Nightmare Carnival

These cats weren’t real, maned sort of lions, that was for sure, but they weren’t any cougars I could think of, either.

If you’d held up a lamp to them one night, maybe, when you were on your way back to the train car and feeling brave, their eyes stayed ink black even when they looked at you, two pairs of holes with nothing inside them.

(I dropped the lamp; I ran back to the train in a panic, sank to the ground outside, and gasped into the dirt, hands fisted in the grass, until I had the strength to stand. When I came inside Joseph’s smile died as he looked up, and Daisy watched me without blinking until I thought I was going to scream.)

Wherever Carvessa had found them, he should have left them there.

* * *

At the next stop we came to, Joseph drew the short straw. Without waiting to see who had the other one, Daisy stood up and went with him to the animal car, and the cage appeared in a single practiced drag down the ramp, with Daisy pushing the brace behind with her eyes averted from the cage and Joseph in front, staring straight ahead and pulling as if his life depended on it.

They’d been traveling with the Brandini Brothers a long time; when they reached the patch of dirt that would be the zoo, they stopped without having to call out warnings, and locked the braces in tandem without even looking at one another.

Most of the crew seemed to think that there was nothing more to those cats than avoiding sharp tempers, and they were busy enough hauling equipment; I was the only one who saw that when Joseph made as if to glance over his shoulder, Daisy rested her hand on his back and kept him moving straight ahead, smooth as a circus act, away from the lion cage.

I was the only one who took any notice, except Carvessa, who stood in the Brandinis’ doorway, his eyes sliding jealously to the mountain lions.

There’s a disadvantage to being as big as I am when people expect their young women to be quick and sharp, but Father said once that I was so quiet I near disappeared, and it was true; among the dozen of us that were dragging the tent into place, I was just another set of broad shoulders.

He never looked up; he never saw I saw.

The Brandini Brothers train got a wild welcome in some towns. There would be a huge crowd of children as we slowed past the station on our way out to where we could make camp; Daisy and Joseph and I would be wedged into the way car at the back end of the train, shoveling candy out to the Brandinis, who stood on the tiny painted porch grabbing behind them for it, tossing out never- ending handfuls of sweets that must have looked like magic — but it wasn’t an absolute lie.

Those lies they only had one of, and it was Carvessa.

One night, after the tent but before the shows started, Joseph and I sat at the edge of our train car, our legs swinging back and forth gently. He was turned a little toward me, his foot sometimes just brushing the edge of my foot.

I wished I had my little mirror, so I could tell if my temples looked as warm as they felt.

“My hands still smell like candy,” he said. “I’ll be the human sugar wafer for a week.”

“I think Jim hit one of them in the face with a piece,” I said. “You think he’d be more careful of someone who might buy a ticket.”

Then Joseph said, “You have to stop looking at Carvessa.”

At the edge of the trees, Carvessa was sitting with the Brandinis, passing a bottle back and forth. Their chairs faced the rest of the camp, but more often than not he was looking over his shoulder toward the animal gallery. I didn’t realize I had been looking.

“Why do the brothers let him keep them?”

The words were out before I could think about them, and my face went hot, but after a long time he said, “I don’t know,” in a way that gave me strange ideas.

“Look at me,” I said, and he did, right in the eye, for a little too long.

It wasn’t that anything was wrong with his eyes. They were bright, light green against his brown skin, and we watched each other long enough that I knew there was a little gold fleck in his right iris. But something was there all the same; my reflection in his pupils was hazy, like he was trying to remember me from some time long ago.

Joseph had looked at the lions once, and they’d looked back at him, and something was missing from him now.

* * *

When Matthew Brandini was watching practices it usually meant Jim was inside doing the books and getting angry, but sometimes he really did seem interested in how things looked. “A true showman,” Allan said sometimes, when he wasn’t calling them both hacks for not giving him a knife-throwing act.

Matthew Brandini watched the contortionists practicing once, a human tower of limbs, and made them do it again more slowly, until it looked twice as hard for them than it had before.

He was right. People clapped harder the harder it looked, without thinking much else about it. They only wanted popcorn; they got the peanut smell for free.