Teeth_ Vampire Tales - Ellen Datlow [33]
Madam Oksana didn’t seem to care.
“They do not appreciate true art,” she said. “The fashion now is crude humor, terrible music, costumes that show everything. It is the same in Europe. Still, we will contrive.”
Lenka cared very much.
“It wouldn’t kill you to buy new costumes. Hector’s bear suit is going to totally fall apart one of these days.”
Madam Oksana shrugged liquidly. “New costumes are expensive.”
“If you could attract better houses, you could afford them. Your open is flashy, and Rima and Hector’s act totally rocks. But the Vaulting Sokolovs are, like, stuck in the last century, and Cio-Cio’s routine is totally lame. Here.” She turned to her laptop, searched, and opened a YouTube video of a Cirque de Soleil equilibrist. “Look,” she said, turning the screen to Madam Oksana. “Cio-Cio could do that with her hands tied behind her.”
Madam Oksana watched the tiny blue-clad figure moving from backbend to handstand while balancing on a giant red ball. “The music is like dogs barking. And the ball is not dignified.”
Neither is walking on your hands, Lenka did not say. “The music’s negotiable. And it doesn’t have to be a ball. She could use a teeter-totter. Or a flexible pole. The point is, she needs more props. There’s only so far you can take a unicycle if you don’t juggle.”
Some time later, after watching dozens of videos of tumblers and ropewalkers and sword swallowers and static trapeze artists, Madam Oksana looked thoughtful and Lenka was exhausted. Watching the trapeze acts was torture, especially one in which two women and a man twisted, swung, and maneuvered their way around a rigid rig like a giant skeletal cube.
There wasn’t a trick she saw that she couldn’t have done before she got sick.
If she could just get in shape again. If she could just practice.
Everyone slept late at the Cirque des Chauve-souris. With no matinees, there wasn’t any reason for the performers to be awake before two or even three in the afternoon, and as far as Lenka knew, they never were.
At eleven one morning, Lenka crept across the parking lot to the tent, telling herself there was no reason to be nervous. Madam Oksana had never said the tent was off-limits, or even the rigs, if nobody was using them.
The tent was dark and smelled of dust and rosin. Heart beating and palms sweating, Lenka turned on a work light, checked the guy ropes on the static trapeze, then chalked her hands and leapt up to grab the bar. Her shoulders screamed as they took her weight, and her belly muscles protested as she beat her legs up and over. She hung there a moment, then hauled herself up to sit on the bar, where she sat, swinging gently, getting her breath back. Her muscles were unhappy, and she should definitely put on a safety harness before she tried anything fancy. It wouldn’t do any harm, though, to throw one simple trick.
Lenka slid her butt forward, arched her neck and back, and spread her arms stiffly along the bar in a crucifix. As she swung, staring up into the peaked roof, she thought she saw a shadowy stirring among the lights. Her vision sparkled and faded. Her ears buzzed.
I’m going to fall, she thought calmly.
When Lenka woke, her mouth tasted of metal and she hurt all over, but in a strained-muscle way, not a broken-bone way. She opened her eyes to a ring of faces.
Madam Oksana was annoyed. “You are not obeying the rules.”
Lenka rolled herself to her side, pushed herself weakly upright. “I wasn’t in the backyard,” she said. “And nobody was practicing. I checked.”
Madam Oksana’s snarl made her look very like one of her cats. “You are a lawyer now, you argue with me? You kill yourself, maybe that is the end of your troubles, but not for us. You are here to make things easy, not bring police to ask questions. You practice, you must wear a belt, ponimaesh?”
Lenka grinned. “I got it, boss.”
Madam Oksana threw her hands