Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [56]
“Have you ever touched the moon, girl?” he called out. “I have a sliver of it right here.”
I stopped, terrified.
“There is a lady in the moon, as you well know, and you can talk to her if you’d like. You can ask her anything you want. Of course she is on the moon, but in here,” he smiled, tapping the glass, “I got a piece of her heart.”
I approached the man carefully, my whole body shaking, drawn by the glimmering jar in his hand.
As I pressed my coin into the man’s palm, he cracked the jar open, just the smallest fraction.
A crowd gathered around us. I watched the jar, the way the light sprinkled out of it like salt. I was mesmerized. Everything spun down to that jar resting in the talker’s meaty hands. At first I could hear nothing at all, and I could see nothing at all resembling a woman.
I tilted my head toward the jar so that my ear was almost covering the crack, my hair brushing against the talker’s hands. And then, all of a sudden, I heard it: the softest voice in the world, the faintest little cry, whispering to me, “Let me out.”
“What?” I whispered, scared to breathe. I heard the crowd around me, pressing in.
“Break the glass,” the voice whispered, so low that no one but me could have heard it, and even I, just barely. “Let me out.”
Before I could even register what I’d heard or make a move, a thin trail of smoke rushed out of the jar and toward the sky, and I was sure I saw a woman floating inside it. I blinked and looked again; all I saw was a whiff of smoke, then nothing.
I looked up and into the man’s face just as he broke into a smile that showed all his teeth. “It’s amazing!” he yelled, turning from me. “Now step inside and see the other wonders I’ve brought back from the sky!”
I was so shaken I had to sit down to recover.
Everything I had ever dreamt of was at the Velasquez Circus and the midway that wrapped around it. The show in the big top was set for that evening, the signs announced, but there was more than enough in the midway to keep the crowds busy until then. My eyes couldn’t take in everything at once, but I tried to remember that I had all the time in the world now: I had nothing else in the world besides that. As I wandered through the crowds, people pointed at me as if I were one of the wonders surrounding them. I didn’t mind. Everything was fantastic there, and surely I was not as strange as the boy with scales covering his body from his neck to his toes, beautiful iridescent scales that seemed to ring with light. His eyes sought me as I wandered into the tent. I smiled up at him from the crowd, my heart in my mouth.
In the next tent was a man who could swallow ten swords at once and then blow streams of fire from his mouth. My skin prickled from the heat, but I couldn’t stop watching him, just as I couldn’t stop watching the girl with the wings sprouting from her back, who walked out onto the small wooden stage next door. I huddled near the stage, lit by lanterns that threw shadows onto the canvas walls. The girl walked out in red sparkling heels. I heard them clack across the floor. She had wonderful curving legs and a torso shaped like a violin. Her blond hair un-spooled down her back and hung around her face—bright blond hair, like starlight. I thought she might be twenty years old. She turned around and shook off her sequined top, revealing curled-up white feathered wings. She smiled at me with her painted lips as she unfolded her wings slowly, inch by inch, like in the vision I’d had in Mercy Library, until the tips touched the sides of the tent with a thwack. Once again I found myself amazed by the sheer beauty of what I was witnessing, of how the world unfolded and revealed itself.
I stepped into the midway as if coming out