Sonnets for Falling Girls

BY: OLIVE LAMBERT

Her mother had replaced all the mirrors in the house with funhouse mirrors by the time Sibella turned fourteen. She chose a different one to stare into each morning. She laughed at the abnormally skinny one, wondering how many bones she’d have to lose to have that distorted image come true. Other days she wanted to see how she’d look if one of those medieval torture racks stretched her an extra few inches or squashed her down to half her size.

“The mirrors are so you learn to love yourselves and develop a healthy mindset,” her mother always said while huffing on her cigarettes, but Sibella didn’t know how any of that was possible if she could still see her lackluster body.

She wished her thighs looked like the thighs of the girls who waited in line outside the Big Top. Their jean shorts sculpted their butts and squished their hips like the clothes had been molded to their bodies. Sibella’s mother caught her looking at those curves once and sprayed her with a trick flower. “It’s unbecoming, Sibella,” she huffed. It was hard to take her mother seriously in full clown makeup, though.

“Look up one of those ‘girls kissing’ videos,” Frankie suggested. The two of them had been placed on churro cart duty for the week as punishment for launching peanuts into the sky from the cannon so the elephants would get on their hind legs. The boiling heat of summer mixed nauseatingly with the scents of cinnamon and half melted vanilla frosting, making it the perfect punishment.

“I’m not interested in them kissing,” Sibella said. “I just want to look like them.” She pointed to a girl in line for the Big Top, the one wearing a bright red tube top and dark blue jean shorts with a head of auburn curls and sparkly green eyeshadow. The sweat beads along the curve of her cleavage sparkled under the light of the Big Top torches. “I wish I had breasts like hers,” Sibella sighed. “Why won’t mine grow, Frankie?”

“Am I even legally allowed to answer that question?” Frankie was only a few years older, but Sibella couldn’t say his exact age. If he had ever told her, she had forgotten. He said, “You’re like a child. Have you even hit puberty yet?”

“You ass, I’m fourteen.”

“So no.” She tossed cinnamon at his face. He laughed and smeared frosting across the back of her shirt. She started throwing napkins at him when someone coughed outside their stand. Sibella’s mother stood in her clown outfit, smiling makeup contrasting the downward turn of her actual mouth. She didn’t have to say anything; Sibella and Frankie began cleaning up their mess. Her mother walked away, high stepping in her two-foot-long clown shoes and taking a cigarette pack from her pocket.

“It’s like getting a silent ‘I’m very disappointed in you’ from Ronald McDonald,” Frankie huffed.

The Eleutheromania Circus had been in Sibella’s family since perhaps the dawn of time. Its founder had been setting up the Big Top torches when his wife went into labor, giving birth inside the tent. Not a single family member was born outside of the Big Top since, until Sibella. Her parents had been on a business trip, not expecting a premature birth, and from there a joke started going around the family that Sibella would be the one to end their circus. Her father’s sudden lung cancer diagnosis and death only a few years later turned the joke into a family-wide paranoia.

Every sibling had a circus job, and Sibella was no exception—except she wasn’t allowed in the Big Top. Performers and family alike would speak in hushed tones of the incidents that occurred when she was just a child, bumbling around inside the tent, but within her memory the place had always been off-limits. She took tickets at the gate, manned various food carts, took out trash, cared for the animals, and sometimes handed out prizes to snot-nosed children at the games, but never was she allowed within those red-and-white-striped walls.

“I heard that when you were five,” her eldest sister once said, “you knocked over one of the Big Top torches and it took two extinguishers to keep the fire from spreading.”

“Celeste, that has to be another stupid circus myth.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

Celeste was a trapeze artist who leapt from flying beams and flipped into the arms of her twin, Corey. While he wasn’t particularly good at flipping, he was strong and could easily throw Celeste, who had been born with lightweight bones. Corey primarily worked on the tightrope. He could walk it perfectly, but the crowd liked it more when he pretended to almost fall, then miraculously steady himself for a beautiful finish. The middle child Corinne swallowed swords and ate fire to the raucous sound of the audience’s screams. There was a rumor in town that she bit the first, and only, guy to make a crude blowjob proposition to her.

Sibella, the youngest, knew of her siblings’ great feats from word of mouth alone. Around the dinner table they took turns relaying their glories and the amount of applause received for them, sometimes truthful and sometimes painfully embellished, even to Sibella’s ears. Their mother would sit and nod, clown makeup still on the edges of her face. She hadn’t been able to make herself take over their father’s job as ringmaster, instead staying on as lead clown and asking her cousin to don the top hat and sparkly jacket. Sibella noticed the painted smile got higher and higher every time her mother drew it.

Overdramatic or not, Sibella craved to hear their dinner table stories, to be part of their secret world behind those striped walls. She envied the bonds of her older siblings, forged by hours of practice in the one place Sibella could never enter. The times she got to spend most with her family during circus season were dinners and the occasional pop-ins while she worked elsewhere on the grounds. The pop-ins annoyed her in the moment, but later she reflected on them as reminders that sometimes she was thought of by her family.

“I heard,” Celeste once said while stealing popcorn from her cart, “that right after Dad died, you stole Mom’s cigarette lighter and ran around the grounds with it before dropping it right outside the tent entrance.”

“Celeste, these jokes are seriously getting old.”

“Are they jokes, Sibella?”

The regular ticket taker was out sick for the weekend, so Sibella was promoted from churro cart to admission gate. She had to wear a striped shirt plus the stupid plastic hat that said TICKETS, but at least she could sit for this job. Frankie fake cried when she informed him of their separation, and she promised to offer coupons for five free churros to keep him busy.

The mosquitos and gnats flocked to the lights of the admission booth and gate, but the plastic shield on the booth stopped them from reaching Sibella’s face. The downside of her protective shield was the increased stuffiness of the box. The dead heat of summer congealed in the sweat on her back and in her underwear.

“Ticket for one please,” said a soft voice. Sibella looked up to meet the forest-green eyes of a girl perhaps only a year or two older than her. She had no boobs either—her pale blue tank top stuck to her chest like the gnats to the shield—and her thighs were just as skinny as Sibella’s. The glaring difference was the emerald piercing glittering on the girl’s navel.

Sibella swallowed, her face warm like a sunburn. “Sorry, what?”

“One ticket please.”

“Oh, oh yeah, I’m sorry. Uh, it’s ten dollars.” She fumbled at tearing the ticket from the strip, accidentally ripping it in half. Shit, she didn’t have any tape. “Uh, are you excit—what, what are you most excited for?” Sibella asked. She was suddenly shivering despite the heat.

“I’ve never been to a circus before so I don’t know!” The girl smiled; even her teeth were perfect.

Sibella finally tore a whole ticket off and slipped it through the hole in the plastic shield. The girl’s hand reached through with a crumpled ten-dollar bill. Sibella’s f ingers grazed her palm as she took the money, a small shudder running up her arm and into her neck. A hair or two stood up. Then the girl was gone, around the booth and through the chain-link gate.

Someone knocked loudly on the side of the booth; Sibella nearly fell off her stool. “Let me in, moron,” the knocker said.

She unlocked the door to find Corinne on the other side with two bottles of water. The box wasn’t big enough for two people, so Corinne leaned against the doorframe and handed over the precious liquid. “How you doing in here? Dead from the heat yet?”

“I’m fine,” Sibella said, chugging half of the first bottle.

Corinne smiled but then leaned closer and lowered her voice. “You are aware that you’re supposed to take the money then give the ticket, right idiot?”

“I—I know!” Sibella protested. “It’s been a long day. Don’t get on me for one mistake.”

Corinne snorted. “If your brain is gonna stop working because one average-looking chick comes through, then our circus may be in as much trouble as Mom says.”

“She was gorgeous, not average!” Sibella said. “I wish I looked that pretty.” “If you ever show up with a navel piercing, Mom might kill you.”

“If I do anything Mom might kill me.”

Corinne shrugged, backing out of the booth. “Eh, that’s the price you pay for not being born in the Big Top.”

“But I didn’t choose that!”

“Tough luck.”

Sibella stepped side to side between the mirror that made her taller and the mirror that made her shorter. Perhaps if she went fast enough she’d be able to see what her real proportions were. She hoped she looked like the girl with the belly button piercing, sleek like a powerful missile, or like the girl in the red tube top, curved like a mountain that people travel to marvel at. The mirrors didn’t tell her which one she was.

She asked her mother if there was a real mirror anywhere in the Eleutheromania Circus. Her mother blew a puff of smoke from her cigarette and put it out in her vanity’s ashtray before she said, “Don’t spend so much time looking at yourself.” She began painting on her smile, smoke still curling around the small dressing room. “The longer you look, the more things you’ll find wrong,” she said sweetly.

“But what if I find something correct?”

Her mother raised one painted eyebrow. “Sibella, that makes no sense.” She got up from her vanity, cigarette lighter falling from her lap and bouncing along the wooden floor. Sibella knelt to pick it up when her mother turned around and screamed, “No!”

Sibella froze, fingers skimming the metal surface of the lighter. “What?”

Her mother swallowed, composing her aghast face quickly. “Nothing sweetheart, just don’t touch that.” She walked over and scooped the lighter off the floor, securing it back into her pocket. “You’re in the ticket booth again tonight. Go and get ready.” Sibella opened her mouth, closed it, then left.

A group of girls approached the booth, laughing together and pulling money from colorful wallets. Too many bugs had swarmed the plastic shield, so Sibella couldn’t make out their specific features; something in her chest hurt at that realization. Was this what her mirrors saw of her every day?

She took the money from the manicured hand which reached through the hole. The nails were long and dark green, accenting the darkness of the hand they were attached to. A sudden desire spread in Sibella’s throat to reach down and kiss the back of that hand the way handsomely-dressed men in movies did to beaming girls. She craved to see the smiles of these girls, but the smeared gnats obstructed her view.

Corey stopped by a few hours later, banging on the door until she unlocked it. He was panting in his leotard, fanning himself aggressively. “Do you need a break?”

“You won’t find it any cooler in here.”

“Fuck.”

Sibella pointed to the plastic shield. “Could you maybe clean the bugs from this thing?”

Corey stared at her. “Why? That’s not my job.”

“Well it’s inhibiting mine.”

“Your job isn’t ogling girls, Sibella.”

The sunburn feeling rushed across her face. “I’m not ogling anyone.”

“Good,” Corey said. “Mom is worried there’s something wrong with you.”

Suddenly Sibella hated her brother being here. “Go jump off your tightrope or something,” she said, turning away from him.

He made a curt noise then slammed the door. It reopened only a few minutes later. “Go away, Corey!” she said.

“Impeccable identification skills,” said Frankie’s voice. The smell of cinnamon f loated in with the much-needed breeze.

“Sorry,” she said, swiveling to face him. “My brother was—”

“I know how brothers are,” he said with a snort. “Want a churro?”

She nodded and he produced a plastic packet of mini churros. He’d been getting better at making them since her mother had refused to move him from the churro cart. No one else wanted the job, plus it was the place Sibella would be confined to when something was nearly fucked up, so Frankie did the job mostly without complaint.

“Any cute girls tonight?” he asked. Sibella simply gestured to the gnat-painted shield. “Damn,” was his only response.

“Frankie,” she said after a few moments of silent chewing, “how do I know if I want to look like a girl or touch her?”

“Remember what I told you last month?”

“Let’s use the cannon to shoot the peanuts higher into the air? Hate to remind you, but that didn’t go well for us.”

“No, asshole,” he said, laughing. “Google ‘girls kissing’ or something similar. On an incognito tab, duh.”

After Frankie went back to his cart, Sibella pulled out her iPod Touch and did what he said. She scrolled through three pages of videos, catching herself imagining what she would look like kissing the girl with the long green nails. This time they were both distorted by a funhouse mirror.

The last few days of the Eleutheromania Circus always brought the largest crowds, which meant none of Sibella’s siblings came to bother her inside her box. She heard the roar of the crowd in the Big Top as she counted the ticket money, wondering which of her siblings had just wowed the people. Did Celeste backflip in midair and catch the bar with her legs? Was Corey standing one-legged on the tightrope, baiting the audience as to if he would fall? Had Corinne just swallowed a f ifteen-inch sword without so much as a cough?

Someone knocked on her plastic shield. “Sorry, no more admissions,” she said.

“Give me all the money in the box,” replied a deep, rough voice.

Sibella looked up to see a masked person on the other side and the dark barrel of a gun poking through the hole in her useless shield. She swallowed. “Uh, I don’t know how.”

“Are you stupid?” asked the voice. “Open this damn thing and hand me the entire fucking box or I’ll shoot you.”

Sibella didn’t know how to open the shield, and she couldn’t move more than a few inches inside this hole, so she closed her eyes and prepared to be shot.

She hadn’t thought about death before—she’d been too busy pondering about living—but now death was all she could think. The gun was leveled at her chest, so perhaps she would go quickly with the first bullet going directly into her heart. Usually death was described as peaceful, although she hadn’t really considered what peace felt like either. It was likely not this hot when you died though, unless hell was real. She most certainly wouldn’t have to worry anymore about her mother yelling at her for staring at the girls waiting in line for the Big Top, and she’d never have to look into another funhouse mirror. No more Corinne calling her names, or Celeste telling stories about all the ways she had jinxed their circus. Corey couldn’t scold her for eyeing the slope of a girl’s sides or the way their hair bounced when they walked.

She smiled a little. Peace, the true peace of being gone, sounded tempting. If death was the only way to be gone, maybe it wasn’t such a bad option. The darkness of her closed eyes comforted her like a hug.

A new voice shouted in the distance. “Fuck,” said the voice with the gun. Sibella opened her eyes to one of the security guards chasing the would-be robber across the field, flashlight swinging in time to shouts of “Stop!”

Sibella finished counting the money, disappointed.

Frankie texted her that night and asked if she was okay. She was standing in front of her funhouse mirror as she texted him back: I think death is more peaceful than life.

Her mother came into her room, sans clown costume, and hugged her. The familiar embrace of smoke followed, settling over the room; it didn’t feel as good as the darkness had. “I’m so glad you’re okay, Sibella,” her mother whispered. “I don’t know what I would do without you.”

“Mom,” Sibella mumbled into her shoulder, “When will I be allowed inside the Big Top?”

Her mother stopped hugging her. “One day, darling, but not now.” Sibella frowned and her mother smiled wide enough to match her usual clown makeup. “It’s simply for everyone’s protection. You must understand that.”

Sibella did not. She looked at their reflections in the mirror. Her mother rippled like a sound wave, colors cutting back and forth at sharp angles, while she was a conglomerate of fuzzy colors and swirls, blurry head detached from blurry body. “Is Celeste telling the truth? Is everyone telling the truth, about all those incidents from when I was a kid?”

Her mother sighed; the noise hurt. “Why are we discussing this, Sibella?”

Sibella bit her lip, burning tears sitting in the corners of her eyes. “I almost died today, Mom,” she said, her voice cracking softly, “and I feel like none of you would miss me if I was gone, all because of some stupid superstitions.”

The sound wave patted the disembodied head, then scoffed. “I would miss you if you were gone, darling. We all would.”

Sibella didn’t look at her mother when she said, “Then why not love me now?”

“We try, but you make it so difficult.”

Sibella returned to the churro cart for the last few circus days, as the admission booth was deemed too dangerous. She didn’t mind completely; she got to spend time with Frankie and could see more girls from the cart. Frankie had developed a system for manning the cart alone, so she sat on a stool in the back and did nearly nothing. Sometimes he asked her to wash a dish or take orders when a crowd began to form, but otherwise she was free to watch people enjoying the circus. Inside the Big Top, the crowd cheered.

“You haven’t talked much about what happened,” Frankie said, wiping cinnamon off the counter. “And that text you sent me was a little concerning. Are you positive you’re okay?”

“Have you ever thought about death, Frankie?”

“When I went camping with my father last fall, I wandered off to piss and found a bear cub just napping on the ground. Pissed my pants and probably shit a little trying to get out of there before its mama came to rearrange my face. I was thinking about death then for sure.”

She laughed. “If I had died in that booth, my family would never know me.”

“What?”

Sibella didn’t explain further; she couldn’t fully explain it to herself. She stared at the velvety sky and its sparkling stars. Sparkling like a perfect pair of teeth, or a navel piercing on a sculpted stomach, or eyeshadow highlighting auburn hair. “They’re all so beautiful,” she said.

Frankie appeared next to her, elbowing the side of her head gently. “They’re colossal balls of gas a couple billion miles away from us. Bet they’re super beautiful when they’re melting your face off up close.”

“I didn’t—you know what, Frankie? You actually would look a lot better with some facial melting.”

“Fuck you!”

Sibella kneeled before the mirror, prodding where her face had begun to fill out. She couldn’t tell by how much because in the mirror her cheeks were still concave and bony. She wanted to see what her skin would look like when melted by a star, but her funhouse mirrors could do so little while her desires were so much.

Her fifteenth birthday came and went with promises from Celeste, Corey, and Corinne to make her feel more loved. She smiled at the words, but doubted their sincerity. When she climbed into bed that evening, feeling no more grown than the day before, her iPod Touch buzzed under her pillow.

Frankie: Yo I’m outside your window. Got a bday surprise.

Sibella pulled on a coat against the early autumn chill and opened her window. Frankie was indeed standing there—in just a tank top and shorts, like a dumbass.

“You could have just knocked,” she said.

“Didn’t wanna wake anyone,” he replied. “Come down. Bring shoes.”

She laced on her sneakers and swung herself over the window ledge, landing in the dry grass and falling into him a little. “What’s so important about this gift that I need to be outside?”

Frankie rustled in his pockets and produced a skeleton key. “I snagged the keychain when I did some overtime filing in the office,” he said. “Made a quick copy thanks to a friend that’s interning with the locksmith.”

Sibella smacked him gently. “Just tell me what it is, dumbass!”

Frankie grinned. “Wanna go inside the Big Top?”

The two of them were shaking—with cold and apprehension alike—as Frankie unlocked the doors to the Big Top. The flaps which usually covered the doors rustled in the light breeze; Sibella worried someone would hear. Frankie assured her it was safe and led her inside.

The Big Top was dark; only the torches outside were lit at night. Frankie moved around behind the curtain to the storage room and turned on the fairy lights strung across the upper beams, bathing the tent in a light yellow glow. Sibella shuffled in the dirt and watched the fake stars twinkle. “It seems smaller on the inside,” she said.

“That’s because most of it is risers and storage.” Frankie motioned to the clown cars, balls, and trapeze equipment nestled behind the curtain. “This stuff is meant to seem like it materializes, but sadly it can’t actually do so.”

Sibella crossed the ring, scuffing her sneakers in the dirt, and stepped onto the ringmaster’s stand. Her mother said this platform was stood on by the first Eleutheromania Circus ringmaster, but now Sibella stood upon it too. She closed her eyes, imagining a crowd of people filling the risers in front of her, cheering for the performance to begin. She raised her arms, quieting them. She would begin by welcoming them to her circus, thanking them for coming to see the talents of these performers. She would introduce the clowns first, let their cars and flower squirt guns amuse the children and adults alike. After the wreckage had been cleared from the ring she would retake her place, ask for another round of applause for the clowns, and then present the trapeze and tightrope swinging above her head.

Sibella opened her eyes as she lifted her hand to the trapeze and tightrope. Would Celeste and Corey still perform if she was the ringmaster? Or would their paranoia corrupt their balance and precision, some self-fulfilling fate loosening the safety net below them? “I want to go up on the tightrope,” she said.

“Hell no! You’re nuts!” Frankie shouted on the sidelines.

Under the fairy lights, the tightrope shimmered. It was the closest star she could possibly touch. “I’m doing it.”

“Motherfu—fine, if you’re going up then I’m coming too.”

They climbed up opposite ladders, staring at one another across the suddenly expansive space. The rope looked thinner than before. She knelt on the platform and wrapped one hand around it. Cold, metallic, a cable. At least that alleviated her worries about it breaking.

“We should have brought one of those balance rods,” shouted Frankie.

“Too late now,” Sibella shouted back, setting one foot on the cable. It rippled under her, swinging gently as she pushed all her weight onto one foot. Without hesitation, her other foot left the platform and stepped in front of the foot planted on the cable. Her arms flew out to the sides as she wobbled back and forth, her body not used to being completely off solid ground. A few perilous sways later her body steadied with the cable and Sibella looked up at Frankie. “Look, Frankie! Look, I’m doing it!”

“Great! Now do it backwards to that platform!”

“Not a chance!” She brought her back foot forward, setting it quickly in front and swaying along with the cable. Her center of balance may not have been as sturdy as Corey’s, but something inside of her was obviously born for the tightrope. Her steps became more sure, more confident, and soon she was in the middle of the tightrope, watching Frankie wince with each step. Her smile stretched her sunburnt cheeks to the point of aching.

Sibella locked her knees up, pausing in the exact center of the tightrope. She lowered her arms, marveling in the feeling of true balance. The net seemed miles beneath her, blending with the dirt so that she could easily imagine the floor as an abyss opening for her alone. A strange and beautiful emptiness filled her mind.

“What the hell are you doing?” Frankie shouted. “Did you seriously get cold feet in the fucking middle?”

Sibella met his eyes for a second, then relaxed her knees and went into the void.

This was better than death, she realized as she descended. That feeling of peace she had thought would come from the barrel of a gun was actually here, in the dive towards the yawning mouth of nothingness. The red and white stripes of the Big Top sped by in her vision, but the fall was slow, a gentle descent into the arms of the void. Her calves and thighs burned; she’d been so tense on that cable. Sibella sucked in the rushing air; her lungs welcomed it. She accepted this feeling, this freedom, and closed her eyes to a lightless limbo between falling and landing.

The net was a crude awakening. The air she had sucked in was pushed out in a gasp. Her vision spun nauseatingly between the darkness and light. She coughed and allowed the net to rock her for a few seconds as her brain and body came back together. Her mind had never felt so clear, her body so relaxed.

Sibella had chosen to jump. She could choose for herself again, and again, and again.

Up on the platform, Frankie was shouting something. Sibella waved a thumbs up and hoped he could see it. “Frankie, can you hear me?” she called, still swaying in the net. “

What the fuck! Are you okay?!”

“Never better. Frankie, I like girls.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

Frankie climbed down and helped her out of the net. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. They locked the Big Top doors behind them and Frankie handed the skeleton key to Sibella with a flourish. “Happy birthday, Sibella.”

“Second best present ever,” she said, snatching the key and hugging him tightly.

“Second? What could top this?”

She shrugged. “My boobs finally starting to grow would be nice.”

Frankie laughed. “Hey, I’ll give you mine as a present next year, deal?”

“Deal!”

They snorted from laughing so hard, then laughed more because they snorted. They spun around in the early autumn breeze, arms out to the side and walking their own invisible tightropes. Dry grass crackled under their feet, echoing through the empty circus.

A shadow stepped onto their cables. “What the hell did you do?” Celeste shivered in her pajamas, eyes wide and hair swept up with horrific bedhead. “Sibella, were you in the Big Top?”

Jubilant and high on freedom, Sibella said, “Yes.”

Celeste screamed. She could have been a horror movie actress with a scream like that. Her hands went over her mouth, a handful of tears streaking down her cheeks. “Why would you do this? You’ve ruined our circus! Everything we love is over!”

“It’s a fucking tent,” Frankie said, stepping between Sibella and Celeste. “You need to chill out.”

Footsteps crunched on the grass as Corinne and Corey approached, beckoned by Celeste’s wailing. Corey put his arms around Celeste as she sobbed into his shoulder, babbling about the death of the circus as he glanced between her and Sibella and the Big Top. “What’s going on? Sibella, what did you do this time?” “I didn’t do anything!” Sibella protested, her former jubilation drained from her body.

“I never do anything, but you’re all ready to jump on me at a second’s notice!”

“You’ve done plenty!” Celeste wailed. “You were born and then Dad died! You were born and then the Big Top nearly burned down! You were born and then Mom stopped wanting to be around any of us! Our lives were ruined because of you!”

Corinne wrapped her arms around the sobbing Celeste as Corey mumbled placating phrases. The trio glared at Sibella who stood flanked only by Frankie and the growing breeze. She breathed deeply, choking down the sob trying to dislodge itself from her throat.

“I’m sorry,” Sibella finally said. “I never meant—I never could have intended any of those things. I was a child.”

“You’re a jinx,” Corinne snapped, “and now you’ve broken the only damn rule you had to follow: don’t go inside the Big Top.”

“No one is going to want to perform,” Corey said, more to the ground than to anyone present. “They’ll all quit. Hell, most of them were here when she nearly burned it down the first few times.”

Frankie scoffed, squeezing Sibella’s shoulder. “Your performers need to grow a pair then.”

Corey looked up now. He spat into the grass. “I don’t recall asking for your input. You’re as much an outsider as Sibella is; don’t pass judgment on our ways.”

Frankie balked and his grip tightened. “Your ways are extreme superstitions and asshole rituals that only serve to keep out those you happen to dislike! Sibella hasn’t done anything wrong except be born and you think a few coincidences make her the harbinger of doom!”

Corey turned, leading the softly sobbing Celeste away. “It’s one coincidence too many,” he scoffed.

Corinne followed them, a distasteful glare thrown over her shoulder. “Mom will have you leave the grounds for this, Sibella,” she said. “It’s too risky for you to stay here anymore.”

Sibella choked down another sob as her siblings turned their backs on her. Arm in arm they walked away, bonded as always in a way Sibella could never be. She dropped to her knees in the hard grass, blades digging into her skin like needles. Sibella cried, the hot tears struggling to come out as a numbness spread through her chest. This was different from the emptiness of seeing a gun leveled at her chest; there was no peace at the end of this.

Frankie rubbed her shoulders, his words of encouragement or pity or sorrow going over her head. Sibella looked up at the Big Top torch waving in the wind, the f lames bursting upwards in miniature orange explosions. She curled her fists in the grass, crackling it under her fingers. “I don’t need them either,” she said.

Frankie paused in his rambling. “Yeah, yeah that’s right,” he said slowly. “You’re going to be better off without their whining and shit.”

“And I don’t need this tent either,” Sibella said. She pushed Frankie off of her and rose, moving as if carried by the wind itself, across the path and to the pole holding the torch.

“Sibella,” Frankie said, “What are you doing?”

She smiled at him, placing her hand on the solid wood of the pole. “Finishing what I clearly started.”

Sibella rammed her body weight into the pole. Frankie shouted as she pulled back and did it again. He sprinted over and grappled for her arms; she kicked at the pole, screaming and thrashing against him. The wood creaked, the dirt giving to her barrage of strikes. Sibella threw herself over and over as Frankie failed to pull her back, failed to contain the fifteen years’ worth of rage burning inside of her.

The pole titled, and the torch toppled from its roost, entering its own free fall to the ground. It struck the dirt, rolling across the browning grass to the edge of the Big Top. The slightest gust of wind was all it took for the orange flame to begin eating up the red and white sides as small licks of flame caught on the grass itself. Sibella saw, smiled, laughed.

The fire grew, a roar growing to match the roar in Sibella’s mind. The flames stretched to the electrical wires, sending the entire top of the tent exploding into orange and yellow flames. Smoke filled the air, propelled by the wind across the entire circus grounds. The grass was the fire’s next meal as the electrical blaze sparked and leapt to other stands. Small flames licked at Sibella’s ankles, and she bent to touch the furious flickers when Frankie grabbed her arm and pulled her towards the entrance gate. She followed him this time, as she had followed the call of the wind and the flame, the call of sparkly eyeshadow and long green nails.

Someone in the distance screamed as the fire consumed, hungry for everything. Wood popped loudly, wires snapped, and stands collapsed to the ground as Sibella and Frankie sprinted towards the exit. The churro cart sizzled as the fire gobbled up its cinnamon reserves. The ticket box burst open, the gnat shield popping like a firework.

The duo tumbled out the front gate and into the field surrounding the grounds. They coughed smoke from their lungs and wiped it from their eyes, dropping into the grass as the fire raged behind them. Hot tears stung Sibella’s burnt cheeks and dripped to the grass.

She rolled over to watch as the bright flames reached into the sky like elephant trunks stretching for peanuts shot from a cannon. Somewhere the glass of a funhouse mirror shattered. In a cacophony of red and orange, the last flag of the Big Top fell into the smoke.