Everglades National Park, 201X
5072 °F
What I remember most about the Everglades is the breathing practice, the gradual realization that the fresh water was not for me, that it was hurting my blood chemistry. I remember this because I spent hours down there at a time, sifting through the riverbed for metals. I would bring up knives and golf clubs from the bottom of the lake. At sunrise, I’d bring them back to the garage and watch them melt down in the window of the box furnace. I found a gold watch around a dead man’s wrist and we used it to make the wedding bands. And obviously, I remember the wedding, but that’s a story for another time.
June spent her nights on the trailer’s pullout couch and her days in the marsh with me. The heat was wearing her thin. I had run her too ragged. I didn’t resent it when she stayed curled up in front of the fan or spent hours in the bathhouse. It was hard for me to do the same, though. I felt invincible at the time, really ready to kill everyone. When I finally did find the carnival, I slammed through the entry gates like I had paid for the building permit. I didn’t even have the sword yet.
I didn’t find Anna on my first day - nothing I would recognize as her. The carnival looked different during the day. The tent’s vibrant colors were fading into pastels under the hot sun. Kids were running around unchaperoned, but so was I.
The sky turned violet every day before sunset. I was up to my neck in the brack water when little halos began to form on its surface and the rain of a sunshower doused my head. I floated — and soon Sobe came over to join me. I rode on his back through the canopy of the willow trees. The raindrops made a soft rhythm against the scales.
Sobe would curl up by the shore with just his snout above the water. I walked out along his head like it was a gangway and had to jump to get clear of his front teeth. Up on the hill, the garage was empty, but full of heat. Even further up, June was sat up in front of the trailer, reclining in some beach chair she had found in the reeds. She was wearing an old beer shirt, drinking an old beer, getting both of them wet. I sat down in the dew-grass beside her.
Not long after, Ducky came out and pitched an umbrella just for himself. I told them that I had found the circus. Ducky told me that the kids were going missing there. He said he could hear them crying out through the psychic membrane.
“Where do they go when they go?” I asked, at which point he ceased to be helpful. I missed Micah dearly.
That night I actually slept inside that papered catacomb and let the walls speak to me. I tried to pierce through the veil in my sleep and to get back on the other side of it. I tried to draw up more memories of Anna and around 4am I realized I had been telling myself stories about her. The memories were wrong and if they weren’t wrong, they were distortions. I poked at the hole in my chest and willed Ursula to speak from inside it, but ever since I’d entered the glade she only droned on in contented mutters and purrs. I fell asleep to the electric hum of the mosquito zapper hanging by the door.
“What do you know about Annabella?” I asked Ducky by the first light of day. He pulled out a volume off the bottom shelf. The funny thing with a seer in isolation is that they reject the symbolic language any human would be familiar with. Their symbol language is their own or it is nonexistent. Looking at the drawing of Anna, I couldn’t tell which he had chosen. I was sure I would never (again?) see her as she really was. I read, which is what I wanted to do anyway.
She was a clown and had been one for as far back as the sight reaches. She had lived in the castle the same as he had. I thought the drawing looked particularly doll-like. There was no indication in the text whether she had been created or maybe just captured. She was a jester to her lord, who showed her the same grace he showed most living things.
“Did he break her up into parts or was she always like that?” I pointed to the different branches - Anna, Belladonna, Calliope. He kinda shrugged at me. There were books upon books in this trailer and this was the only one he had to describe her. I asked him, “Does she like to wear disguises?”
What I think about Anna is that more than anything, she likes to be up against and beneath the skin. I think she stretches herself thin and uncurls in hidden places. I think she must see herself as a netting, that there’s something she wants to catch that she can’t make on her own. I think that she’s a parasite and I pity her. I should’ve spent more time looking through the papers, but I just couldn’t make myself pay attention to the words that were written there. Ducky showed me old myths that the clown had crept into, dialectics between her and other members of the court. It was all tired and familiar and forgotten. It made me too depressed. I felt an amnesiac’s dread.
June and I took the airboat out to the carnival that day. It was going on properly now, almost seamlessly. I didn’t look too hard at the carnies or clowns. They only looked strange in the periphery. We managed to have an OK time in spite of this. I won June a stuffed bear in a dart throwing game. We didn’t eat any of the food that came out of the fairground.
We went back several times, both day and night, and very seldom saw anything that might raise suspicion. June asked if I would just leave it alone – a real question, not a hidden request. I thought about it too. On the third night, Anna came out of her tent.
She smelled sweet sugar-rot and earth. Her hair was soft pink, the same color as the ballet slippers she skimmed the ground with. Her eyes were obviously fake. Even the kids seemed to notice they were painted on. Still, she saw me.
I asked Ducky if he would make me a sword, or if he’d spare me one he had lying around. It was ready by the next night, steel inlaid with gold. Despite his age, he worked at a breakneck pace by the forge.
From then on, I didn’t walk the fairgrounds without it, and Anna wouldn’t leave me alone. When it wasn’t her, she sent a minion, the dumb one. June and her would shoot the shit while I drew sigils into the dirt with my heel. We didn’t have to be hostile to each other. We knew there’d be plenty of time for that.
The clowns get overfamiliar quickly. A tall one caught us by the funhouse and offered to show us a magic trick. The large spore in her hands spun and flickered. I made out the first hints of animation before the ink blotted out my vision. Ursula had kept me from staring too long. June had not been so lucky. I pulled the black mucus from my retinas to find her stupefied and frozen. I smacked the seeds into the grass. The clown slapped my hands back, which I guess she thought was cute. June came to a little while after. Now, I could make out the same look of hypnosis on the faces of the children and June’s eye would snag on the object of focus. She took it personally. She wouldn’t go back anymore except to destroy it.
Did we overreact? Maybe. But that was the same week we learned Sobe could breathe fire. We ended up being vindicated afterwards, upon the discovery of the half-digested missing children, so that was nice.
I really wanted to let Anna live. I came in through the front gates with my sword sheathed just to look for her. I liked Anna. But she was ready for me, you know that?
She can be…very disarming. I don’t know if it was the spores or the same ether she gave the others, but the veil couldn’t block it out. She was magnetic. I lost the sword at some point, sat docile while she braided my hair back into a fishtail. She might’ve won if she hadn’t thought to bring me to the water.
This is maybe the only time she’s ever made me laugh. I woke up in an aquarium with a bunch of kids tapping on the glass. The sign said
There was no lid to the tank. I climbed out, ruined the show. You know the rest.
Three times that night I sank under the waves. The first time, I woke up to the inside of a fish tank. The second time, the inside of a circus tent. The third time, the inside of a burning circus tent. The last was probably the worst, because it was the same restless “sleep” I always get when Ursula wakes up. It was a hazy dream, the kind they told me to stop writing about. For our purposes, it’s irrelevant. The tent was burning down, so I didn’t stay in it.
Nobody else was left on the fairground except for people I already knew. They told me later how they’d gutted the pods to get the victims out, how June had uprooted the clowns with her bare hands, but I didn’t see any of that. When I came out, the only thing they were waiting for was me.