See and be Seen

The applause dies down but the curtain stays up. Marvello likes me to remain on stage, smiling and waving, as the audience trickles out of our canvas colosseum. It feels a little like I’m overstaying my welcome in their collective consciousness and eyeline, but He thinks it endears me to them, and what Marvello thinks is manifested in my experience.

My beloved public move like cats, simultaneously full of and completely lacking purpose. They seem to deliberately do whatever it is they look like they’re not doing. Every time someone approaches the door, they suddenly turn around and settle back into conversation; when it seems as if they’ll be here forever, they start, jump up, and all but run out of the tent. All the while, my grimace gets stiffer and stiffer and my farewell wave feels more and more like an involuntary affectation.

As my hand starts to cramp, I realise there is only one pair of eyes staring back at me, even Marvello is long gone. They belong to a slender redhead approaching the evening of their childhood. Their ice-blue gaze is offputting, even to me; I hold it delicately and cautiously, like some creepy-crawly resting on my hand. I’m not sure if I want them to leave or not.

Before long, they stand, but like all the others they don’t exit immediately. Unlike all the others, they continue to stare at me, and I at them. The combination of watching and being watched is so distracting it takes some time to notice them gravitating down the aisle toward me. They move like a spectre, and their skin is so pale I break eye contact briefly to reassure myself that their feet are touching the ground. At this point, I’ve completely given up on monitoring my facial expression or continuing to shake my hand around, I am paralysed.

A beckoning call comes from the shaft of blinding light that is the entrance to the bigtop, I think it must have been the youth’s name, although now, seconds later, I have no idea what it was. They are suddenly gone in a flurry of flame locks. As they breach the threshold, everything goes black and deafening silence overwhelms me, just like it always does.

I can never tell how long I spend like this, although it is probably most of my life; surely I spend more time not performing than performing? Unobserved and unheard, my senses switch off. It’s what I imagine being dead would be like, if the dead could still think. I really hope they can’t.

I’ve tried a lot of different ways of passing the unknowable amont of time. My experiences (or at least, the experiences I can remember) are extremely limited, so all the stories and songs I try to recite to myself end up about the same caged little animal. I do, however, have an expansive vocabulary, thanks to Marvello’s desire to pepper his pre-show patter with every word he knows of four syllables or greater. I let them spin around in my mind nonsensically, sensationally, intrinsically, occasionally, specifically, conversationally, prolifically…

“Negating further unnecessary hesitation...” I always hear this bit before the rest of my senses come back, “I am elated for the presentation of the strangest aberration in all creation, the fat kid arachnid… Scorpion Scotty!”

My vision returns as I am revealed to the crowd. The stage lights assault my eyes to welcome them back to function. I raise my hands to the ceiling in all their ectrodactyl glory, letting the voracious masses salivate over a few missing fingers. I stroke my bare, ample sides from my hips up, lifting each vestigial limb to try and make them look more functional than they actually are. To complete the exhibition, I turned around, displaying the small extension to my spine that pokes out above my underwear. Hardly a scorpion’s tail, even with the small blade Marvello had surgically attached, but I shake it around in what I hope is a vaguely menacing way.

Now comes the part of my act I can actually enjoy. The audience always tolerates my dancing, I think it makes them feel less like sick voyeurs and more like patrons of the arts, and what the audience tolerates, Marvello won’t actively remove from view. I don’t know if I dance like anyone else, I doubt it. I just move my body in a way that feels natural to me, punctuated with bursts of percussion on the stage or my own limbs. Most look on with polite interest, but occasionally I see a shine of true appreciation. I see one today in a familiar fire-framed face.

A booming voice hurriedly lauding my movement tells me that my time is nearly over. I try and pull my performance into a neat conclusion, ending in the centre of the stage for the customary goodbye.

I seek out the understanding pair of near-white eyes I noticed during my number, and find the associated hair too late, they are being yanked up and out of the stalls by adults whose features I do not bother to observe. Disappointed, I withdraw long before the audience leaves. I barely notice when my vision and hearing cut out.

Provision, incision, intrusion, illusion, illustration, penetration, pencil pine, stencil line, stenographer, photographer, phosphorescent, luminescent…

My blind and deaf reverie is broken, not by an obnoxious announcement, but by a dim yellow circle of light. The next thing I see is a slim, ghostly presence. They smile at me.

“Hi,” they say, softly.

“Greetings and salutations!” I exclaim with a showman’s smile, spreading my claws wide. They giggle. “I mean… hello.” I do hear some normal conversation now and again.

“I hope I’m not intruding.”

“Do not even for the minutest of moments consider the poss-” I pause. Normal. “You’re not. Nothing really happens between shows for you to intrude on.”

“I just wanted to tell you that your dancing’s really good. Reminds me of leaves in the wind. Or maybe pebbles on a creekbed?” They pause, as if about to reveal a secret. “You’re a terrible freak though.”

I laugh. “Thankyou.”

“When my parents said there was a freakshow, I was expecting a proper monster, like a vampire or a werewolf or something.”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

“You’re just a person.”

“I’m afraid so.” A pause allows my curiosity to get the better of me, “You must think me awfully rude but I have to ask- are you a boy or a girl?”

“Do you have to ask? Does it matter?”

I shrug and realise it doesn’t. “You’re right, sorry.”

They smile and fiddle with their hair. “I should be getting back, it’s late. Just wanted to tell you that. Maybe I’ll come back? My family moved into the farmhouse next door and it seems like you need practice talking.”

“It seems I do.”

“Until next time, then.”

“Goodbye.”

As they turn to leave I call after them. “Thankyou,” I say, “For seeing me.”

“Thankyou for seeing me,” they reply as my world disintegrates once more.