Twelve Stories

Matthew Salesses

Nobody comes to the circus anymore. Hemingway, the last elephant, trumpets a sad note as his girlfriend is packed away into a truck to be sold. All us clowns line up in front of the big top to wave goodbye. My wife, Lulu, takes it hardest. She won’t even put on her make-up anymore. Last week, she crushed her rubber nose under her heel and it squeaked apart into two pieces. “What’s the point,” she said, “if no one laughs?”

The recession has hit us hard. Our boss sells off the animals: first the monkey that couldn’t ride its bicycle, the one that reminded Lulu of our lost son; then the tigers, which got meaner as they got hungrier; and the lions (ditto); now the elephants.

As the truck’s engine starts, Lulu rushes in front of the bumper. My boss pushes me forward to stop her.

“Please?” I ask Lulu. “You can’t prevent this.” It takes three of us to pull her away out of the road.

Hours later, I stand in front of rows of empty bleachers and perform tricks for three elderly folks who come once a month, for free, from the nursing home. They don’t pay any attention. One man is clearly drunk. The other man and the woman talk about the past without making sense. Lulu skulks around behind me, just outside the open tent flap. When I look back at her bare face, I realize how old we’ve gotten. Not quite elderly, but long past having another child. Her blond hair sticks up at untamed angles and her wrinkles quaver as she cries. She kisses Hemingway on his trunk. He unfurls it around her shoulders like an arm.

I squirt the rest of my plastic flower’s water at my partner and hurry out of the ring. Hemingway’s  trainer leads him in, and I want, for Lulu, a minute or two more. The trunk is a comfort, I know. That wrinkled gray flesh. An elephant never forgets.

As Lulu opens her hands, I see the red halves of her rubber nose. She stares at them with regret, and I can tell she’s thinking of our son. Split. Irreparable. We had let him camp with an older friend―they never returned. The friend showed up dead just two months ago, after twelve years of no news. This was around the same time we started feeling the effects of the recession. When she heard about the death, Lulu wanted to leave and renew our search for Danny, but he disappeared so long ago, really. What was I supposed to say? I told her we couldn’t leave our jobs. Not when so many others needed the work we had. Not when we couldn’t even afford a local pint, a night out we deserved.

I didn’t know she would blame herself for not saving any of her income. I didn’t know she would handle losing the animals like she was again losing our flesh and blood. The day the tigers shipped, she managed to get into a cage with one of them. I swear she looked disappointed when we got her out without a bite taken.

I walk up to her now and the smell of gas fills my nose. She hoists something off the ground and strides past me, into the tent. As she goes by, she takes a book of matches from her pocket. With Danny, she used to light an entire book and put it into her mouth, where the flame would go out. It always made him laugh. It was his favorite trick.

This time, though, she lifts what she picked up over her head, and liquid splashes over her clothes. It’s gas―I realize it’s gas―and then I’m running, watching her drop the canister and pull a match from the book.

She sees me coming, and her eyes light up in a way I don’t understand. I tackle her. I try to keep her head from smashing into the ground. The smell cuts into my lungs. I will always remember this smell, the smell of not burning. I reach for her arm and make sure she can’t strike the match.

“What were you thinking?” I ask, holding her down.

“I wasn’t going to do it,” she says. “I just wanted someone to care. I just wanted someone to care that I care.”

The elderly folks are watching now, out of their seats.

“Tomorrow the bleachers will be full,” I say as she looks up at me. “Everything will be a little less empty.”

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Matthew Salesses is the author of a chapbook, We Will Take What We Can Get (Publishing Genius), and stories in or forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Witness, The Literary Review, American Short Fiction, Pleiades, Mid-American Review, and others. His fiction has received awards from Glimmer Train, MAR, University of New Orleans, and IMPAC. He edits Redivider.