The crowd was hungry for Marrionetta. They guzzled on moonshine, fractured peanuts in their eager fingers, shifted their sweating haunches and gazed with frustration at the stage wings, waiting and waiting for their favorite to take the center spotlight.
At last, she did. She rose from a lorry in the floor. Tremendous applause tended her upwards and she threw her face skyward with a triumphant arm stretched out as if to say Hail to thee, loyal worshipers.
Lorelei, the long wedge of his face looming in the crowd, smirked at her feeble attempt to project control. Inside his breast though, something twinged. She couldn’t possibly be alright, could she? No he stifled the idea. She would be weak. Patience, patience.
She had already sweated through her costume. Each breath came as a rattling rasp, her lungs barely able to contain the oxygen she desperately craved. The lorry halted. She was on stage. The organ stopped its tumbling drone. Close at hand to the stage, Mingey took up her seat at a harp The metal of the harp’s frame was well oxidized and mishandled. She strummed a false, angelic note. It cringed with irony.
With noticeable effort, Marrionetta lashed herself to the beams of the stage. Members of the audience gasped at her strange grace. Once aloft though, she gave a bow as languid as a dew drop. The appreciating crowd cheered again and with this swell of appreciation, Marrionetta began to whirl.
Supreme dissatisfaction darkened Lorelei’s brow as he watched her swiftly wind herself through the air. It was mesmerizing. With her body, she charted out the contours of an unknown satellite. Like a distant planet or a sphere conjured through sublime magic, something unseen was made visible. Her sequins flashed, adding a sense of radiant beauty.
The trick distracted. Even Lorelei could not keep his focus on her face as it sweated and darkened with effort. The sloping movement helped preserve her energies but nothing could be done about the constant, draining fatigue. Her cold and hollow bones seemed to leech energy from her very spirit. She bore down on herself. CUDGEL she thought. CUDGEL or die. Tears streamed down her face. They flew from her cheeks, winking bright in the air but their luminescence was softer than the sequins and no one saw them at all.
But the ruse could only go on for so long. Her abdomen cramped. Hard. She yelped in pain and an attendant gag of nausea escaped her throat. It felt like her stomach might collapse in on itself. She lost the flow of her arc. Her trajectory became strange and harried. She became a tousle of uncollected movements as she moved through the canopy of the big top.
The audience waited for resolution. This was, without a doubt, one of the most complex and intricate performances of hers they had ever seen. None suspected that the spidery cacophony above them was a performer on a collision course with fate. It all appeared rehearsed, meaningful, and practiced. Beautiful. She was beautiful even in the beginning throes of disaster.
Lorelei’s groin leapt in anticipation. He knew what it meant. Or if he didn’t know, he felt it all the same.
Marrionetta attempted to regain control. For several breaths she felt certain she could do it. Harder. CUDGEL. Die! Die! but her berating words were of no use. Her body was not her own and had not been for some time. She became entangled in her strings. The torque of her swings and the weight of her body stretched a bundle of them in just the wrong way. There was a sound like crunching grass. A handful of her strings broke in midair.
She fell so hard and so fast that it was almost invisible. Several moments passed while the gaping audience sought to find her. Wasn’t she still in the air? Where had she gone?
Like a broken insect, Marrionetta lay on the floor. What an image it was. She bit down on her mouth, hard to make no sound. She raised an arm to try to rise but the strength was not there. She was a buzzing, piled squander of limbs.
The audience screamed with pleasure. “She’s fallen! She’s fallen!” Peanut shells rained down on her. Her loyal worshipers embraced each other, crying, hysterical. A vile thing had befallen their nightmare queen. They thrilled and thrilled. Never before could such a thing had ever happened or been imagined.
Violet rushed out to her. With enormous effort, Violet dragged Marrionetta back into the subterranean refuge of the big top. The shrill and delighted screams of the audience echoing in their ears.
x9dread 