Present at the Birth of Mystery
A fish with a bouquet of anemones said, Swim with me in the sky. Time is a river without banks. The sea reared up before me, became a flowing wall that nonetheless held its shifting limit; it did not intend to drown. Octopuses caught and threw each other in a tangled echo of my act. The herring with the sea anemones flew away before he could be packed in brine.
I can no longer bear the audience in their grotesque rapture, their vampiric thirst to live through us as we traverse between flaking stars and contort our bodies to fit inside divided minds. Tonight, as my man releases my ankles, I decide to somersault to someplace new. I will not catch the bar that locks me into circus identity.
The drums below pause as usual to let the audience hear their gasp, to safely feel their terror at the distance I must travel to the birdless perch. I take their breath and use it to rotate to the upper world. I want to be present at the birth of my own mystery, to feel what the audience siphons from my well. My purple mermaid hair frees itself unbidden, while the violin and cello describe the void I’m yet to cross, and I remember how my father’s barrels of pickled herring used to sell for a pittance. I don’t know what he took for me, when in the trampled meadow beyond our village he left me outside the big tent. The day-ghost moon was sinking, blue. I thought it all a joke.
In the air I claim as mine, I inscribe a second somersault, linking cracked stars into new constellations I have no time to name. The audience puffs out their collective breath. Only my man knows that as I open into a torpedo then twist, I’ll miss the bar that’s already swung to its extremity. Slave to gravity, the bar accelerates away from me, eager for the equilibrium denied to all performers. I fold into a pike and somersault past my partner’s outstretched hands. He doesn’t wish to contain me, but ropes tugged at pegs in the ground of his mind when before the show I said, I want to drown in the sky. His shoulders must be near to popping to reach so far for me.
A companion piece to ‘Archipelago’
Written in response to the painting ‘Blue Circus’ by Marc Chagall during the 2022 microfiction workshop ‘Animal Magic: Ekphrastic Microfiction’ by Meg Pokrass and Lorette C. Luzajic