Breathing Deep on a High Wire

She adjusted the strap of her bodysuit. The sequins were digging into her shoulder again. She glanced down at her cleavage, making sure everything was securely tucked away into the costume with just enough of the creamy swell rising above to be enticing but not indecent. Men would inevitably take notice but children of all ages would be mesmerized as she juggled flaming batons atop the high-wire.

As she sat in front of the mirror, she looked at her overly made-up face, resplendent with hues only found in nature on the tails of peacocks. She slicked on one more dab of lip gloss and smiled; teeth were all clear. She ran her fingers down her long, dark ponytail, thankful for the return of her natural color. He had always hated her dark hair so she had bleached it for years. Funny how the light hair made her world seem dark and her dark hair was comforting and made her feel light as a feather. That feeling helped when she had to concentrate on her balance on a thin wire over 100 feet above the ground.
She checked her smartphone for the dozenth time in less than an hour. No message yet. How much longer would she have to wait? The friend that worked for the lawyer was to let her know as soon as the sentencing was handed down. It should have been over long ago. She looked at herself in the mirror again carefully. The makeup covered the smudges under her eyes that betrayed her sleepless nights. As shaky as she felt though, once she climbed that ladder and lit the batons, her nerves were always steady. She woke with a purpose each day: to hear the gasps and claps that let her know her efforts were appreciated. It was something that gave her joy.

BUZZZZ! She jumped involuntarily and checked her phone. “Jury and judge coming back now,” she read.

She closed her eyes, tried to take a deep breath but it got stuck somewhere in her throat. Her mind took her against her will, much as he had done in that cabin, to dark places in the past. Why hadn’t she fought harder or tried to get away earlier? She mentally berated herself again for blaming the wrong person. HE was the bastard who had done this to several other women before her. He had pushed her into believing all sorts of lies including how she was nothing and could never escape. But she had.

Once she had gotten away, she realized she had acquired a set of balls that he seemed to have no use for; in her mind, only an impotent eunuch preys upon those he sees as weak. She sort of laughed to herself and thought, I took his balls as he wasn’t using them, the coward. She had shown bravery as she recounted to police all the details she could recall. She had gone back to the circus as soon as her body had healed, intuitively knowing it would also help heal her soul as well.
She stood and walked to a small flap in the tent. She peeked through and saw the man with the tigers, using a whip to guide them to their spots in the cage. Like a carefully choreographed dance, the powerful yet seemingly languid beasts circled the man and took their spots atop some stacked chairs. So much strength constrained by some bars of a cage! Hopefully soon he too would be held at bay in a cage.

She glanced into the stands and noticed a group of children. A school group, by the looks of the matching bright red shirts they all wore. They were laughing. She craned her neck and saw the object of their mirth: three clowns were chasing and tripping each other in the next ring. She looked back at the children. Their faces were almost glowing. She couldn’t remember feeling a joy that could and should be taken for granted. If not for her friends, she knew she wouldn’t even have the hope of finding that joy again. But as she shed her pain and shared her trials, she connected with others and found everyone had their own tales of woe.

One of the clowns’ wives died last year after a three-year battle with cancer. An animal trainer just found out last week that her husband was leaving her for a bank teller back home. A backup dancer who needs to have knee surgery is worried about insurance. The couple who get shot out of matching cannons together just suffered a miscarriage. So trite but true, friends sharing makes burdens lighter.

Buzzz… Buzzz… She had been daydreaming about her first job as a high-wire act for the circus when her phone buzzed and vibrated on the table.

“Guilty. 99 Years. No parole. Breathe!”

Whoooosh! She could finally release the breath she had been holding. She felt so light she thought maybe she’d float to the very top of the Big Top. Two Years. Over 2,000 miles. Lots of trips up the ladder. Lots of balancing on a thin high-wire.

April 27, 2013 0

It’s Not the Velocity

It happened after he fell over the stump. He lost consciousness, his friends said, for several minutes. They had been playing tag, nothing more. They noticed the bump on the back of his head when they tried to rouse him. One boy said David must have hit the large, misshapen root of the old tree when he fell. When his eyes fluttered open, he smiled at his friends and said “I’m It.”

Years later, David would recall those words and wonder exactly what he had become. With his studies and research he had pieced together the trajectory of his fall, the velocity, the distance, the angle of impact, the force of his skull on the tree root. No, the fall did not kill him as it could have, nor did his head split open and spill its contents on the ground. Rather, his brain had undergone some other kind of change altogether and imploded in the nicest possible way. If being the smartest man on earth was to be considered nice.

As David grew and was tested and taught and developed, it was determined he had suffered some sort of trauma that resulted in a permanent benign growth that pressed and intruded on his brain. He was a super genius. Before long, he was in demand from think tanks all over the world.

It was difficult to shut out all the thought processes of which he was capable and just be in the moment. But lord did he try! When he was young, he felt he knew too much about too many things to enjoy them. After amassing several degrees at an accelerated rate in school, he proceeded to defile himself in the pursuit of understanding the appeal of carefree youth. But it never quite worked as he was never carefree. He could not quite shut off the ongoing commentary in his head explaining all the events around him, from the weather to a football game to a school dance; his brain would calculate the odds of rain based on observable data, the physics and strategy of the ballgame, the body language and social cues of awkward teens following the age-old dating rituals. He found the only time he could focus on one thing at a time was when he saw Lisa.

When he saw her, he didn’t think of math but of poetry. Instead of working on his Planck report, he wanted to study Van Gogh’s irises, as they were the same color as her eyes. It was such a relief to not be the smart kid for once that he relished his time near her. He didn’t dare approach her, as he was certain by her social cues she would not be interested in him as a possible dating specimen, but he still unabashedly admired her whenever he could.

The closest he came to completely losing his cool was the one time she spoke to him. Years later, he could remember every detail of that moment: the color of her shirt, the way her jeans caressed her slight curves, the ponytail that dangled over one shoulder, how she leaned her head to her right/his left when she asked for a napkin at the lunch table. He didn’t recall what lunch tasted like that day because his senses were saturated with her nearness, her lilac smell, and her small fingers that brushed his as she took the napkin from him.

Sitting in his office as a grown man, he could only but laugh at the memory of the nerdiest boy staring at the beautiful girl next door. What tripe! What a cliché! But as he looked out his window and saw the city lit for the night, he again wondered at how tripping over the tree stump had rendered him a lonely, smart man. He had undoubtedly helped many people with his discoveries and research. But he was so alone with his thoughts. There was a part of him that remained the David pre-stump, happy with a group of friends. Now he only had colleagues and lackeys. It was time to try something radical. Get out of his own head, so to speak. As he looked at the ticket on his desk, he knew this was a chance. The retreat focused on meditation and back to basics nature stuff. Not his thing at all. But he had never experienced anything like this, thinking of only himself with nothing to gain but some peace. It would be a mental challenge to shut out the world and find the boy within.

After one month, two episodes of freaking out, several crying jags, and more laughter than he could remember, David found himself walking alone through a forest. He stopped and stared at a leaf falling from a tree. It fell slowly, the soft breeze carrying it gently as if to cradle it all the way to the ground. As the leaf finally came to rest on some moss, David realized he hadn’t thought of any equations pertaining to the leaf’s fall, nor the processes of leaves changing color, nor anything except to just watch it and admire its grace as it fell.

Smiling, David turned to go home, knowing he had found peace just like he knew he would, once he put his mind to it.

March 27, 2013 0

Vintage Watch

Vintage Watch

He was feeling on top of the world. That always sounded like such a stupid phrase before today. Especially since he usually felt he looked at the world through a skewed scope from the ground up. But now he found himself looking at the tops of skyscrapers and ruminating about the shapes of clouds. Things are definitely looking up, he thought to himself.

As he walked, he found he needed some air and some elbow room so he turned off the crowded sidewalk and onto a quieter alley with faded signs and some old cars parked on one side. He looked at the dingy shop windows as he walked. Old books. A record store. A coffee shop. Old suitcases and things. A tailor. Wait. Back up. What was that next to the old suitcase? He stopped and looked in the window. A watch. Why did it look so familiar? He found himself walking into the shop as if his feet were moving of their own volition.

The cozy smell of musty old attic permeated his nostrils. Specks of dust floated in the air like snowflakes. He gave a cursory look to the baubles and umbrellas and books and hats and shoes and pipes and photographs and pennants and scarves and glasses and watches and… there it was. The watch in the window. He looked around for someone to wait on him. He heard some rustling near the rear of the store so he just waited and looked at the watch. It wasn’t moving but somehow he knew how the ticking would sound. He didn’t touch it but somehow he knew the weight of it on his wrist. He could almost recall how the small scratch on the left side of the face had gotten there.

Suddenly the shopkeeper spoke to him, asking if he’d like to try it on. He nodded. The clerk took the watch from the display, held it for a moment, and then handed it over. The man put it on his wrist, fastening the band. The clerk said something about how it looked good on him or he wore it well or something like that. He wasn’t really listening. He was hearing… music? Had Big Band been playing on the radio when he walked in?

He thanked the old shopkeeper and walked out of the shop. It took maybe 35 seconds (the watch had just needed a good winding) for the man to realize something had shifted. Something was different. When he stopped admiring his wrist accoutrement, he looked up. Holy shit! Was he dreaming? Hallucinating? It was as if he was looking at an old issue of LIFE magazine. Everything looked clean, new. The buildings looked washed. Men wore hats and ties. Women had tailored dresses and heels. The cars looked vintage…1940-something. Was he on a movie set? He looked around for a camera crew, ready to apologize for walking in a shot, possibly ruining a take, but he saw no cameras.

Instead he saw people walking briskly by him, some tipping their hats, some smiling a quick smile. He walked a few paces then turned around. The shop was still there. The shopkeeper was looking at him through the window. Then he was gone. Wait. There he was at the door. The man went to him and raised his eyebrows as if to say, what the hell? Do you see this too? The man spoke.

“Try it on for three days. That’s our policy. You’ve got three days to find if it’s a good fit or all can be returned.”

The man looked again at his wrist. He knew the clerk wasn’t just talking about the watch. He also knew somehow that he was home. Modern living had never appealed to him. He didn’t like the disheveled state of the world he had left behind. He knew there was still hope in this decade. People hadn’t lost hope yet. He at least could hope here.

He nodded again, not finding a voice to ask the myriad questions cropping up in his head. He continued walking, marveling at how familiar the scene looked to him. He knew the shops and could recall most of the owners’ names. He neared the crossroads, not sure what the busy city street he had originally turned off would look like now. It was still busy. But slower. People didn’t seem to be in such a hurry. And it was quieter. The whole atmosphere was more polite.

He went directly to the coffee shop he knew from the next block and sat at the counter. Ordered coffee. When the waitress asked if he wanted pie, he declined. But she added that it was his favorite, apple pie. When he looked into her eyes, he saw a familiar gleam and said yes to the pie.