The day dawned bright and big and bold upon town and it shone upon a dread and gruesome sight: a tent as big as the sky and as brightly coloured as a forest of springtime birds in full song. Joyous tinny music spilled from it, and a man with a truly spectacular moustache and a megaphone strode out from it, big blue eyes crinkled in joy under his gigantic top hat.
“Atten-shun all! Young and old! Thin and fat! Boys gals and nonbinary pals! You must come here, one and all, and give us your money or your lives!”
Then he put away his megaphone and went back inside the tent. As an afterthought, a big and bold-fonted banner was unfurled proclaiming it GIBLO’S MAGNIFICENT AND MARVELOUS TRULY TERRIFIC SHOW.
But everyone already knew that.
***
“I don’t see why we ought to do as he ordered,” argued Little Flek, as her mother busied herself digging up their family savings from the hidden chest under her wardrobe.
“Sweetness,” said her mother with a friendly smile, “Giblo’s Magnificent and Marvelous Truly Terrific Show has terrorized this green good earth of ours for over one hundred years. They are a crew of the finest cutthroats, robbers, and tricksters ever assembled, and their leader – Giblo the Grandiose – is believed to be an actual and truthful wizard. We’ve got utterly no choice but to do as they say.”
“Nonsense,” said Little Flek. “I bet I can handle it.”
“You are eleven.”
“Nearly twelve! And besides, haven’t you read me all those fairy tales and stories all this time? I know exactly what to do. The only way I’d have a better chance is if I were the third of three sons and you set my two older brothers out ahead of me.”
“Those were stories for children, sweety.”
“Are you saying you left out the important bits?” demanded Little Flek.
“No. But there are truths hidden in them you may not yet be old enough to-” and here Little Flek tuned her out, for those were the magic words to get your children to stop listening to you. She nodded and hummed and when her mother was done she said “that’s fine. Now give me a bit of the old grey cheese from our fridge.”
“I like the old grey cheese in our fridge. And take water with you, it’s warm out.”
“I’ll make good use of it, I promise,” said Little Flek. “And I KNOW it’s hot out GEEZ.” And she took the old grey lump of cheese (and a bottle of water, begrudgingly) and split off a little corner of it and placed it on the ground outside their door until she attracted a mouse, which she picked up, pet, and put in her pocket (don’t do this at home). She put the cheese in her other pocket and while she was at it she broke some pale twigs from the birch tree by her home’s front door and took them too. Thus equipped, she set forth for the entrance to the midway, which was easy to find as it was being guarded by a twelve-foot-tall man with the muscles of a rhinoceros.
“HELLO,” he said to her, crouching down on one knee for ease of conversation. “I AM STRONGMAN STU, THE TICKETMASTER. DO YOU HAVE A TICKET FOR THE SHOW, LITTLE LADY? OR PERHAPS HOUSEHOLD BELONGINGS YOU ARE GOING TO GIVE TO US IN EXCHANGE FOR YOUR LIFE AND THAT OF YOUR LOVED ONES?”
“Neither,” said Little Flek in her most fearlessly bored voice. “I came here to shut you down. It will be a trivial matter, as I am the strongest person in the world.”
“GOOD ONE,” said Strongman Stu with genuine admiration. “ALWAYS HAPPY TO MEET A FELLOW PRACTITIONER OF THE PATH. BUT TELL ME, CAN YOU DO THIS?” and so saying, he scooped up a stone from the ground and ground it to juice in his palm.
“Easily,” scoffed Little Flek. And she produced her grey cheese, which she wrung to whey.
“NICE,” said Strongman Stu. “TRADE YOU.”
“I’m sorry?”
“OBVIOUSLY WE SHOULD CHECK EACH OTHER’S WORK. LIKE SO!” and so saying, the ticketmaster flicked a droplet of the rock-juice in his palm into his mouth and drank it thoughtfully. “SEDIMENTARY WITH A STRONG BOUQUET,” he opined loftily. “TRY SOME.”
“No thank you,” said Little Flek.
“SURE,” said Strongman Stu with a big nasty grin. “AND I BET YOURS DOESN’T TASTE LIKE WHEY AT ALL. THE CHEESE-ROCK IS THE OLDEST TRICK IN THE BOOK, KID. GO HOME AND BEG MOM TO PAY US OFF. LESS OF A WASTE OF EVERYONE’S TIME.”
But Little Flek was not defeated yet. “Your suspicions are unwarranted,” she said dismissively. “Exactly the sort of thing a puffed-up weakling would say. Why, I bet you aren’t even strong enough to pick up this midway.”
“PLEASE,” laughed Strongman Stu. “YOU INSULT ME.” And he picked up the entirety of the midway rides, cotton candy, balloon games and all, but he did it with one hand – his right hand – and held the other one out in challenge to Little Flek. “AND I CAN STILL ASK YOU FOR YOUR TICKETS,” he mocked. “WERE YOU HOPING TO TRICK ME INTO STANDING HERE WITH MY HANDS FULL? READ A BOOK WRITTEN WITHIN YOUR LIFETIME, SQUIRT. CASH OR GET ROLLING.”
And Little Flek didn’t want to admit it, but that rather had been her plan. However, the words of the strongman and the rucking-up of his tank top had given her a different sort of idea, and so she stepped quickly around to his right side, reached into the back pocket of his jorts, and yanked out his wallet.
“HEY!” shouted Strongman Stu, almost dropping the Midway. “GIVE THAT BACK!”
“Go get it!” called Little Flek. And she threw it into the nearby wondrous portable outhouse the circus had placed nearby for their patrons, where it splashed thickly. And as the ticketmaster ran to the toilet and jammed one hand in while the other desperately balanced the midway in the other, she advanced upon the big top quite unbothered by anyone.
“Hmm,” she said to herself as she did this. “Hmm.”
***
The big top was a hundred feet high and girded in iron-and-bulletproof-glass and sparkled like a prism left under a sunbeam. At its steel entryway lounged a tremendously bored woman, dangling in the trunk of an even-more-bored-looking elephant. Attending her were sixteen baboons with broadswords, a lion with an eyepatch and a sabre between his teeth, a bear with brass knuckles, and a tiger with a rocket launcher.
“Halt or whatever,” she monotone’d to Flek. “Show’s not on. Go away. Buzz off. Beat it.”
“But I need to go into the big top to speak to Giblo the Grandiose,” whimpered Little Flek in the most drippy tones she could manage, wringing her sleeves desperately to conceal the movements of her pockets.
“You really don’t.”
“I really do,” sobbed Little Flek, and as she covered her face with her hands she slipped loose the mouse from her pocket, which ran across the ground between her and the elephant, scurrying over its foot as it fled.
The elephant shifted gently from one shoulder to the other, unbothered.
“Kid,” the bored woman said, looking even less impressed (if possible). “That’s an old wives’ tale. And I know your mom is probably like, thirty, but even she probably wouldn’t be dumb enough to tell you it’s real. Don’t you go to school or something?”
“Oh no I don’t know what you’re talking about at all,” mumbled Little Flek, saying all the very bad words she knew inside her head as fast as she could. “Oh no no no, I don’t at all. Oh I’m so sorry for all this trouble!” and saying so she threw herself at the feet of the lion and apologized left right and center while checking each paw quickly and carefully.
Darn gosh it to heck. Not a single one of them had a thorn stuck inside.
“Oh my god,” said the woman, choking the words out between the giggles and wheezes of a virulent laughing fit. “Oh wow.” She slammed a fist into the elephant’s cheek and got herself under control. “You believe in THAT shit too? Whoops sorry, I mean that ‘stuff.’ Can’t swear in front of a nine-year-old.”
“I am ELEVEN!” snapped Little Fleck, incandescent with rage. “And I wasn’t!”
“Sure. Sure. Sure! Y’know why my lion doesn’t have thorns in his paws?”
“No! Yes! Maybe! I don’t care!”
“Because I train them in old parking lots and mesh cages and he’s got enough scar tissue on those toes to block BULLETS,” she mocked, striking a match on the side of one of the baboon’s heads and lighting a cigarette. “Y’know why my elephant isn’t scared of mice?”
“I’m not listening!”
“Because elephants aren’t scared of mice, they’re just scared of little scurrying stuff they can’t recognize, and this elephant spends all day standing in a dark, dinghy stall with mice and roaches wandering around over and between her feet! She doesn’t give a shit! Much like the shits I only intermittently remove from her enclosure! And by ‘I” I mean ‘the monkeys’ because I’m too important to do that myself! It’s great!”
“You’re treating these animals very poorly,” said Little Flek. “Why?”
“Because they don’t matter!” said the woman loudly, stubbing out her cigarette butt in the tiger’s right ear. “I care about one thing! Money! They get paid in peanuts so I get paid in benjamins! It’s great! They don’t even know that you can exchange money FOR peanuts!”
The elephant raised a single large, delicately-feathery eyebrow at this. Then she turned the woman upside down, turned out her pockets with two quick shakes, then swung her trunk and sent the woman sailing hundreds of feet through the air, where her flight terminated in the outhouse. The baboons plucked up the discarded worldly possessions, boarded the lion, tiger, and bear, and the entire procession headed off out the front gates hooting and hollering with great enthusiasm.
“Hmm,” said Little Flek as she watched them leave. Then she turned on her heel and strode into the darkness of the big top. “Hmm.”
***
In the big top all was dim and disheveled. Rings and netting and audience seating lay as half-assembled dinosaur skeletons in the dark. A little sun of dim morning light slunk down in a shriveled shaft from the apex of the tent, high high high above Little Flek’s regard.
On the far side of the big top was a little trailer that said OFFICE on it. And in front of it was a clown.
“I seek to speak to Giblo the Grandiose,” Little Flek announced to him. “Stand aside!”
“Go home, kid,” said the clown in the voice of a man who’d surrendered to life long ago only to watch helplessly as it took no mercy upon him.
“Don’t make fun of my size,” snapped Little Flek. “I am a great and terrible ogre, who crunches the fingerbones of men between my teeth!” and as she said this she produced her handful of white birch twigs from her pocket and snapped them to bits in her jaws with much snarling.
“Those are clearly sticks,” said the clown.
“They are NOT!” shouted Little Flek. “You should be afraid of me!”
“I’ve got a gun,” said the clown, brandishing it half-heartedly and half-assedly.
“Oh, well, you too have fearful power then. Want to play a riddle game?”
“No,” said the clown.
“Look behind you!” shouted Little Flek.
The clown looked behind himself, turning his spine with a noise like slow-popping corn in a battered tin pan. When he winched himself back around he looked down at his feet and sighed from the very bottom of his shallow, tar-soaked lungs. “So. My big floppy shoes have laces made of rope built into their outside entirely for the look of it. They don’t come undone, and you can’t tie them together.”
“I KNOW that!” snapped Little Flek, scrambling away with flushed face and furious brows. “Don’t explain it to me like I’m five!”
“You’re basically five.”
“I am ELEVEN!”
“Spend your day more productively, kid. Go home and get mommy and daddy to pay up so we don’t bulldoze the town.”
“My daddy’s dead and it’s my MOTHER not my MOMMY – I SAID I’M NOT FIVE!”
“Boo hoo cry me a river,” said the clown without particular venom. “Life’s hard for everyone. You think I’m doing this because I’m living the good times? I had no money so I joined the show; now I owe THEM money for my fanciful clown suit, greasy clown paint, tiny clown car, and unlicensed clown gun. Plus interest.”
“What’s interest?”
“Uninteresting but expensive.”
“Look behind you!” shouted Little Flek.
The clown shut his eyes and breathed through his nose very heavily. “Fine. One. Two. Three. Oh look, nothing’s there. Still. And I still don’t have real laces, so –”
The tiny clown car’s controls were sized appropriately for Little Flek’s use. The horn, however, was slightly louder than average, which she held down with her elbow as she wedged the accelerator with one of her shoes until she bailed out as the big top’s wall loomed above her. The clown howled in wordless anguish and pursued his renegade vehicle across the dusty once-midway grounds until it hurtled into the doors of the outhouse and he – still screaming – launched himself after it.
“Hmm,” said Little Flek as she considered this. But her journey was almost over, and she was only half-shoed, so she did not tarry long. “Hmm.”
***
No one answered when Little Flek knocked on the door to the trailer that said OFFICE. At length she opened it.
It was full of stars. Distant stars, so dim they could barely twinkle. Near stars, glaring balls of nuclear hellfire. Dead stars, pale-glowing corpses of impossible density that made lead seem lighthearted. Rending stars, turned to ravenous vacuums that ate anything near them. And they swirled as one choir around the head of the figure in the center of the office, cross-legged, two-headed, many-eyed.
He was still wearing his gigantic top hat, but his spectacular moustache had fractalized into something that looked like but was not a beard. He did not need a megaphone anymore.
“I am Giblo the Grandiose,” he explained. “I am a wizard of the Ninth Sceptre and the Seventh Sphere. I know all of the Great Mysteries and two of the Little Mysteries, and can whisper the Hidden Truths and Utter Lies. I take gold and turn it to coal; I take coal and turn it to magic; I take what others have and turn it to my own; I take what I want and turn it to what I need. Unravel your wits and lay bare your devices before me. Unspool your strength and lie prone before me. Take action against me if you should dare do so.”
Little Flek stood there and thought and thought and thought with her mind like a rat in a wheel, her hands in her pockets.
Her hands found something in her pockets.
“Hmm,” she said. “Hmm.” Then she pulled out her water bottle, removed its cap, and poured it all over Giblo the Grandiose’s laptop. It made several nasty noises and a nasty smell and died most tragically.
“WHAT?” shrieked Giblo the Grandiose. “How am I meant to handle payroll now?!”
But he was talking to himself, for Little Flek had already left. Himself, and every employee of Giblo’s Magnificent and Marvelous Truly Terrific Show within earshot, at the top of his impressive lungs.
It wasn’t easy to fit the entire OFFICE into one (already overoccupied) outhouse. But if faith can move mountains, spite can at least tip a trailer, and bounced cheques can push it a few hundred yards in a big hurry.
***
“I’m home,” said Little Flek, eyes downcast and sore of foot. “And I lost a shoe. I’m sorry.
“That’s alright, sweetie. We can afford more now that you’ve saved us and our life savings by getting Giblo’s Magnificent and Marvelous Truly Terrific Show disbanded and scattered to the winds.”
“But I didn’t do it the right way,” pouted Little Flek. “I tried all my best magical tricks and not a single one of them worked – everything that DID work was based around property damage and fiscal desperation. You were right: all my big ideas were just stories after all.”
“Oh you silly goose,” smiled her mother fondly. “Maybe you weren’t paying any attention to those fairy tales? Property damage and fiscal desperation are the most powerful magics and most timeless stories of all.”
And Little Flek knew her mother was right, and gave her a hug, and though she remained little in size she grew a bit larger in wisdom that day.
The outhouse was left behind and eventually had to be demolished.