Trustfall - a fiction fantasy for freewrite #408: carnival

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Trustfall

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Janey looked at the big empty space at the end of the beach, where the carnival had been. She knew it was only supposed to have been in town for two weeks, but it seemed to her as if it had always been there. And now it was gone.

She could still hear Norah, the bearded lady, singing softly as she bustled about cleaning and cooking for the others, her heavenly voice rising and falling as effortlessly as a gull on the wind. She could see Ginger and Edmond practicing their trapeze act, a slow motion arial ballet, a never ending trustfall, dangerous and graceful. She remembered the gleam of Madame Zora's crystal ball in the candlelight, the night before they had stepped into The Arcanum. The elaborate, mysterious patterns tattooed across Jacque's massive, rippling muscles, and the map so cleverly hidden within those patterns, between his spine and left scapula, directly over his third heart.

She could still feel Ethan's kiss fluttering, like a phantom butterfly, against her chapped lips.

Nobody would believe her if she told them. About the monsters. The danger. The kiss. Maybe even about the carnival. It was as if it had never been here.

Normal people tended to forget about carnivals when they left town, anyway. Also, inter-dimensional rifts were not the kind of thing people put much stock in. If she went around talking about pan-galactic human diasporas, and wormholes, and a traveling carnival that was really just a cover for a last ditch effort to save the universe from the malevolent depredations of the Nameless Ones, the best she could hope for was that nobody would take her seriously. The worst... she shivered, remembering Grandfather Flamingo's warning: "Don't breathe a word of this to anyone. You might end up institutionalized, like my poor sister Jezebel was, back in the seventies. Or worse." And the look on Jezebel's face as she'd nodded, eyes wide with sincerity, her cat-like features as serious as Janey had ever seen them, before going back to cleaning herself with her tongue.

She sighed. Ethan had promised he'd come back for her soon. And Norah had looked her directly in the eyes and told her it wasn't over, that they'd see each other again. But right now, it all felt like a dream.

It was getting colder. She'd have to go back soon, she told herself. Back to her parents' basement. And to job hunting, because there was no way her shifts at Pretzel Land hadn't been given to somebody else. She didn't want to go back, didn't want it to be over. But she couldn't stand out here all day. She watched the gulls swooping and turning over the water. Sometimes they hung almost motionless, high up in the pale gray sky. Sometimes they dove after fish in the sea or scraps of food along the beach. Abruptly one dropped out of the air toward the sand at her feet. She shrieked, reflexively, jumping out of its way. But it dropped whatever it had picked up, and climbed back into the sky. Not food, apparently.

No, she could see it glimmering dully there in the sand. It was metal, or maybe glass, or some kind of cut stone. She walked a few paces and bent to pick it up.

It was a key. Oddly shaped, but definitely a key. She couldn't read the symbols carved into it, but she knew what lock it was meant for. Or at least she hoped she did. She turned and headed toward town, toward the small oak door at the back of the genealogy section at the old lodge, her fingers closing around the cold, comforting solidity of the object she carried.

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©2018 Bennett Italia, all rights reserved.

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Hi everyone! This is my 87th 5 minute freewrite. (Disclaimer: these usually take me significantly longer than 5 minutes to write and edit ).

Come join in the fun at @freewritehouse! Many thanks to @mariannewest for hosting this wonderful daily freewrite :) https://steemit.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/day-408-5-minute-freewrite-sunday-prompt-carnival

Today's prompt: Carnival