out the poison, her Jeridian genes helping her to heal. Swinging in over Deralisee’s permanent carnival pitch, Cyber Circus had descended out of one of the last blue skies of the year, a colossal beast of brass and biomorphed flesh, to take centre stage amongst Deralisee’s bountiful celebrations.
The lights dim. All is hushed inside the green-tinged underworld of the circus tent.
A soft melody begins to pipe from the calliope. Notes that are fine and sweet, like longed-for rain. She appears – a figure in white beneath the blaze of a spotlight. Her dress is enticingly translucent; it skims her ankles and clings to her thighs, waist, ribs and breasts. Her hair is a cascade of orange flame.
When she dances, Desirous Nim seems to ripple like a petticoat pegged out to dry in the wind. So beautifully she arches her bare feet, lifting and lowering her arms like water flowing – and isn’t she divine? This exquisite desert flower. This fragile reed.
The drums start to beat. Soft at first, as a steady heartbeat. Building and building over time. The lights dim further so that the crowd are forced to squeeze up their eyes and peer into the gloom. The drums grow ever more agitated, rolling over themselves into sonic waves.
Boom! Boom! Boom! The base drum kicks in. Nim sets herself ablaze and the drums turn tribal. She’s shining now from beneath her made-new skin – a light storm of purest white.
Which is when a second figure takes to the stage. An offbeat beauty. Eyes set wide. Mouth slashed like a scar. Her clothes are pinned tighter at places it won’t show, petticoats and a scarlet corset borrowed from Nim. Her stage name is Charm, Conjuress of Seasons. She steps up into the circus ring, and her hands lift and the dust across the ground begins to dance.
The drums beat ever faster. The dust swirls, a magnetised cobra. It breezes out past the edges of the ring, lifts and swooping over the heads of the gasping audience. In time, Charm brings the magic grains back inside the circle and waltzes with them spilt out over her two hands. At the centre of the ring, Nim continues to flood the circus tent with her gleam while Charm directs the dust to ripple in beneath the courtesan’s feet.
Liftng her hands towards the spot-lit heavens, Charm agitates the motes to rise. On a wave of pulsing drums and spellbound dust, Nim ascends ten metres above the ground. She pirouettes air-bound. Light spills out from the heart of her over the world of the circus.
The others emerge then from behind the backstage curtain. A ladyboy flashing teeth and feminine wiles as he skips about the ring. The pig man who is yet awkward on the stage but grunts and squeals with bold enthusiasm. A savage black-eyed girl who bounds in on all four limbs, jaw snapping, gore matted in her mane. And the HawkEye, a man of flesh and metal who scans the crowd with his whirring eyepiece and stalks into the centre of the ring. He holds a hand up to Nim and she takes it.
On a balcony above, the ringmaster hops from foot to foot, waving his extravagant feathered hat as the calliope pipes its last song of the night.
“Goodnight ladies. Goodnight gentlemen. Goodnight Saints and goodnight sinners. Goodnight one and all from the sensational, lavational, electrisical, metaphysical Cyber Circus!”
BLACK SUNDAY
Wesley Sanders edged the drink onto the table.
“There ya’rl, Miss Nightingale. Iced lemonade, or as Momma’s prone to call it, sunlight in a glass.”
The eight year old grinned. His teeth were large and very white, as if slicked with whitewash like the exterior of the Grace Presbyterian Church. His cheeks were nut-brown apples.
Carrie-Anne leant forward in her rocker and put her toes to the floor. She smiled back. “Thank you, Wesley. Tell your momma, she sure does know how to soothe the spirit.”
Wesley bobbed his cap. He waltzed off down the porch, humming one of those slow sad negro church songs he was prone to. Even after he’d swung through the inner gauze and disappeared inside the house, Carrie-Anne could hear the tune. It seemed to nestle down inside the dry Oklahoma heat and stay there, whispering at her.
She picked up the lemonade, rested the sole of a bare foot against the table and rocked. Julie Sander’s eldest, Abraham, had painted the porch a light grey colour before he’d abandoned Bromide for Oklahoma City last fall. That afternoon, the paint shade complimented the troubled sky where blue and lavender clouds roiled.
A storm was coming. What kind, Carrie-Anne wasn’t sure. This time of year, it could be hail, could be lightning, could be a twister. But she welcomed it. The weather was unseasonably close. It licked at the nape of her neck where her shoulder-length hair clung, and at each underarm, leaving sweat stains on her new cotton dress. Everything induced slumber. Except the cold lemonade.
Carrie-Anne put the glass to her lips and sipped. She wanted to stay mindful. The back gate needed fixing; she’d set the new yardman on it with instructions to go about replacing the struts. One of her stockings had a run that wouldn’t darn itself. Plus the whole house needed airing.
She’d noticed as much that morning. Rising from her blankets at the tail end of night, she’d descended the stairs and glimpsed the place as with an outsider’s eye. Everything was layered with dust. She’d got a rag to it. But as she beat the motes, she’d felt a familiar, inexplicable crackling along her bare arms. Lips parted, she’d held up a hand to the window. In the first rays of dawn, the dust had appeared to dance near but never touch her skin, as if magnetically repelled...Seconds later, she’d heard footsteps on the stairs and Julie Sanders saying in her quiet way, “Sure is dusty, Miss Nightingale. I’ll light a flame under the coffee pot then get to helping ya.”
Carrie-Anne braced her foot against the table and stayed tipped back on the rockers. Having filled the role of nursery nurse ever since Carrie-Anne first arrived at Boar House, aged eight and orphaned, Julie was like family, as were her boys. Which was how the woman knew to fill the house with the clarifying aroma of coffee and just join in shaking out the dust that morning. Also how she knew to dispatch Wesley with cool lemonade when the gate was still broken, the stocking still torn, the house still dust-riddled.
All the same, Julie’s best efforts had failed. With the heat cooking in around her, Carrie-Anne found it impossible to rouse herself to any thought but one.
Even wearing ear mufflers, he couldn’t escape the terrible clanking as fragments of rock in the sand ricocheted off the drill. The cockpit shuddered with each impact. His jaw ached from clenching his teeth to stop them jarring. The four-point Sutton harness rubbed the same sore spots it did every run; Virgil imagined Carrie- Anne slavering the blisters with peppered grease. Lust alleviated his discomfort. The excavations were pivotal to his work, but, Christ, he missed that gal. Her baby scent when she soaped the sweat offa her. Those frank blue eyes and wide mouth. He liked her off-beat beauty.
“Stop tugging your little john back there, Virgil, and crank the boiler. That last sheet of bedrock took the best of old Bessie’s heat.” Straining at the front harness, Josephine Splitz attempted to glare back over her shoulder.
Virgil knew he’d just be a blur at her peripheral vision. He crossed his arms over his crotch all the same.
“Sorry, Jos. Its hot’s all. Got me sweating like a hog ripe for slaughter.”
Grabbing a battered iron scoop off a hook overhead, he drove it through the coke trough that ran alongside his chair and used the other hand to open the iron flap in the Burrower’s wall. A tremendous gush of heat spilt into the cabin. He shook the coke down the shoot and shut the hatch.
“Another couple.”
If the old coot’d had eyes in the back of her head, Virgil guessed they’d have been lit up and smiling. Twice more he drove the scoop into the coke and threw the fodder down the boiler’s throat.
Reaching overhead, he took hold of a leather loop and tugged several times, feeling the papery air off the bellows feed the cabin and boiler simultaneously. Glancing past Josephine’s shoulder, Virgil saw the needles creep up in the rack of brass and glass gauges. The steering wheel juddered under the old girl’s hands, and he thought he heard her wince despite the wads of muslin she’d taped around the triangulated steel bar. Any other octogenarian shoehorned into the cramped quarters of the Burrower would’ve screamed for death’s release long ago. But
