister's breathing behind you, you feel the electric pulse of her breasts and her lungs and her eyes, palpable in the air. Paul stands up, puts his hands deep in his pocket, his bottle rocket penis flattening out to a heavy but subdued bump.
"Hi." She says and it makes you sick, the syrup in her voice. You never have known your sister to be such a slut. You stand up then, too, but you continue to face Paul as he looks at your sister. His nipples are at the points of two blue sun rays, the left one with a silver hoop strung through it, erect. His flat belly stretches far down into his leather pants, the waistline pulled down and tight by his hands in his pockets. The clean line of his hips peeks over the edge.
Paul walks past you and takes your sister's arm and they walk to the door, sweeping by you in their rush. Your sister cranes her head over her shoulder, smiles, waves.
He never looks back, but he belches briefly, like a hiccup, and you look for a thin trail of smoke snaking between his cracked and bleeding lips back into the room as the smell lingers in the air like oil or sex.
Fritz Swanson is sophomore in creative writing hailing from Parma, Mich. He has won the Hopwood Underclassmen Award for fiction, among other prizes.