Teeth_ Vampire Tales - Ellen Datlow [30]
She circled over the audience and disappeared behind the curtains.
“Nice effect,” Mama said.
“Shh,” Papa said. “The acro-bats.”
Lenka giggled.
There were three Vaulting Sokols, slender young men with white teeth and incredibly fast reflexes.
Papa watched their flipping and posturing for a moment, then whispered in Lenka’s ear. “They tumble like in your grandfather’s time—much skill, but little imagination.”
Behind Lenka, someone got up and headed for the bar. “They’re losing the audience,” Mama muttered.
The next act was better—a big man in a moth-eaten bear suit and a contortionist in a scale-patterned leotard who slithered around his body with multivertebraed suppleness until he plucked her off and spun her in the air like a living ball.
When the bear man and the snake girl removed their masks, Lenka saw that the girl was about her age, with very fair skin and very dark hair cut in a square bob. She made her compliment to the audience without a glimmer of a smile, one arm raised, her knee cocked, pivoting to acknowledge the applause.
“Very professional.” Mama approved.
The next act was Battina, capeless, and with black velvet cat ears sticking out of her thickly coiled hair. She swept in, proud as a queen, heading a procession of seven cats, their tails and heads held high.
Lenka had seen cat acts before—mostly on YouTube. Cats are cats. Even when they’re trained, they tend to wander off or roll belly-up or wash themselves. Not Battina’s cats. They walked a slack rope, jumped through hoops, balanced on a pole, and most remarkably of all, performed a kind of kitty synchronous dance routine in perfect unison, guided by Battina’s chirps and meows.
“The woman’s a witch,” Mama muttered.
“Shh,” Lenka said.
When the lights came up for intermission, Papa turned to her anxiously. “You like?”
“She’d better,” Mama said.
“The cats were way cool. And the contortionist is the bomb. Can I get a Coke at the bar? I’m really thirsty.”
After the break came a female sword swallower, a Japanese girl on a unicycle, and a slack-rope walker in a striped unitard that covered him to the knees. Lenka judged them all better than competent, but uninspired.
The contortionist reappeared, cartwheeling out between the curtains and down the runway, a simple effect made spectacular by the shimmering bat’s wings that stretched from her ankles to her wrists. Reaching the center of the ring, she reached up, grasped a previously invisible bar, and rode it slowly upward. Lenka’s throat closed in pure envy.
About six feet up, the trapeze stopped and the girl beat up to standing, bent her knees, and set the trapeze in motion, her wings rippling as she swung.
“She’s going to get those tangled in the ropes,” Mama muttered darkly.
She didn’t. Lenka watched the girl flow through her routine, twisting, coiling, somersaulting, hanging by her hands, her neck, one foot, an arm, as if the laws of gravity and physics had been suspended just for her. She must be incredibly strong. She must be incredibly disciplined. She must not have any friends, or go to movies or play video games or be on Facebook, just train and perform and sleep and do her chores and her lessons and train some more. It wasn’t a normal life. Mama and Papa said Lenka would learn to like normal life, if it turned out that she couldn’t perform.
Mama and Papa were so totally wrong.
Dear Mama and Papa:
When you read this, I will be far away from here.
I’m not leaving because I don’t love you, or because I think you’re mean or unfair or anything. You’re the best and most loving parents in the world and you’ve saved my life, even more than Dr. Weiner and the clinic. You’ve given up a lot to make me well, and you haven’t tried to make me feel guilty about it, which is totally awesome.
The thing is, I feel guilty anyway. And fenced