Teeth_ Vampire Tales - Ellen Datlow [29]
“There’s a circus in town,” Lenka said.
Her mother didn’t even turn from the stove. “No.”
“The tumblers are Czech—you ever hear of the Vaulting Sokols?” Mama shook her head. “And a cat act. You love cat acts. Please, Mama?”
Papa came in, hair wet from the shower, shirt half buttoned over his undershirt.
“Please what, berusko?”
“She wants to go to the circus, Joska,” her mother said. “I have already said no. You want fried egg or scrambled?”
Lenka pushed the paper toward her father. He shook his head without looking. “Your mother is right. Your immune system is compromised. Circus means children; children mean germs. Not a good atmosphere for you, princess mine.”
“It’s not a big-top show, Papa, just salon acts. Straight from the Old Country—you’ll love it. Besides, Dr. Weiner didn’t say I couldn’t go out, he just said I had to take it easy.”
Mama beat the eggs with unnecessary vigor. “It will not make you happy, to watch someone else fly.”
“I miss the circus, you know?” Lenka got up and put an arm around her mother’s stiff shoulders. “Please, Mama? I’m going nuts, stuck here wondering if I’m ever going to be well enough to fly again.”
It wasn’t playing fair, but if Lenka had learned anything over the past year, it was that sometimes getting better involved pain.
Lenka and her parents drove in early from University Heights. As they waited for the house to open, they had time to examine the outside of the Cirque des Chauve-souris’s famous wooden tent.
“Doesn’t look like much, does it?” Mama said.
“It’s antique,” Papa said, not quite apologetically.
“So they can’t paint it? It doesn’t make a good impression, all dinged up like that.”
Papa smiled one of his sad clown smiles and took her hand. He reached for Lenka’s, too. Lenka squeezed his fingers gently and disengaged. Yes, it was painful to be waiting in line instead of making up and stretching backstage. But she’d rather he didn’t make such a thing out of it.
Inside, as her mother claimed three empty chairs on a side aisle, Lenka cast a professional eye over the setup.
The tent was roomier than it had looked from outside, but it felt cramped to Lenka, the peaked ceiling too low to fly in, the ring a raised platform hardly big enough for a decent cartwheel. A ramp connected it to a semicircular stage curtained with worn scarlet velvet. The audience was stacked back from the ring in folding chairs. A row of raised booths against the walls was furnished with tables and velvet banquettes. Above them were faded old-timey murals of circuses past. The light wasn’t great, but Lenka made out clowns in whiteface, a ringmaster in scarlet, a girl standing on a fat-haunched pony, a boy on a flying trapeze.
Lenka felt a tug on her sleeve. “They’re starting.”
The houselights snapped off; a portable steam organ struck up a wheezy oompah-pah, oompah-pah. A spot came up on a woman dressed in brown velvet with a cape to her feet. Her head was covered with a half mask sporting leaflike bat ears. The ringmistress. Battina.
She lifted her arms, and the cape hung down from her wrists like wings. “Welcome, mesdames,” she fluted, Russian accent thick as borscht. “Welcome, messieurs. Welcome . . . Les Chauve-souris!”
Lenka heard a chittering overhead, and suddenly the air was full of movement, half seen and half heard, a restless, leathery flutter. A woman gave a nervous shriek, and Mama covered her head protectively as small, dark shapes flickered through the lights and down to the stage. A crashing chord, and the shapes transformed into a troupe of performers, caped and masked in brown.
Mama folded her hands in her lap. “Handkerchiefs and trapdoors. They’re fast, though.”
As the organ struck up “Thunder and Blazes,” Battina rose into the air and skimmed over