So, The Anchoress will have to get comfortable over at WordPress, where this newest installment will later go. Feel free to check out last year's NaNo WriMo project as it continues down the trail to eventual publication (fingers crossed)!
The NaNo Project will eventually be getting its own WordPress page as well. For now, I'll be posting the first few installments here on Blogger.
Cat's Paw Mountain is another idea I've been laboring over, only this one's been in the slow cooker for a few years now. I had a dream a very long time ago, and over the years I've been poking and prodding it with writing prompt in an attempt to get it to leave my mental nest. I'm fed up with this story just lounging around without a job though, so this month it's getting the kick... to paper!
Or screen.
You know what I mean.
Keeping it contemporary this go around. Be interesting to see where this goes. The first year was awesome, but I wasn't working 11am - 8pm, and I wasn't trying to close on a house, either. Oh, and plan a wedding party cook-out. And move into said house I am trying to close on.
You know...
It's best not to linger on these things. Let's go to the circus.
All the lonely people,
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people,
Where do they all belong?
All Luke King heard from the changing room was muffled music, the stamping of elephant feet, and the reactions from an audience he could not see. They were laughing at clowns he had snorted coke with only an hour before the show. The thought amused Luke King. He sat in a chair in front of a dusty mirror and tied his salty hair behind his head. He sat there a little longer, and drank a lukewarm beer that used to be cold. There was a pool of condensation on the bottom of the can, the entire refreshing chill had washed away, but at least he could mess with his own brain for the time being. Madame Butterfly was to blame for that one.
She was the pretty thing tangled up in the cot behind him. The trapeze artist had to be in her thirties, a matriarch of the traveling circus. All those years of swinging, flipping, and stretching had left her body tight, probably stronger than Luke. Her hair was short, and gelled back, but now that she’d been napping on a pillow probably bent and crooked. Her make up was still intact. Little gems lined her eyes and her cheeks glittered with artificial, colorful shine. Still, from the moment he saw her, he had a real reaction to her. The circus train pulled into a station outside of Alexandria, right at the lip of the D.C. border, and he had been there to meet the ring master and finalize the part time contract. She was the first thing he saw, and he thought about her all day and all night.
“You keep looking at me like that, King, you’ll never forget me.” Madame Butterfly smiled in her sleep, and King concentrated on his beer.
“Think we’re a little beyond that point, darlin’.” He spoke around a mouthful of beer as he reached for his cigarettes.
“Can I have one?”
“Sure, you gotta get up though. You’re on in ‘bout half an hour.”
She sat up from the cot, so slow and luxurious, and he watched her reflection in his mirror. Her arms rolled over her head, and her bare breasts were taught with the stretch. Not bad for a woman who claimed to have a kid in the clown car out there in the big tent. She stood from the bed, and nestled her naked hip against the lip of the table jutting out from the mirror. After riddling with his cigarettes, she finally found the one she liked, and planted it between her grinning lips.
“So, you’re sayin’ you’ll never forget me, huh?”
“Could be, yeah.”
“That’s what I thought. Got any big plans?”
Luke King frowned, something about that question left a weirdness in his gut. “Like what?”
“You know… movies, Hollywood. Some big re-emergence like… I dunno, Liam Neeson or something. Or Frank Langella.”
“Frank who?”
“C’mon, you know what I mean. You were the best…”
“Were,” he echoed, uncomfortable.
“Yeah. Everyone remembers,” she straddled his lap, and leaned on the table, “when Luke King fought the Nazis. Or when Luke King had that big car chase under that bridge in Georgetown.”
“I got a few gigs after this…”
“Yeah? Anything I’d like?”
There were dirt racing gigs, and another circus to tour with. There was also a celebrity reality show thing he had made some sort of drunken promise too. At that moment, he knew exactly what Madame Butterfly was aiming for. He stood up, and she took the queue in an instant and hopped off his lap. That pretty face got ugly, she was indignant from her pinched brows all the way to her spread feet.
“I don’t think so,” Luke King mumbled, and took another gulp of his beer. He tucked his lower lip over his moustache and sucked away foam.
“What’s your problem?”
“You should go.”
“Go? The Hell did I do? Can’t a girl be curious?”
“First of all, you ain’t no girl, girls don’t know what they’re doing. You’re a woman who knows exactly what she’s doin’. Second of all, you’re almost up anyway, so…”
Madame Butterfly burst into laughter and found the bathrobe she had shown up in. She dropped it off her shimmering, aging body, and told him she wanted him. Now, she covered herself off, and dropped every practiced posture she had in her arsenal. She was hunched and angry.
“Oh, please! You think I’m barking up that money tree? Listen, grandpa, it’s a shrub, at most - all right? – and I’m saying that because I’m feeling kind. It’s shriveled and useless as that poor excuse for a cock. I don’t need a handout from someone like you.”
Luke King rounded on Madame Butterfly. The beer shot from his hand and scorched a path over her shoulder. The carbonated meteor struck the wall behind her. An instant tide of white foam swelled across the wall, and dripped down to the floor. Madame Butterfly shook; there was an infuriated, experienced flare in her painted eyes that Luke King recognized. Many women had given him that look. Madame Butterfly was not so unique anymore, no matter how many flips she could muster, no matter how many brats she pumped out to a life in the circus, no matter how many gems she wore on her face.
“Now, I been polite. I see you in here again, I’m liable to get rude.”
Luke King navigated the intestines of the big bellied stadium the circus had taken over. Those who had finished their performances were lingering in the halls, or on their way out for a cigarette. He never did get to start his smoke back in the dressing room Madame Butterfly was probably already wrecking. Luke King quickened his pace, thanks to the painkillers circulating his system. He had lost count of the operations, but they changed the way he walked, the way he slept, and the way he was. Maybe he had been a little too rough on her…
A helmet was thrust in his hands. His thoughts had been one long daze, it was like he had slept walk all the way to the backstage curtain. There were three other bikers around him, each next to their own growling rides. Two of them had their helmets in their lap, and they wildly discussing the routine they were about to perform. The third was silent, his arms were crossed and he stared ahead. The stage hand, a greasy kid who wanted to be a runaway all his life, pointed at Luke King’s bike.
“You’re on in twenty minutes. You ready? You better be ready if you’re going to miss rehearsal.”
“Give me my damn keys,” Luke King grumbled.
The third biker held up his gloved hand. He was zipped up in padded jacket, and his helmet’s visor was shut. The only face Luke King had to speak to was the painted skull across the helmet’s shiny dome. A pair of keys dangled from a bent knuckle, but the rider said nothing, instead, he watched Luke King for his next move. The hairs on Luke King’s neck stood on end. If they were playing poker, the skull-faced rider would know that Luke had nothing left to play with, not in his hands, and not on the table. Luke snatched the keys off the stranger, the one who had been so quiet during rehearsals, and made his way to his bike.
Luke King had several bikes, but he loved this one. He lavished the mechanism with red paint and obsessive repairs and modification, and he called her “Dorothy”. She was no ordinary machine. Taking her out was like taking a horse from its stable, a process that secured an unbreakable bond between ride and rider. As he turned the key, her rumble was healthy, and she purred all over. Luke King’s fingers melded to the handlebars, and every problem in the world was gone.
“Luke King, right?”
He opened his eyes and saw the skull-faced rider in front of him. Whoever he was, he was lean, almost emaciated. His presence made Luke King uncomfortable, not just now, but in the rehearsals Luke had even bothered attending. The rider was quiet, but not shy, and he possessed a fatal, infantile coolness, like James Dean had.
“Yep,” Luke King pulled on his helmet to give himself something to do.
“Big fan of your work.”
“There’s no accounting for taste.”
He took the glove off one of his hands, and reached for Luke King. “It’s been great working with you.”
Luke King took his hand, and prayed that the obligatory shake would send the creepy kid on his way. Instead, he was locked in a firm handshake that had Luke King forgetting what season it was. Sure, the summer had been long, golden, and sometimes overheated, but the kid felt like he strolled in from winter.
“… You too, kid.”
The riders lined up, now Luke King was one of the boys again. He had his visor down like an ancient knight ready to perform for the lords and ladies. Only these days, lords and ladies were more like brats, fat mothers, and dads with dipcups, not to mention the occasional drunk college kids. Luke King was sick to his stomach, but he blamed that on the cocaine, pain killers, and beer still figuring themselves out in his system. The ring master broke his attention.
“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the act you’ve all been waiting for. It’s the return of Luke King and his Rebel Riders!”
The engines revved, and the curtains tore to the sides to reveal the four riders. Luke King led the three around the ring. The grown ups who remembered him cheered, as the riders began to perform high ramp jumps. Their paths criss and crossed in mid-air. Luke King was already used to the feeling of his stomach being in his throat, the thrill of the jump was gone, and these days he never imagined himself jumping over firey pits or lines of school buses. He dreamed of boring drives in the country on Dorothy, he dreamed of mediocrity and simplicity, and dreamed of the day when he could leave his tapped adrenaline addiction behind him. The celebration around the riders faded as a steel-caged ball descended from the top of the tent.
“The Rebel Riders will defy death and gravity itself as ‘round and ‘round they go! Where they stops, nobody knows!”
The crowd cheered again as the ring master retreated from the light. Two clowns threw open the door leading into the spherical cage. The riders rolled inside, and the ball lifted into the air. The ball was large enough to accommodate them, but when they started riding, the available space began to dwindle. The riders sped around, over, beside, across, and under each other. Their bikes roared, and their lights cast about in a frantic, blinding frenzy as the riders dipped and wove around one another in the rising cage. One of them was cheering as high as his voice would go, Luke King was sure the other one had thrown up in his helmet before they even got in the ball. There was no other indication of the third rider, except for the skull face that would flit through the buzzing lights and then disappear again.
Luke King crashed into one of the riders. He was not sure whether his wheel caught on something in the cage, or whether the adrenal junkie had torpedoed into him, but he lost control. When one rider went, the rest of them followed. The lights flailed, and there was one eruption and the metal all around Luke King screamed. Pain found new and creative ways to enter his body. He heard bones snap, a searing burn spread across his shoulder and up his neck, his skin opened up in several places as he was raked over the metal grating. The riders were dragged across the bars and then sucked into a cyclone of flipping, grinding motorcycles.
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