Contortion Read online

  There was a reason that Arcanium was closed to anyone under eighteen after eight o’clock at night.

  In purple latex, bloody wicked face paint and thick gold thread that held the separate Frankensteined pieces of the costume together—exposing that she wore no bra or underwear and calling attention her tits and ass without shame—Valorie was just another reason, and she knew it.

  The boys came back up into the heavens and dismounted their trapeze bars, body language similar to Lennon’s when she’d left him. She met their eyes, glanced down at their prominent bulges then returned her gaze up with a small smile on her lips. Seth blushed easily, pale in a different way than Lennon. If Lars blushed, she wouldn’t be able to see it, dark as he was. They were a tasty pair. If only they knew how tasty they’d be together for all to see, how the twins would love to see them love each other, how Valorie wouldn’t mind watching them make out for an hour so.

  Misha, the sword swallower, and Carlo, one of the Human Torsos, were quiet but not secretive about their relationship—mostly because Carlo was a randy little fucker, and while he had a special place in his heart for Misha, he’d screw anything that stood still and parted their legs. He was as shameless in his desires as Seth and Lars were ashamed, although not quite so shameless as to snog Misha in front of everyone.

  It wouldn’t be the same, though. Carlo was an attractive man. As half a man, he was still twice the man that most were. Misha, not so much. It wouldn’t be the same as seeing two hot young things like Seth and Lars.

  Alas, that was something she still had to keep in her fantasies.

  One of these days. And she’d be there to see it. She’d been their sexual introduction to Arcanium. They owed her that much. Just a kiss on each other’s lips. She didn’t think it was much to ask.

  The spotlight, blue for Seth and Lars’ act, went white again. Victor ran out, his stone-gray and pitted skin rippling. He was a treasure to look at—not quite as alarming as Bale, the Lizard Man. It was as though he’d been carved from boulder stone and would grow moss at any minute, but his skin was supple as skin could be. The places where Lennon stood on his shoulders pushed in like normal flesh. It looked like he was wearing a particularly convincing body suit and had a genius of a makeup artist. Circus-goers often discreetly looked for zippers, seams and brushstrokes on the stranger of Arcanium’s oddities. There weren’t any to be found.

  Victor held Lennon by his calves as he ran, straight-backed. Lennon took over the brunt of his balance, but it still had to be like standing on a running horse without a saddle or reins.

  Lennon was good at what he did. He’d been performing much longer than Valorie, and he’d been the one to teach her tumbling and acrobatics in her early years. He was steady, as though standing on solid ground.

  When Victor reached the center of the ring, he abruptly stopped and released Lennon’s legs. Lennon leaped from Victor’s shoulders, flipping what seemed an impossible number of rotations before landing on the ground and continuing in a summersault to the wooden partition of the ring.

  He hit it with his feet then, like a swimmer, somersaulted backward to return to Victor, who lifted him from under his arms and tossed him into the air. When Lennon came back down, still tucked like a pill bug and spinning, Victor caught him by his back and threw him up as though he were a basketball, over and over again to the rhythm of the industrial orchestra playing through the speakers.

  As soon as the audience would be getting dizzy, Lennon popped open and landed on his hands on Victor’s shoulders. Then, stiff as a board, he fell back until he touched down on his feet in the sawdust.

  Introduction concluded.

  What followed was a series of higher jumps and more elaborate twists, like watching a diver in the Olympics attempt to do his routine above the ground instead of water. Victor gave him additional height, but Lennon still impressed the audience. They’d been greased by many of the prior performances and were easy to please, but that didn’t mean that their pleasure was undeserved.

  Valorie was so often a part of the routine that she quite enjoyed just being able to watch them, even if it was from an unenviable position above. She knew what it would look like from a better vantage point, though. She’d always been good at seeing potential.

  She thought that was one of the reasons Bell had taken her into his bed and into his confidence way back then. She couldn’t see into the future to save her ass, but she was usually good at guessing. In another circus, she might have been the fortune teller instead of Bell—another circus and another temperament. She preferred dealing with the public from a distance. She had to display herself for hours on end, but at least they had to stay out of reach and she didn’t have to acknowledge the fourth wall.

  When Lennon and Victor retreated behind the curtain once again to thunderous applause, the white light shifted to gold that would turn her skin to honey.

  The catwalk crew member, silent and dressed in black, lowered her swing down the center of the ring. The spotlight, gentler than when the whole ring was being used, caught her as she descended past the canvas that separated the catwalk in the heavens from the ring. She kept herself perfectly still, her legs tucked and crossed like a secretary’s, although she didn’t know of many secretaries who wore latex catsuits to their jobs. There were probably a few bosses who wished they did.

  “In one of the most anticipated acts of the night,” the Ringmaster intoned from his platform, his voice low, sensual, mysterious and resonant through her bones, “our world-renowned contortionist returns to the spotlight, bringing her singular, sexy, spine-aching skill to the air. Give a warm hand, mere mortals, to the darling of the broken dolls, Miss Valorie.”

  The Ringmaster loved his job way too much, as much as a man like the Ringmaster could love anything. Which, as it turned out, was quite a lot—although a person would never be able to tell when he wasn’t in the ring.

  Still, once they got used to it, Valorie was pretty sure almost everyone in Arcanium liked their job way too much. Things could be worse—much worse.

  Valorie had chosen an electric violin piece to perform to, but first she had to milk the silence that followed the applause.

  After a single extended note, Valorie came to life.

  She leaned back, swinging down. Her knees, still crossed, kept her on the swing as she cascaded her hands down in elegant twists. She kept going, though, once she stretched as far down as she could reach, arching her spine backward until she could grab her ankles, uncross her legs and climb up her legs to her knees. Her body made an almost perfect circle, a nonviolent ouroboros. She held her position as the swing began to turn, displaying her from all angles like a piece of crystal in an auction house.

  The applause was sincere but polite.

  It was okay. The show was just getting started.

  She let go of one leg and extended it straight behind her to show off its length, swinging on the circle by one knee as she counted the click of the ticking sound like a clock hand on the music track.

  Then she took hold of the swing with her hands and unfurled her body, turning it into a pendulum. Back and forth. Back and forth. More force each time. She used the built momentum to kick her legs forward and push herself back up before spreading her legs and catching the upper part of the circular swing with her ankles.

  Valorie released her hands from the swing again, holding herself upside down by her ankles alone, her back against the bar as she spread her arms and accepted the audience’s applause. She didn’t linger too long this time. She slid her ankles along the edges of the circle until she was hanging just by the juncture of her bridges at the swing’s widest point.

  She was flexible, not immune to pain, and it did hurt holding herself up like that, but it was worth it for the image. Her ability was all about the pictures she could make. This was no different.

  She climbed her upper half up her legs again, keeping the tendon tension all along the line of her body to keep herself aloft by her feet.
She breathed a sigh of relief when she grabbed the bar and let her ankles off before swinging back up into the circle.

  For the next minute and a half of the song, she took a short break from the acrobatic element and focused on her contortion. The swing was roughly between half and three-quarters of her height in circumference, so it wasn’t easy to fit herself in it without making angles of herself within the frame.

  The angles themselves, though, were easy. The jerky, minor-key eeriness of the music coupled with her face paint meant that she could go as bizarre as she wanted, twitching her limbs and even her neck into painful, broken angles. She rotated her arms and legs and spine at least one twist beyond what the usual contortionist could do, her tendons stretching but not screaming, all to the mingled delight and disgust of the audience. She moved about in the swing like a spider in her web. With the right grasp and strength, gravity and orientation meant very little to her. It made no difference whether she was upside-down, sideways or right-side-up—or some variation of the three, depending on where her legs happened to be in relation to her head at any given time.

  She ended that section of the act in a handstand, her legs straight up on either side of the top of the circle.

  The violin became more frantic, and her moves more graceless, like she was going to lose her balance at any point from the harshness of her movements. Valorie brought her legs down along the curved line of the circle again, but this time not holding on to it with her ankles. She could lean her legs against the bar, but her only hold was still her hands. Like a clock with its hands out of sync, she brought her legs down, beat by beat, into the splits. Then farther…and farther…and farther, until they both pointed straight down. She jerked her feet to the side, locking them together.

  And let go.

  She swung down on nothing more than the locked arches of her feet. That’s when the applause thundered in her ears like sea in a shell, making the scream of the violin less shrill as she spread her arms again and extended them down. Her body became a human iris hanging from the swing.

  Following the climax of the song, Valorie drew herself back up with an upside-down plié, climbed into the circle, raised one long leg then tucked it behind her head, the ankle around the top of the swing. The swing ascended into the heavens once again as she waved goodbye with her arm twisted behind her back.

  Piece of cake. Her nerves could kiss her ass.

  * * * *

  Contortion involved being in tune with her body and what it was capable of. It involved knowing where her center settled, how long she could accept a little bit of pain without injury, knowing how far she could go, trusting skin, sinew and bone. It involved complete awareness.

  And awareness and arousal—like arousal and fear—were not so far apart. She could practically hear the men and some of the women in the audience wonder what it would be like to have sex with her when she spread her legs or arched her back and her neck as though in ecstasy—and always just a little farther, like she could do one better than anyone else, including pleasure. It was no wonder that she started her performance turned on and ended it nearly in a frenzy, although she appeared composed. It didn’t matter how many performances she’d done. She’d be the first to say that, like the Ringmaster, like Seth and Lars, like Lord Mikhail and Lady Sasha, like Maya, like Bell, like Lennon, like most of the rest of the cast…

  Valorie loved her job just a little too much.

  Latex wasn’t the best material to get wet, but there was no helping it by the end of a performance. The ring was kept cool with a series of fans this time of year rather than their usual air conditioners, because of how cold it was outside and how warm it could become inside the big top tent. So her temples felt damp and the latex stuck to her skin in a few places, but it was between her legs that she was most uncomfortable, like her pussy was wearing a patent leather shoe.

  She hurried down the ladder as Misha broke up the acrobatic acts with his sword-swallowing, sacrificing grace completely in favor of the sometimes humorous, sometimes gut-wrenching gross-out. The audience would never know just how gross it really was. However, no matter how much Misha looked like he was going to kick the bucket any day now, he somehow managed to make his act engaging and more disgusting than outright alarming.

  The cast didn’t do curtain calls. Valorie didn’t have to stay for Maya and Bell’s closing. In fact, during the performance was usually the best time to leave, when there were no adoring fans trying to weasel themselves in where they weren’t wanted, on edge and hard and not always in the mood to hear no from a professional tease.

  Fuck that noise. Valorie wasn’t interested in looking outside the circus for her pleasure. The isolation of the circus could be suffocating, but she also didn’t feel comfortable walking among the normals anymore. Though she wasn’t as extreme as Joanne and Jane or Kitty in appearance, she’d stopped feeling normal early in her tenure at Arcanium.

  The truth was, she’d lost her patience with the outside. Arcanium was a world of illusion, but not anywhere near what the rest of the world was. When the curtain closed and the lights went out, the illusions ended. Valorie respected—needed—that honesty, even when it could be cruel, like she could sometimes be. She hardly distinguished herself in that way, in good company within the circus.

  Some wouldn’t be proud of it, and she wasn’t. That’s simply the way her life was these days, and it mostly worked for her, although life at Arcanium had soured a little after Bell had moved out. Lennon was a man to fuck. Just like Victor. Or Ciàran and Moss, the circus’ Tall Man and Short Man. Or Seth and Lars. They were there, and it was fun, but she didn’t even just fuck Bell anymore. That had meant more to her. Lennon and Valorie had their own chemistry, but it wasn’t anything that could last. And she had miles to go before she slept, a long time before she left the circus for a normal life again.

  A normal life.

  Even if she wanted to, Valorie didn’t know if she could leave anymore.

  She left through the backstage exit, passing by the lion and tiger sitting placidly outside their cages. They’d finished their act with the Ringmaster, Carlo and Christina and were relaxing before they had to be put back in.

  Fleet of foot and nearly silent without shoes on, she ran to the part of the circus grounds where they kept their cavalcade of trailers and RVs.

  The light wasn’t on inside her RV, but Lennon didn’t need light to see or feel his way through. It was big for an RV, small for an apartment. There wasn’t much to get lost in.

  She was about to open the door to step in so that she could finally peel the latex off for Lennon’s private viewing pleasure. He didn’t like taking clothes off her, because there was almost always a trick to it. He liked watching her do it for him.

  But she stopped when she glanced over at Lennon’s RV, with the metal trailer attached—like a horse trailer but with smaller windows, temperature control and a few additional custom amenities. Her sinking-stomach hunch paid off in the worst way when she noticed that, though there weren’t lights on in his tiny wreck of an RV, the light was on in the trailer. The light was blue, dim. Too much light hurt Melanie’s eyes.

  Valorie stepped lightly toward the trailer. Quietly as she could, she opened the door and peered inside.

  The tank was about the size and volume of six large, full bathtubs. It was clear, framed with steel, utterly empty except for the woman who lived in it. There were buttons on the outside, shielded by plastic covering that allowed the woman to push them without getting water on the board. They controlled filtration, temperature, jets, salinity, like a large, clear fish tank combined with a spa tub.

  The setup wasn’t as luxurious as it sounded. It lacked the hominess of aquariums. Instead, the tank had the clinical cast of a magician’s escape prop.

  This was Melanie’s home for the foreseeable future. Unless they stopped somewhere with a lake or a pond that wasn’t dormant or filthy with algae, Melanie stayed here or in the smaller tank in her exhibition te
nt, where she was transferred every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. She wasn’t getting out of her restrictive body any time soon, so she wasn’t getting out of the water either. Bell was too mad at her.

  It didn’t make a difference, really, that Melanie and her friends had threatened Maya in particular, as well as Christina and Troy. If there was something to say for Bell, it was that he took deep, personal offense to outsiders threatening any of his people, not just his favorites. Melanie was stuck with her tail for the foreseeable. She should be grateful that Bell even allowed her, John and Shawn to talk now that he trusted them not to scream for help.

  Valorie brought her eye to the crack, keeping her lips pressed tightly together to remind her not to make a sound.

  Melanie swam up to the surface of the water, her long bluish-green mermaid tail curling like a sea serpent behind her. She propped her elbows on the edge of the tank to watch Lennon by the smaller tanks in the back of the trailer as he caught fish and put them into a small container. Melanie could stomach human food, but her cravings ran wilder. The end of her tail lashed like a cat’s, and she vocalized her hunger through a gill-slashed throat. The slits were closed, her lungs taking precedence above water.

  “There’s a good girl,” Lennon crooned as he came around to the bench next to the tank. He stood on it, too short to reach the edge without the boost. “Who wants a nibble?”

  “Stop teasing,” Melanie said. Her voice wasn’t what it used to be. It seemed to double back in on itself and echo, as though she used both sets of vocal cords at once. Her sharp, conical, snaggled teeth clicked together. She stared down at Lennon with her too-large, frustrated eyes. The limpid eyelid that covered them in the water had retracted. Her long brown hair plastered itself to her face, neck and shoulders like seaweed.

  Melanie curled her bluish lips in revulsion as Lennon held the wriggling sardine up to her mouth, but that didn’t stop her from snapping hungrily forward like a seal. She gnashed her teeth as she held the tail, ripping pieces off the living fish and swallowing them whole with a backward toss of her head. Finally, she threw the tail in. Her webbed, clawed fingers were coated with remnants of fish scales, but she didn’t clean herself off, because Lennon had more.