Did I mention I like Dr. Cherie? It was creeping upon 11:30 a.m. when she finally pulled Detective Plume outside of the interview room to chat with the others who had been watching from behind the glass. I chose the chair that gave them all the view of my back when they ushered me into the small, refrigerated room and quickly sat down before they could suggest the actual chair that was meant for me; the one that allowed them to view my face. I knew they wouldn’t make a fuss over my selection.
It had been more like 8:45 a.m. when Ms. Keisha had finally came to the house and got me. The knock on my bedroom door spoke volumes about her arrival. It is only when she is here that he knocks. I quickly threw on something that discounted my features. I was back in hell and, fuck it, I wanted to look like it too. I didn’t even wash off his scent from my skin from last night. Maybe I had hoped she would smell him and just know, but even I knew better than that.
I said nothing the entire ride over to the precinct. I had to keep reminding myself that she was the reason why I was back in that house and it was barely, but just enough weight to keep my arms from throwing themselves around her when she reached in for a hug. Instead, I breezed past her and jumped into the back seat of the loaner she drove over and pressed my face into the glass of the window behind the driver seat with one purpose. Daddy is too much of a gentlemen to let her drive while he is in the car and this position obstructed his view of me from the rear-view mirror.
It was to be Dad’s first day back, so, naturally, they clucked and clustered with our entrance. I threw on my sullen-teenager-who-had-been-through-some-shit expression and that kept them from prodding and patting me for the most part. Then they went off a bit to talk-- Dr. Cherie, Dad, Captain Jones and Detective Plume. I could see Dr. Cherie protesting something before relenting before I was ushered into the small room. Dr. Cherie took the chair opposite me and waited. Ms. Keisha came in a bit later with another chair and sat adjacent to her.
She then whispered something to Dr. Cherie before relaying it directly to me in her honeyed drawl. “Suga, it may give you some comfort to know that Mr. Samuels passed ova this mo'nin’.” I know in her own way she thought this would make me feel better. It didn’t.
It was purely unintentional, honestly. Dr. Cherie had mistaken my silence for insecurity and had stepped out of the room to contest the location of, and the number of participants present for, this interview; a battle she had previously fought about when we first arrived and lost. But I literally couldn’t speak. Hearing about Dirt hit me like a ton of bricks. Dirt was decent. Definitely not a knight in shining armor, more like a knight in aluminum foil. He had one good side and one not as nice but after everything that had happened, I still wouldn’t wish him harm. I can’t believe he is gone. Wow, that is on me and Ring.
Shortly after they stepped outside, Ms. Keisha came back in and told me we would be finishing up the interview in Dr. Cherie’s office. I mouthed a thank you to her as I stood up, careful not to let Dad see that part and then turned my face towards the glass for the first time. The burn from his gaze previously in my back was felt dead on now. He was angry and I don’t know why I wasn’t frightened this time but I let my eyes connect with the spot I thought was his and let a slight smile show.
Dr. Cherie’s office was private. It would be only us this time. It was also considerably warmer and it wasn’t just the temperature. She had artwork, inspirational quotes and pictures of the kids she had helped in a collage on one of the walls. I recognized one boy from my feed-- Little Johnny Doe. He was found wandering the highway one town over, not far from the car parked on the side of the road with his dead parents in the front seat. Overdose. He was smiling in the picture his foster parents took and sent to her. The note underneath had his handwriting, “I love you, Ms. Joy.”
Dr. Joy Cherie made a small remark in regards to the change of scenery that refocused me back to the task at hand and triggered my nerves. I knew I would actually have to tell them something this time and I don’t know why but I just cried. Ms. Keisha bent down at my side, put her arm around me and explained that because Dirt was dead, the case would be closed pretty quickly and that I only needed to confirm a few details for the written record. I know she thought, somehow, this would make me feel better but it didn’t.
Detective Plume asked me a series of questions with considerable pauses between each one; all of which I ignored. I couldn’t hear her over the tick of the hand of the clock on the wall just above little Johnny that seemed to coincide with the hard thumping that was happening in my chest. And I know it’s not possible, but I swear that I could feel his anger grow crimson with each of those thumps I was gone. It was distracting. I just put my face into my hands and apologized.
It was when Dr. Cherie suggested I start from the beginning that sounds finally escaped my throat. She told me to pick a place as far back in time as I had wanted and to just talk. That it didn’t need to make sense. It didn’t have to follow any logic. It didn’t even have to be related to this case. She said, “just talk.” So I swallowed a fraction of my worries and recounted one of my happier memories of us, of a time when I had briefly forgotten that life is shit.
I told them that she was the beginning of us. That all of us were there before she came but it was her who made us a family. She made us belong. Then I began to blur the lines of reality just a bit and although it may have been as strange to hear as it was to say, somehow, it all just made sense.
I told them that our family was part of a circus. A traveling freak show of sorts that went from town to town, baring our insecurities for our daily bread and that one, cold night in the winter, during one of our performances, the most handsome man that Ring had ever seen sat down in the front row, along with him, a young girl. That girl watched us with exhilaration that night. All of us: the Juggler, the Siamese Twins, the Clown, the Fat Lady, the Contortionist and our Ringleader. Later, Magi would recount that she had never seen such weird yet beautiful creatures before that night and that she begged her grandfather to join us.
Man, who was very charming, was an older gentleman who had been supporting his granddaughter by doing magic tricks in local towns after her mother, his daughter, died unexpectedly. He asked Ring if she could use a magician and his assistant in her act. See, Ring was the mother of us. She had been the reason we had found each other. She was our strength and our protector and she wouldn’t let just anyone into our group for fear that any of us would wind up harmed. Ring was good at reading people. Man, she later would tell me, was what she called a juxtaposition. She said he was a God upon her eyes but a devil in the flesh but that it was Magi, and Magi only, that convinced her to agree.
Magician stuck pretty close to her grandfather and her grandfather kept his distance from us. She and he were rarely apart. It took a few months later, after our newness had worn off and she had grown more comfortable that she came out of her trailer one morning and joined us for breakfast--alone. We were so elated and greeted her as such. We cleared a spot between the twins and ushered her down. Clown put a plate in front of her. Dirt, our groundskeeper, was rolling in Fat Lady at the time. We had built this wooden platform on 16 wheels and that’s how we were able to get her around as she was too big to walk. Ms. Lady chortled and snorted with glee when she saw Magi then broke out into full song and we all joined in as our own freakish way of welcoming her. We sung. We ate. We laughed.
We talked about everything that morning. The days of old and how things were changing. It was getting harder and harder to survive. We told Magi that before she and her grandfather came we were lucky to fill half the seats, and that now, we could at least afford better food. She laughed at that.
It was Juggler who set us down the path of conversation that would lead us to our very first glimpse into Magi’s mind. We had all been so curious about her. She was like our own special celebrity that belonged only to us. For the life of me, I can’t understand why we held her in such high regard but we did and anytime we found out some frivolous detail about her life we, with the exception of Ring, would gather and debate or equate it to all the other trivial facts we had pillaged and deliberated over them like scholars of science or theorists of conspiracy.
He must’ve been in a nostalgic mood, because Juggler brought up the store. The story of the store undoubtedly gave the effect of a stone skipping across water. With each ripple, another character would narrate their own dreamy biography to which the motion would not end until each of us had had a turn. We all collectively sighed at the thought of hearing his recital once again but it was mostly out of habit. For Magi’s sake, we allowed him to continue but we listened intently to each other's stories with a renewal of eagerness as though it was the very first time.
Juggler made the cakes and sweets that we sold during our performances. One-third of his profits went to supplies, one-third towards the big pot that helped pay our wages and expenses and he kept a third as his profit with no objection from us. Juggler told Magi about his plans to own his own treat store. That he will make the most exotic and decadent cakes one has ever tasted and that thousands will come for miles just to try them. It was Juggler's goal to one day be able to provide for his family, without having to leave them behind just to do it.
Clown chimed in next and Magi, who couldn’t keep her eyes from wandering towards him, did little to hide her surprise. Once we understood why, the laughter ricocheted off every surface and reverberated for a quarter-mile. See Clown is Black, but he wears white make-up in his act and during most times he isn’t performing too. The times, although they were a-changing, were still very difficult for those with any color and I think it was Magi’s first time seeing Clown in his skin. Clown told the story of his childhood. About how he started making people laugh to avoid being bullied for his pigment. That he really has no idea what he is good at outside of that but one day, he will leave the circus, find a smaller town that accepts him and live a quiet life, start a family.
Tort went next. The contortionist explained to Magi that she loves what she does so much and that she wouldn’t and couldn’t see herself doing anything else. Tort explained that she's heard of a show that puts on routines for royalty and told Magi that she plans on leaving the freak show when it makes its stop in Bounty that summer.
The twins, who were joined at the hip, had an oscillating habit to their speech in which they alternated between each twin every sentence. No matter how complex the question, they could manage to keep the rhythm going for hours and in this way, they explained to Magi that they were very much content with not having a plan like the rest of us. In fact, they emphasized, perhaps a bit too overtly, that they were a packaged deal. The only thing the Twins ever cared about was each other and we all knew that to be true. Any opportunity that happens to one of them from this point, has to accommodate the other and, according to them, it was the reason they were still traveling with the show.
Ms. Lady followed next. In between stuffing heaping spoonfuls of food into her mouth and drinking sugared water in order to make room for more, she managed to sing that she has plans to get skinny enough to walk again, so she can pursue her dream of joining an opera and traveling the world on a flying plane.
We never actually considered Dirt as part of our family, more like an extension and we never included him into our discussions either though that never stopped him from adding in his two-cents. Dirt interrupted Ms. Lady’s labored chomping to insist that he too had dreams beyond cleaning up animal shit. He told Magi that once he found the most beautiful girl that he would make her his wife and put babies in her. The thing is Dirt leered directly at Magi when he said this; which prompted Clown’s papa bear instinct to appear and check Dirt in the most confrontational way he could stand, by joking that he would never, ever leave Ring. This, officially, ensured that as much as it was common knowledge to us that Ring and Dirt were perpetually fucking, now it was as common to Magi.
It grew quiet for some time after that, until Magi turned to Ring and asked about her plans for the future. Ring went on to recount about how it was her father who had first created the space for her freaks to gather and be who they are, the space she inherited after he died, but that when the time comes her freaks have outgrown her she will settle in a city and grow old.
Ring, the boldest one of us, dared asked the question we had all been wondering to Magi: if she had any plans for the future; and almost as if he had known it was her turn to speak did he appear, Man, seemingly from thin air. He stood just out of sight, behind her, insidiously waiting for her to speak. I am certain she didn’t see him because I don’t think she would have answered if she had and we didn’t dare stop her either because, although it wasn’t much of an answer, it meant everything in the world for us just to hear it.
In one neat sentence she managed to relay that she hoped to find a mate for her grandfather and go off and explore the world one day on her own. Man sidled up to Magi, then gripped both hands into her shoulders as his silent way of reassuring her he had heard what she said. I swear to you that all of us who were unfortunate enough to see her face from across that table, felt the same dread that was splattered upon it. He then bent down and put his mouth near her ear and whispered something we all knew though couldn’t hear. Then she excused herself and went back into their trailer. We didn't see her for the rest of the day. Man then put both palms flat on the table, right in the middle of her ghost, placed a dry smile upon his face, leaned into us and said…
I was as entrenched in the story as they were, when he banged on Dr. Cherie’s door. Detective Plume jumped with a fright, opened it just enough to get herself through and pulled it closed behind her. I could hear him yelling and Ms. Keisha turning on her southern charm, begging to get just a few more minutes. She came back in and sat down, hoping the disruption wouldn’t keep me from talking further; but we all knew it would. I could feel him on the other side, fuming, and I couldn’t much concentrate after that. So I stood up and headed for the door. I put the knob in my palm, turned back to them and finished, “and he leaned in and said that as long as he was alive, that he would never let her leave.” Then I opened the door and walked into his arms.
This work is created by, written by and belongs to Aecko and shared here for entertainment.