Post by pinstrike on Sept 17, 2007 23:19:13 GMT -5
The Sideshow
A small crowd had coalesced around it. One could easily imagine us platelets gathering at a wound.
It was not that the stage was more attractive than the other surrounding attractions. It had no blinking lights, no flashing signs. Perhaps it was, in fact, that the stage was older, dirtier than the others, with peeling paint and rotting wood and a moth eaten curtain. Perhaps it was the ancient-looking painted panels surrounding the stage. Perhaps none of us could have told you why we had been drawn to it. It held no promise of anything spectacular.
It was a sideshow. And that was reason enough. To gather. To wait. To watch. What we were waiting for, what we were hoping to see, what we would see—Well, that was anyone’s guess. We would simply have to wait, which brought us back to the same question for which we had no real answer.
It was a goddamn sideshow. That was answer enough.
Still, however, to this day, I struggle with these questions. How, after seeing what I saw, my life—or rather, my outlook on it—has changed. How my views about the solidity of anatomy and the tangibility of the fantastical were shattered. Why I was compelled to join the audience, I may never know.
We stood, still as pewter, gazing at the stage, the light of the single lantern swaying gently in the summer breeze, playing over our faces. And we all stood there, not knowing exactly why. But, had sideshows not always drawn those whose craving for the bizarre had been left untended to by the world outside the carnival? Was that not its purpose? To provide that nourishment?
The man appeared after a few moments of waiting, but if a blind man had been among us, he wouldn’t have known. The man’s movements were silent. And what a figure! Needle thin, wearing a skin tight coat, the tails of which flapped about his bony knees. A fantastic hat, half as tall as a man, was perched upon his head. All in all, a rather cartoon-ish character. At least half a head taller than any man I’d ever seen. He leaned on a cane of what appeared to be silver. But the strangest, most frightening aspect, was the fact that his entire head was wrapped in coloured ribbons, concealing his face entirely, from which hung countless crucifixes that clinked together like a peculiar blend of wind chimes and pocket change.
Despite his magnificent height, his footsteps fell all but silently on the rotted wood of the stage, and for moments that seemed to pass like molasses through a hypodermic needle, he was perfectly still. Perfectly quiet. His coat ceased flapping in the wind. He seemed the walking embodiment of the kind of quiet that stagnates between stars.
Then, all at once, he spoke, the audience gasping in surprise at the sudden break of silence.
“Welcome, friends! To the greatest sideshow on earth!”
He paused, his veiled face sweeping over the crowd.
“What you will see,” he continued, “Will shock you, amaze you, and…”
He paused again.
“…I pray frighten you. The Exhibits here— I ask you this—to disregard disbelief and abandon explanation. I assure you, there are none.”
With that, he spun on his heel and walked back into the darkness, though the curtains stayed open. The breeze kicked up, softly reminding us to recover the breath the man’s words had stolen. My heart beat with a fury that increased as moments passed, adrenaline surging through me, preparing me for I knew not what.
Then came the man’s dull, dry, monotone, somehow amplified into an echoing roar.
“Exhibit One.”
A slight pause, the echo fading in our ears.
“The Fantastic Sextuplets!”
Whatever we—whatever I expected to emerge from behind the curtain was promptly devoured by what did.
A mass of human limbs, flopping and clawing at the ground, slowly advancing towards us. It was a blur of human movement, and only when it stopped moving could I make out some anatomical order of the thing.
It was a person—or six people. The mass of arms and legs radiated from six torsos, grafted together by some means I doubt natural. I could make out no genetailia, despite the thing’s nakedness; however, three of the six faces bore a certain tenderness of features that denoted femininity. The heads were attached to each other by long flaps of flesh that pulled and distorted their faces into grotesque, saddening shapes.
The fantastic sextuplets.
I remember making a sick coughing sound. It was just so unnatural! Then silence. The kind of silence found in a church or at a funeral. Reverent. Sympathetic. What exactly was god-like about the being was debatable. What was pitiful about it—well, that was evident.
The thing squirmed for a while more. Then its movements became more desparate, and a sound resembling a wet phone book tearing flapped through the air. I think I knew what was happening before I let myself accept it. The stitches holding the mass of flesh together began to snap and break, blood spilling from the open wounds. Some of the audience in the front got wet with the spray. The whole thing, the whole Siamese thing broke into six separate beings. I was standing in the back. I’ve never gotten the blood out of my shirt.
Some turned their heads, others walked away, holding their mouths and stomachs. A child wept. My eyes stayed open and my feet stayed firm. In a few short, sharp movements, the process was complete. The six people—can I call them that?—were twitching in their own blood. It seemed to me that this was not part of the show, but who could really tell?
From the darkness, then, came six things about the size of porcelain dolls, their flesh so black they blended into the night around them. In their hands they carried poles topped with large, barbed hooks that looked like better days. These they swung down and drove into the six twins, each issuing a cry of agony. Then, displaying extraordinary strength for their mass, the doll-sized things dragged the still writhing, slick forms across the stage and behind the curtain.
“Thank you! Thank You!” came the man’s voice as if he were calming applause.
“And now! Exhibit two! Our Voluptuous mermaid!”
He left us not time for recovery of our senses, but merely blended exhibit after exhibit without intermission or breath.
The doll creatures emerged again. This time there were four of them, each pulling on a cord. On the other end of the cord was Exhibit two.
It was a great rectangular tank, about ten feet tall, filled with what may or may not have been water. Suspended in it was the mermaid. A woman, nude, her flesh a pale, sick, blue colour. The nipple on the one intact breast a dull purple. Her face was expressionless, her head perfectly hairless. I said it was a mermaid.
Well, its legs were by some means fused together, from her pubis to the bone by extensions that stretched the skin of what would have been her feet an extra yard or so. It was an amazing and terrible sight. One could do naught but stare.
Suddenly, she—it—began to pound violently on the glass, her face no longer expressionless but a twisted mess of rage, as if the tubes that ran through her had ceased to spit the sedative into her blood. The doll-sized things were quick to emerge and tow the tank back behind the darkness.
The audience was thinning dramatically. There was room now for me to move nearer the stage, so long as I was able to sidestep the pools of vomit.
“And now, Exhibit three. The…world’s…tallest…man!”
He said this with a drama that was soon justified. The darkness rolled back across the towering figure. Easily fifteen feet tall, his head was beyond the light of the lantern and seemed to fuse with the starless sky. I had to crane my neck to see the whole of his massive frame. He was even thinner than the showman, so thin indeed he seemed to be fashioned out of matches, his odd fitting clothes hanging loosely from his delicate yet massive limbs. He made a sound that slightly resembled a greeting, and looked down at us, his eyes catching the light of the moon. A look of murderous rage soon replaced the warm, gentle-giant look on his face.
But again, this seemed anticipated, and just as he let a wild roar tear at his lips, the doll-sized creatures had their hooks in him, pulling him back into the darkness of the stage. His howl of rage became one of physical agony that ripped open the dull noises of the carnival. After quite a few moments’ struggle, he finally fell back onto the stage and scrambled back behind the curtain.
Before the world’s tallest man had even disappeared into the dark, the man’s voice came again.
“Exhibit 4. The amazing fleshless beast!” his voice had an eerie quality to it, as if he were accomplishing something at our expense. But there was a tinge of affection, of pride behind the words, as if he were putting his own child, or a pet on display for his guests.
The thing didn’t come gradually onto the stage. It leaped. It could have been anything from a lion to a bear, or anything that walked on all fours. Its wide, tooth-filled, eyeless face seemed to beam at us, as if to tell us triumphantly: this is what we all look like when the outside goes away.
Three times the size of a man, it had no flesh, no fur. Just a walking mass of throbbing tissues and pulsing arteries. The sinews that hung from it were the closest thing to fur it had. Its back sloped into a great hump of muscle that glistened in the lights of the carnival, dripping its fluids onto the already bloodied stage. It paced back and forth for a while, allowing us to see it from all angles. Lord! What a revolting creature! I wouldn’t even begin to imagine the pain that every movement must bring, the suffering that every footfall was parent to.
Then it happened. All at once it seems. It bared its teeth and shifted its gaze towards me—directly at me—and leapt into the air. I was too terrified to move, let alone run. The audience scattered, fell to the floor, screaming. At that moment I was sure I was either to be maimed or killed or both.
But the beast never landed. Metal pipes shot out from its sides, stretching flaps of tissue into wing-like appendages, which caught the wind and lifted it up into the air just above my head; so close I could feel the juices raining down on me. I turned and watched it fly into the carnival, among the lights and attractions until it was obscured from sight.
Turning back to the stage, the man emerged from the darkness clapping, applauding himself.
“Fantastic! Riveting! Marvelous! Did I not tell you that this was the greatest sideshow on earth?! In all of creation? Yes!” He let loose a magnificent howl of laughter that shook the ribbons on his face.
In a matter of moments, before the crowd had time to react, the beast had returned. On the stage it dropped a woman I recognized from the crowd earlier, but had left after she saw the beast. She was screaming hysterically clutching an aged and bloated belly weeping between cries for help.
For her, I’m sure.
But mostly for the child inside of her.
The beast retreated to the darkness at a glance from his master, who had turned towards the screaming would-be mother.
With a shrill whistle he called forth the doll-sized creatures with their hooks.
They hooked the woman and pulled her writhing flesh into the dark.
He turned back to us.
“This,” he said, “is my fourth show! Be sure—those of you who enjoyed it—to join me again next year when,”
He turned his head to the darkness, which still spat the woman’s screams and the tearing of her flesh and some other sound entirely, though perhaps I imagined it, as I’m not sure if a fetus is capable of crying.
“You will see Exhibit five!”
He faced us again, his crucifixes jingling in the wind.
He continued in a slow, thoughtful manner, “Yes…Exhibit five.” Though there was no way to know, you could almost feel the ribbons shift as he smiled. The man turned on his heel and walked into the darkness, the lantern making silver pinpricks of crucifixes; the last we saw of him as the curtain fell and the screaming stopped.
I lingered a moment longer, entranced, bewitched, whatever word you like. I didn’t move, didn’t breathe for quite some time. When I could, I walked away.
We all left there—well, I cannot speak for the rest of them, but I certainly left there—with a change on my face I’m sure the night couldn’t hide. Something in me was different—altered eternally. Never would I look at the changelessness of flesh, the truth of being, or the solidity of anatomy the same again. Because, simply, none of them were real. Flesh is as alterable and fragile as circumstance, or papier-mache, it just takes a certain hand to shape it. Such a hand belonged to the ribbon-faced showman.
What’s behind the curtain? What waits in the darkness the lantern hides from us? Don’t ask such questions. Next year, just go to the carnival. Find the darkest, most reclusive area—between the pop-a-balloon and the empty lot. Farthest from the Ferris wheel. There, you’ll find a small crowd. And a small stage. Stay and wait and watch and see. I’ll be there. I will certainly be among the audience. I want to see Exhibit five.
A small crowd had coalesced around it. One could easily imagine us platelets gathering at a wound.
It was not that the stage was more attractive than the other surrounding attractions. It had no blinking lights, no flashing signs. Perhaps it was, in fact, that the stage was older, dirtier than the others, with peeling paint and rotting wood and a moth eaten curtain. Perhaps it was the ancient-looking painted panels surrounding the stage. Perhaps none of us could have told you why we had been drawn to it. It held no promise of anything spectacular.
It was a sideshow. And that was reason enough. To gather. To wait. To watch. What we were waiting for, what we were hoping to see, what we would see—Well, that was anyone’s guess. We would simply have to wait, which brought us back to the same question for which we had no real answer.
It was a goddamn sideshow. That was answer enough.
Still, however, to this day, I struggle with these questions. How, after seeing what I saw, my life—or rather, my outlook on it—has changed. How my views about the solidity of anatomy and the tangibility of the fantastical were shattered. Why I was compelled to join the audience, I may never know.
We stood, still as pewter, gazing at the stage, the light of the single lantern swaying gently in the summer breeze, playing over our faces. And we all stood there, not knowing exactly why. But, had sideshows not always drawn those whose craving for the bizarre had been left untended to by the world outside the carnival? Was that not its purpose? To provide that nourishment?
The man appeared after a few moments of waiting, but if a blind man had been among us, he wouldn’t have known. The man’s movements were silent. And what a figure! Needle thin, wearing a skin tight coat, the tails of which flapped about his bony knees. A fantastic hat, half as tall as a man, was perched upon his head. All in all, a rather cartoon-ish character. At least half a head taller than any man I’d ever seen. He leaned on a cane of what appeared to be silver. But the strangest, most frightening aspect, was the fact that his entire head was wrapped in coloured ribbons, concealing his face entirely, from which hung countless crucifixes that clinked together like a peculiar blend of wind chimes and pocket change.
Despite his magnificent height, his footsteps fell all but silently on the rotted wood of the stage, and for moments that seemed to pass like molasses through a hypodermic needle, he was perfectly still. Perfectly quiet. His coat ceased flapping in the wind. He seemed the walking embodiment of the kind of quiet that stagnates between stars.
Then, all at once, he spoke, the audience gasping in surprise at the sudden break of silence.
“Welcome, friends! To the greatest sideshow on earth!”
He paused, his veiled face sweeping over the crowd.
“What you will see,” he continued, “Will shock you, amaze you, and…”
He paused again.
“…I pray frighten you. The Exhibits here— I ask you this—to disregard disbelief and abandon explanation. I assure you, there are none.”
With that, he spun on his heel and walked back into the darkness, though the curtains stayed open. The breeze kicked up, softly reminding us to recover the breath the man’s words had stolen. My heart beat with a fury that increased as moments passed, adrenaline surging through me, preparing me for I knew not what.
Then came the man’s dull, dry, monotone, somehow amplified into an echoing roar.
“Exhibit One.”
A slight pause, the echo fading in our ears.
“The Fantastic Sextuplets!”
Whatever we—whatever I expected to emerge from behind the curtain was promptly devoured by what did.
A mass of human limbs, flopping and clawing at the ground, slowly advancing towards us. It was a blur of human movement, and only when it stopped moving could I make out some anatomical order of the thing.
It was a person—or six people. The mass of arms and legs radiated from six torsos, grafted together by some means I doubt natural. I could make out no genetailia, despite the thing’s nakedness; however, three of the six faces bore a certain tenderness of features that denoted femininity. The heads were attached to each other by long flaps of flesh that pulled and distorted their faces into grotesque, saddening shapes.
The fantastic sextuplets.
I remember making a sick coughing sound. It was just so unnatural! Then silence. The kind of silence found in a church or at a funeral. Reverent. Sympathetic. What exactly was god-like about the being was debatable. What was pitiful about it—well, that was evident.
The thing squirmed for a while more. Then its movements became more desparate, and a sound resembling a wet phone book tearing flapped through the air. I think I knew what was happening before I let myself accept it. The stitches holding the mass of flesh together began to snap and break, blood spilling from the open wounds. Some of the audience in the front got wet with the spray. The whole thing, the whole Siamese thing broke into six separate beings. I was standing in the back. I’ve never gotten the blood out of my shirt.
Some turned their heads, others walked away, holding their mouths and stomachs. A child wept. My eyes stayed open and my feet stayed firm. In a few short, sharp movements, the process was complete. The six people—can I call them that?—were twitching in their own blood. It seemed to me that this was not part of the show, but who could really tell?
From the darkness, then, came six things about the size of porcelain dolls, their flesh so black they blended into the night around them. In their hands they carried poles topped with large, barbed hooks that looked like better days. These they swung down and drove into the six twins, each issuing a cry of agony. Then, displaying extraordinary strength for their mass, the doll-sized things dragged the still writhing, slick forms across the stage and behind the curtain.
“Thank you! Thank You!” came the man’s voice as if he were calming applause.
“And now! Exhibit two! Our Voluptuous mermaid!”
He left us not time for recovery of our senses, but merely blended exhibit after exhibit without intermission or breath.
The doll creatures emerged again. This time there were four of them, each pulling on a cord. On the other end of the cord was Exhibit two.
It was a great rectangular tank, about ten feet tall, filled with what may or may not have been water. Suspended in it was the mermaid. A woman, nude, her flesh a pale, sick, blue colour. The nipple on the one intact breast a dull purple. Her face was expressionless, her head perfectly hairless. I said it was a mermaid.
Well, its legs were by some means fused together, from her pubis to the bone by extensions that stretched the skin of what would have been her feet an extra yard or so. It was an amazing and terrible sight. One could do naught but stare.
Suddenly, she—it—began to pound violently on the glass, her face no longer expressionless but a twisted mess of rage, as if the tubes that ran through her had ceased to spit the sedative into her blood. The doll-sized things were quick to emerge and tow the tank back behind the darkness.
The audience was thinning dramatically. There was room now for me to move nearer the stage, so long as I was able to sidestep the pools of vomit.
“And now, Exhibit three. The…world’s…tallest…man!”
He said this with a drama that was soon justified. The darkness rolled back across the towering figure. Easily fifteen feet tall, his head was beyond the light of the lantern and seemed to fuse with the starless sky. I had to crane my neck to see the whole of his massive frame. He was even thinner than the showman, so thin indeed he seemed to be fashioned out of matches, his odd fitting clothes hanging loosely from his delicate yet massive limbs. He made a sound that slightly resembled a greeting, and looked down at us, his eyes catching the light of the moon. A look of murderous rage soon replaced the warm, gentle-giant look on his face.
But again, this seemed anticipated, and just as he let a wild roar tear at his lips, the doll-sized creatures had their hooks in him, pulling him back into the darkness of the stage. His howl of rage became one of physical agony that ripped open the dull noises of the carnival. After quite a few moments’ struggle, he finally fell back onto the stage and scrambled back behind the curtain.
Before the world’s tallest man had even disappeared into the dark, the man’s voice came again.
“Exhibit 4. The amazing fleshless beast!” his voice had an eerie quality to it, as if he were accomplishing something at our expense. But there was a tinge of affection, of pride behind the words, as if he were putting his own child, or a pet on display for his guests.
The thing didn’t come gradually onto the stage. It leaped. It could have been anything from a lion to a bear, or anything that walked on all fours. Its wide, tooth-filled, eyeless face seemed to beam at us, as if to tell us triumphantly: this is what we all look like when the outside goes away.
Three times the size of a man, it had no flesh, no fur. Just a walking mass of throbbing tissues and pulsing arteries. The sinews that hung from it were the closest thing to fur it had. Its back sloped into a great hump of muscle that glistened in the lights of the carnival, dripping its fluids onto the already bloodied stage. It paced back and forth for a while, allowing us to see it from all angles. Lord! What a revolting creature! I wouldn’t even begin to imagine the pain that every movement must bring, the suffering that every footfall was parent to.
Then it happened. All at once it seems. It bared its teeth and shifted its gaze towards me—directly at me—and leapt into the air. I was too terrified to move, let alone run. The audience scattered, fell to the floor, screaming. At that moment I was sure I was either to be maimed or killed or both.
But the beast never landed. Metal pipes shot out from its sides, stretching flaps of tissue into wing-like appendages, which caught the wind and lifted it up into the air just above my head; so close I could feel the juices raining down on me. I turned and watched it fly into the carnival, among the lights and attractions until it was obscured from sight.
Turning back to the stage, the man emerged from the darkness clapping, applauding himself.
“Fantastic! Riveting! Marvelous! Did I not tell you that this was the greatest sideshow on earth?! In all of creation? Yes!” He let loose a magnificent howl of laughter that shook the ribbons on his face.
In a matter of moments, before the crowd had time to react, the beast had returned. On the stage it dropped a woman I recognized from the crowd earlier, but had left after she saw the beast. She was screaming hysterically clutching an aged and bloated belly weeping between cries for help.
For her, I’m sure.
But mostly for the child inside of her.
The beast retreated to the darkness at a glance from his master, who had turned towards the screaming would-be mother.
With a shrill whistle he called forth the doll-sized creatures with their hooks.
They hooked the woman and pulled her writhing flesh into the dark.
He turned back to us.
“This,” he said, “is my fourth show! Be sure—those of you who enjoyed it—to join me again next year when,”
He turned his head to the darkness, which still spat the woman’s screams and the tearing of her flesh and some other sound entirely, though perhaps I imagined it, as I’m not sure if a fetus is capable of crying.
“You will see Exhibit five!”
He faced us again, his crucifixes jingling in the wind.
He continued in a slow, thoughtful manner, “Yes…Exhibit five.” Though there was no way to know, you could almost feel the ribbons shift as he smiled. The man turned on his heel and walked into the darkness, the lantern making silver pinpricks of crucifixes; the last we saw of him as the curtain fell and the screaming stopped.
I lingered a moment longer, entranced, bewitched, whatever word you like. I didn’t move, didn’t breathe for quite some time. When I could, I walked away.
We all left there—well, I cannot speak for the rest of them, but I certainly left there—with a change on my face I’m sure the night couldn’t hide. Something in me was different—altered eternally. Never would I look at the changelessness of flesh, the truth of being, or the solidity of anatomy the same again. Because, simply, none of them were real. Flesh is as alterable and fragile as circumstance, or papier-mache, it just takes a certain hand to shape it. Such a hand belonged to the ribbon-faced showman.
What’s behind the curtain? What waits in the darkness the lantern hides from us? Don’t ask such questions. Next year, just go to the carnival. Find the darkest, most reclusive area—between the pop-a-balloon and the empty lot. Farthest from the Ferris wheel. There, you’ll find a small crowd. And a small stage. Stay and wait and watch and see. I’ll be there. I will certainly be among the audience. I want to see Exhibit five.
...*vomits*
