Olympia Knife by Alysia Constantine

Author:Alysia Constantine [Constantine, Alysia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: literary fiction, LGBT fiction, lgbt, lesbian
ISBN: 9781945053276
Publisher: Interlude Press
Published: 2017-11-02T06:00:00+00:00

Seven

The Disciplined Bear and His Tutor

With only the sideshow and no main tent, the circus was no longer a circus, but simply an Attraction (and they kept the name “The Stephens Great Attraction” because they were already known in the smaller towns through which they traveled). They left the main tent and all its riggings behind when they left Georgia; there were fewer wagons left in their caravan, and the poor horses could benefit from the easier load. The much smaller sideshow tent more easily looked filled, too, and with much smaller crowds trickling in to see the Attraction on even their biggest days, Madame Barbue and Minnie wanted to maintain at least the illusion of a full house and a successful show.

Everyone learned to do everything that needed doing, from washing dishes to rigging tents to driving wagons and mending costumes; in such a small crew, every hand was precious. Minnie took over doing the books and constantly wandered between trailers, worrying over the expense of feeding the horses, or feeding the performers, or buying even one more sequin. Somehow, though the Attraction was several times smaller, the work and the worry seemed to have multiplied several times over.

Despite all their best efforts at cutting back and shoring up, everything began to fall quickly and completely apart. Trailers hit rutted ground, lost wheels, and were abandoned empty by the roadside after their contents were consolidated into other wagons. The sideshow tent developed two new and very large rips in the canvas and, though Minnie worked to mend the tent with string and a thick needle until her fingers were red and bleeding, new tears appeared in the fabric every time it was unfurled and at last she gave up keeping it repaired and allowed it to batter itself to shreds, to become at last a great, flapping, roofless striped fringe around the performance space, barely a gesture at either decoration or shelter.

Minnie even considered, on one particularly mean day, getting rid of Samu and his bear Viselik, who ate like the quarter-ton beast he was and shat and roared and paced in his heavy iron cage, which required its own wagon, pulled by two horses specially dedicated to that purpose. But she hadn’t the heart and never raised the possibility aloud.

Samu, for his part, abandoned his trailer, sold most of his belongings in Georgia, and took to sleeping and riding with his bear in the six-by-twelve-foot cage car. He was used to small spaces shared with dangerous creatures; he’d traveled to America from Hungary in the hold of a ship, smuggled with his parents and twelve hostile, hungry men who leered at his mother so threateningly, she would only sleep during the daytime when Samu and his father could watch over her. In New York, they’d lived for months in a tiny factory dormitory with so many other people that Samu barely slept and, when he did, he huddled with his parents on a pile of their belongings, lest anything be stolen or any one of them harmed as they slept.

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