The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival

The following is from my novel in progress, The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival.

PROLOGUE

Mim lived at the Eight Mile Suspended Carnival.  This is all she could remember about how she got there:

A column of wind sucked her from a forgotten dream, from the grey buzz of nothing.  The wind lifted her, spun her, and threw her, clanging, crashing down to that spot.

Mim couldn’t remember anything that happened before that wind.

“Wind is just air,” Mr. Suspenders, the carnival’s owner, said, but Mim knew more, angry air, maybe bee-stung air, screaming blind air, raging, like bees, but bees couldn’t sting the air, to sting, bees needed flesh: arms, hands, legs, and sometimes other parts.  Hands.  Mim knew wind wasn’t just air, or more accurately, she knew the wind that delivered her here wasn’t simple bee-stung air.  The wind had ripped her from something, something that had probably been important, maybe people, a family.  All she remembered, other than the grit and violence of the wind, was waking on the ground just west of The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival with torn clothing, bruises, cuts.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Scratch-land spread across the horizon.  Shrubs interrupted this line, but only in a patchy, occasional way.  Mostly, there was nothing, except in one direction: structures, machines, and buildings.  Crotchety spiny metal things sprung from the ground, sprouted from metal bits, dry-rusted weeds, forgotten, neglected.  Once painted bright yellow, red, and blue, but faded now from too much sun, from lack of notice, rot of time.  Things weren’t alive and green here, like things might be in some places.  This still place, this dry, dusty shadow, offered only silent repercussions of emptiness.

Metal monster machines lurched in a grand circle around a tall pole.  An assortment of small canvas tents trembled, lights peeking from openings like faces, eyes, but silent mouths, not wanting to disturb the sleeping machines.

A painted banner: THE EIGHT MILE SUSPENDED CARNIVAL.

If you looked closer, you’d see that the banner had been painted over, year after year.  The canvas clutched the paint; the banner might otherwise lose its name.  “Look,” the banner said, “I exist!”

The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival yearned to triumph, as the piles of rusty dirt eroded nearby, stagnant holes that had been dug long ago, endeavoring to appropriate who knows what.  The holes were never filled in.  The work was left mid-sentence.

The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival meanwhile sighed, but stood, what else was it going to do?  Forgotten, but not departed, layers, just words, The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival, faded layers of remembrance and forgetting, existence and extinction, again and again, layers of paint on The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival sign, unclinging surfaces, pink and blue and rusty red, and the dust of the paint mixed with the dust of the ground, and the raindogs barked (what else would raindogs do?) and so did Beatrice, that feathery creature, the one true attraction, side dish to the forgotten layers of wonderment: death, reincarnation, and how-much-longer-before-its-next-death carnival.

The ground shimmied like uneven scales from here to there, and back here, to a young scratch-girl who didn’t move.

Couldn’t.

The scratch-girl thought she was invisible.

She remembered only the wall of wind that had sucked her inside, thrown her, burnished and bruised her; she had become a stone, and the wind, a wall of steel, it pushed and pummeled and then abandoned her on this flat thing, the ground.  Drumming echoed in her ears, numbed them.  Now silence iced her ears over, and when the silence began to melt, the slow drip of its melting twisted her mind back onto itself.  She couldn’t move…the ground, magnetic, pulled her down, arms and legs, those invisible things above and below, all around; pain pressed her body on the cracked ground.  The light burned her eyes.  The icy silence melted through her ears and into her brain, and she was surrounded by thick nothing.

Everything hurt but she couldn’t feel any individual part of herself because it all hurt together, a clanking concert, a grinding symphony.  Drumming, cymbals, shouts, and trumpets, vibrations of pain, a cacophony of sting, rip, ache.

But then, someone in the field made sounds.  The sounds came closer; were they words?  Coming toward her?

She’d lain on that scratch-land forever forever forever.  Her shell hurt, and inside her shell was heat, pulsing, and so it seemed like she should try to move.  The parts tried to work together, the things you could use: arms, hands, legs, and sometimes other parts.  Hands.  In a cloud of anguish, muscles and bones sputtered, attempted to get up, get up, get up, but only echoes filled the air where there should have been motion.

Her throat hurt most of all.  She wanted water.

She heard those sounds, outside her body, and soon, footsteps.  A wet tongue leathered her forehead.  She opened her eyes and a blur of lady stood in front of her, and that bright thing, the sun, and again, something leathery licked her forehead.

“No, Beatrice!  She might be diseased!” the lady said.

The leathery thing was attached to a creature: narrow snout-head, long flat neck, grey-brown feather-fur, draped or dripped, all perched on two tall legs.  Its tongue across the girl’s forehead tickled, distracting from the pain of her shell.

The girl strained to clarify the shapes in front of her.

“Beatrice!”  The lady pulled the creature away and leaned down to the girl.  The girl smelled an overwarmed human smell, and heard metal jangle.  Metal draped from every part of the lady’s body.

“Who’s this?  Wait, I know,” the lady said, then closed her bulby eyes.  Her green eyelids had purple ditches beneath.  What interesting colors are in the world, the girl thought, but so unfocused.

“It’s Mim,” the lady said, “and you can call me Cleopatra.”

The name sounded almost familiar.

“You’re…in search of gold?  No, I see dark clouds.  No matter, here you are now,” Cleopatra said.

The girl felt her shell being lifted, and she cringed.

“Ooh, you’re all torn up,” Cleopatra said.

The girl was propped up by Cleopatra’s thin, velvet hands.  Hands not what they seem, the girl thought.  Maybe Cleopatra has someone else’s hands.

“I’m thirsty,” the girl said.

“Not gold?  Of course, water!  But I got the name right?”

Was it Mim?  The girl didn’t know.  “I don’t know,” she said.  A sharp twinge coursed through her hip; the shaggy creature pushed and dug into the ground beneath her.

“Beatrice, vamanos,” Cleopatra said.  “Where are your people?” she asked Mim.

Mim had no idea.  She told Cleopatra about the wall of wind.

“Well, you’ll stay with us.”

Cleopatra dragged Mim to her feet.  Beatrice nosed fully into the ground where Mim had been lying, and grabbed in her mouth a large vole.  She gnawed on it for a moment, and then trotted ahead of them.

“Can you walk?” Cleopatra asked.

Mim didn’t know this at the time, but her body would never fully let go of that ghastly choir.  Sometimes a betrayal, a tingle, sometimes a rumble, or quiver, but there was always motion, herself under the skin wanting to stay intact, but the restless skin pulling away, recoiling from her insides, skin with no desire to stay where it was.  She had a feeling (or was it a dream, or a memory?) of her skin peeling away, moving across the dry land, never to slither its way back to her, never again to cover her, contain, constrain her.  If the skin had betrayed her once, would it thereafter yearn for that freedom, unencumbered with containing a person, a soul?

If the skin could float, or slither, and be skin, only feel on the outside, things would be so much simpler.  No inside secret hidden jaunts, just sensation, straightforward skin with uncolored feeling.

Or maybe her skin hadn’t betrayed her.

Maybe that freedom was too frightening, too vast–maybe the skin needed to rein in her body, so the whole thing wouldn’t blow away.

One night, Mim would consider this.  She would hold onto her arms, bundle herself together in case her skin got any ideas in the dark; she would coil into a tight, safe cocoon.

But now Mim stood up carefully, supported by Cleopatra’s potent-smelling arm.  Pulled beside that meaty body, Mim winced.  Her shell hurt in new ways with each step.

Slowly, they approached the large cluster of spidery metal things, big tall things, and round things, and the structures that looked like giant metal flowers.  Mim saw others ahead, a gate, and the banner, paint clutching canvas.

“Welcome to The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival,” Cleopatra said.

Once inside the gate, they passed small tents and pens and booths, metal wrapped with cloth.  A greasy smell invaded Mim’s nostrils.  Past the metal structures, they came to a clearing in front of a ragged building, with a sign above that said the word Hotel.  A bald man wearing all brown sat on a low stool, carving a piece of wood.

“Beatrice went grazing, and look what I found,” Cleopatra said to the man.   “Girl says the twister dropped her over there.”

The bald man was called Mr. Suspenders.

“Get a cot for her, would you?” Cleopatra said.

“We can’t take in any strays,” he said, “Unless she can do something.  Some sort of work.”

Mr. Suspenders turned the wood in his hand several times, rubbing the surface, staring at Mim.  “Survived the twister.  Can you do anything, foundling?” he asked.

“Let her rest in my room first, she’s all torn up.”

“There’s plenty of rooms,” Mr. Suspenders said.  “This little one might want privacy.”

“She doesn’t want to be alone.  Let me take care of her.  She can stay with me.  Okay, Mim?”

“Okay,” Mim said.

“Can we trust her?” he asked Cleopatra, still staring at Mim.

“Would I have brought her back if no?”

“How did you make it through that storm?” he said.

“I don’t know,” Mim said.

Mr. Suspenders muttered something and held his knife as if to resume his carving, but did not.

Cleopatra led Mim inside the dark hotel, past dingy shapes, illuminated by lamps that glowed no more than moonbeams, or fireflies.  Although it was afternoon, paltry light penetrated the paper-covered windows.  They climbed a broad staircase, to the first landing.

“Take my bed until he brings a cot.”

Cleopatra’s room smelled like burned rice.  Mim coughed.  Something clicked and there was light.  Draped with all kinds of flimsy stuff, the suffocating room sighed.  From every surface, spheres and baubles glared at Mim.

Cleopatra eased Mim onto her wide bed.  “Now, let us figure you out.”  Cleopatra took some cards from her pocket, and placed them on a silk-draped table.  “You must remember something, a face, a dream, some echo?  I can’t purchase this idea of nothing.  Cards might help.  Or not.  Let’s try the real way.  How old are you?  You’re skinny, but you look about fifteen, yes?  With breasts, I think so.  Fifteen.  So watch those men around here.”

Mim surveyed the collection of glass and feathers, but it made her eyes hurt so she closed them.

Along with the grease of the Eight Mile Suspended Carnival, Mim smelled something else, something powdery and dark.  The twister had stirred something up; the odor took shape and seeped into her pores.  She felt textures, the roughness of the floor, and the shiny smoothness of the worn blanket that covered her in Cleopatra’s dank room.

And the symphony of pain played on inside her head, toured her body, banging with a sadistic rhythm.  She tried to muffle it but breathing did not help.  The band made sounds like steps, but then they were not inside her, they were real steps, voices, and the door opened, so she opened her eyes.

Mr. Suspenders came in with another man, who said he was a doctor.

“Doctor, like I’m Cleopatra,” Cleopatra said.

The man who said he was a doctor pulled things out of a bag, put a cloth on Mim’s chin, and lifted her head.

“Open your mouth,” he said, and she did.  Something warm dribbled down her throat, and soon Mim was falling asleep, and she slowly curled her shell into the shape of a claw, and this gave some relief.

===============

The smell of edibles, and the hollow in Mim’s gut woke her.  In the night, someone must have moved her from Cleopatra’s bed to a cot.  A thin bit of light crept across Cleopatra’s collection of round items.  Mim stepped through a thick porridge of soreness to get across the room.  She opened the door, and went downstairs.

A small man stirred a pot at a giant stove.  Ribbons trailed from the pointed top of his hat.

Mim knocked against a sideboard, and a tower of tin bowls tumbled, clattering on the floor.  The man yelped and turned toward Mim.

She started gathering the bowls.

“Don’t sneak up like that!  Scare a guy, then now,” the man said.

“I didn’t mean to.  Who are you?”

“Les’Onion, pleasure to meet you.”  He smiled, and tucked a long lock of hair under his hat.  “Hmm, not much respect left,” he said.  He would say this every morning at The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival.  Stirring his pot of respect.

“So you’re our new wastrel, eh?  You came by way of twister.  I heard they’re rebuilding what they can of Grayville, north of Wistmount.  We were lucky.  Dry as a skeleton here, though the sky wasn’t pretty, and cramming all those marks in the basement was a hell of a story, the which I shall spare you now.  Sit down, you’re probably hungry.”

Mim sat on a long bench at the table.  Les’Onion handed her a bowl of reddish soupy stuff, and a large spoon.  He dipped some into a bowl for himself, and sat across from her.

“Tell me about yourself, scrawny,” he said.

“Cleopatra found me.”

“Who?”

“Cleopatra, she said that was her name.”

Les’Onion laughed.  “You mean the fortune-teller.  Her name ain’t Cleopatra, dolly.  Far from it.”

“What’s her name?” Mim asked.

“Ask herself.  Anyway, what about you?”

“I can’t remember anything.  Just the wind.”  When she thought of the wind, her skin woke and quivered.

Les’Onion took a bite of the food.  “Needs more honey.”  He opened a lidded jar, and drizzled a spoon full of shiny amber over his bowl.  “You’ll want some too,” he said, and drizzled some on hers.

Mim tasted the reddish stuff.  It made her tongue tingle, but she was hungry, and it was sweet, so she ate.

===============

The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival stood shaky but determined, surrounded by scrubby brushes and dry nothing.  Across the river was the black powder munitions works, what Mr. Suspenders called the death pill factory.  Small, shabby buildings lined the bank, tracks and carts connecting it all.  Mr. Suspenders said the death pill factory was built in this diffuse way, so that when a man did something stupid, like smoke a cigar, and something blew up, the damage wouldn’t be complete.

===============

Some nights while Mim recuperated in Cleopatra’s room, she was back inside the roar, the wall of wind, and its energy tossed her from one place to another, murky places where unclear people blended into each other.  All people resembled all other people.  For Mim, looking at faces was a waste of effort, the ones who came to the carnival from the death pill factory…Mr. Suspenders called them spent marks, but all faces were insignificant because Mim could see their insides, their memories.  And while Mim slept, she dreamed that Mr. Suspenders blended with the other men, and entered the death pill factory, and Mim herself was draped with feathers or fur, like Beatrice.  Wind made everything happen, wind was all there was sometimes, wind kept at it, wind quieted everything else; wind made everything stop and watch its terrible feats.

===============

Uncurl the shell.  Go outside.  Watch the craggy faded faces of these carnies who didn’t even know for sure, but seemed to accept that she was, in fact, Mim.  Who else would she be?  She was glad for their food and shelter.

===============

Mim wore her name like a new dress.  She didn’t have anything else, really, to prove her being.  Mim would have to be enough.