Marrionetta staggered around the stage area in the big top. The staff hands exchanged weathered and weary glances among themselves just behind the thin veil of stale cigarette smoke. The dancer girls arched their snarling mouths, prettying up their stockings and waving their shoulders around in mocking shadows of Miss Mary’s preeminent case of the shakes. Everyone at rehearsal assumed she was drunk.
Only Violet could see the strength. Just hours before, Marrionetta had been raked as a bean stalk, doubled over in her voming bucket, a splintered and desolate version of herself. Now, at least, here in the big top, she merely appeared graceless. At least she was standing on her own two feet. Violet couldn’t imagine the effort it was taking Miss Mary to stand relatively tall and proud. She wondered additionally how badly things might go this evening if Marrionetta really intended to put in a full day’s work of rehearsal. That was to say, half a day, in her case.
Marrionetta skipped up the walls and strung herself up on the ceiling. Her weight sagged and not performatively. A few of the teenaged lever boys looked away with disgust. A female form so tortured was beyond their ken to appreciate, in any dimension.
Marrionetta wrestled her tired scoop into a more agréable stature. She inhaled deeply and, to Violet’s astonishment, hurled herself in several beautiful circles. She turned and glided along an unseen axis. Her ankles flew back over her head. Her hair whipped out of its braids. She was like a wild thing, contouring out a celestial shape. Her momentum carried her faster and faster until she was in a silken orbit. One could almost see the object she conjured out of negative space. A round nothing. A planet. A moon. Something full of life and rotating violently just beyond the dullness of common sight and visual meaning.
She managed this silhouetting display for several minutes. A few of the dancers’ sneers opened up into gapes of interest. An observant acrobat lit a new cigarette, one that burned brightly as his eyes followed her calculating rotations. Marrionetta, the unhinged puppetress. What a find she really was.
Then, one of her strings caught sour on an old hook. She jerked off course. Her flank collided forcefully with a beam and she screamed like an angry dog.
“Miss Mary!” Violet immediately approached the stage area. Marrionetta was already letting herself down in a spidery tantrum of her strings.
“After all your mincing and hill spiking shrieks!” Marrionetta gestured rudely at all of the attending circus staff. People backed away from her. She kicked a box of nails and they scattered in a tremendous wave. “Everyone begs and pleads for Miss Mary to come back to work and you crabbing munchers can’t even hook it up right!”
Marrionetta threw on her coat and spat on the ground. The observant acrobat bowed and moved quickly out of her way. She flicked her hand at him. A command. He gave her his glowing cigarette and she dragged on it angrily. She she smote it under her pink, velvet slipper.
“If Ungulen or Mr. Hargus asks for me,” Marrionetta shrieked at the top of her lungs, “I’m in my dressing room until you brackish piss drinking, dandruff huffing hooligans gets my stage rigging done up correctly!” She began slowly marching her way out the big top. Violet attempted to offer Marrionetta an arm but she haughtily refused. Each foot stomped strangely over the next, like a cross eyed hen.
Once she was out of the big top, Marrionetta slung herself over a low fence and began dry heaving. Violet joined her outside. They walked home very gently.
x9dread 