The Painted Stars

I read an eyewitness account a few days after, so I know what it looked like from down there, in the seats. I hadn't meant to read it; Dad and Mom had studiously hidden any newspapers and hadn't turned the t.v. on since the accident. But I had walking from the trailer down the midway, head down and hunkered between my shoulders, toward the animal pens when a wind blew a crumpled ball of pages against my shin. I stopped, as though they were shackles, and bent down.

It was the local paper, a small town fish-wrapper of the kind that usually gave glowing coverage to the Elks Club dinner and the ice cream social on the Town Hall Yard every summer. This issue was different. CIRCUS ACCIDENT LEAVES 1 DEAD.

I had no memory of what happened. It's maybe a good thing I read the eyewitness report, the memories of Mrs. Evelyn Marks, 48, who attended the performance with her husband and two sons. Even though she had been thirty feet below me, below us, her words filled in the gaps that yawned like a canyon between before and after.

Rafe and I are twin brothers; we had been born in the circus and trained since before we could walk to perform. For fourteen years we drew them into the big top, first as cavorting little clowns, and then as we grew, as acrobats and tumblers. We have been doing the high-trapeze act for five years. There is something magical, I hear over and over again after a show, to see two identical boys, barely out of childhood, swinging and flipping through the air like birds of prey on the hunt. And to me yes, there was always magic in the split second before one of our outstretched hands, chalked and strong, with nothing but empty space below it, neared and then touched the other's hand and the slight crackle of electricity shivered up the arm as the fingers wrapped tightly around the others' wrist and he slid off the bar, weightless for an instant until all his weight settled at the end of your grip.

Mrs. Marks, according to the paper, said the act was flawless up until the moment of the accident. She was vivid in her recollection: our silver lycra bodysuits, our slicked-back hair, the spotlight burning in the dark tent, the murmur and wild applause of the crowd each time we caught the other or flipped or soared. It was flawless, we were always flawless. We were perfect, in town after town, show after show.

At first, we had had a net, but because we were always perfect, Dad dismantled it for the Calgary show a few years ago, and charged an extra two dollars a ticket. Now its just sawdust down there, and each time I climbed the long ladder up to the platform as the band played Rafe and I's theme song, I would spit halfway up and try to watch it all the way to the ground as I climbed, growing exponentially further and further from the little wet part of myself until it finally splashed onto the dust and I looked up to see the rungs of the ladder rising up into the dark.

When we were seven, Dad had had an artist paint stars on the ceiling of the tent. We loved it, it made us look like we were flying through a clear night sky. In our silver, with our black hair and our pale skin we must have looked like phantoms swirling in the night above a terrified and awestruck village.

In everything Rafe and I were as one, and so we were the perfect trapeze act; we could anticipate the other, almost read the others' mind as people are always afraid twins can do. We ate the same food, slept in the same bed, had the same dreams sometimes. Nothing was more natural to me than his hand around my wrist, mine around his, swinging through the beams of spotlight. Legs curled around the bar, bodies stretched and yearning toward the other, a vastness below and a sea of upturned, nervous pinpricks, sucking the air from the whole tent into their lungs and not letting it out until one had caught the other, so it seemed there was sometimes not enough air for he and I.

Mrs. Marks said it had taken her breath away, the boys had. Mine too, if truth be told. It was always that way; partway through the act I would notice I had been holding my breath too, just like them, and I'd let it out slowly, waiting for Rafe to swing back toward me. I remember the low burning in my chest, the murmuring thump of my heartbeat in my ears, a flash of silver in a shaft of golden light.

My arm, my fingers I willed to their furthest points, stretching out; my legs and body swung hard toward the oncoming phantom, my back arcing, my head back, my eyes open searching the space between. That's all I remember.

The next thing I knew was the silence of hundreds, the intake of gasps and the waiting dread. I read the article over and over, wishing I had been in two places at once, up in the air with Rafe and down in the seats with Mrs. Marks and her family, to see, falling end over end, elegant even in distress, a silver trickle down the black canvas; an explosion of wood chips. I swung like a pendulum, she told the paper. Back and forth, until momentum died and I hung upside down like a bat, arms hanging down, head slack, legs tightly curled around the bar.

I could have let go, could have unfurled my long legs and slid through the dark to be with him. I must have been afraid, or else I would have. The spotlight was cut, she said, the whole place was dark for a moment, and then people began to scream and cry. There was nothing but them and us in the dark, a lone silver phantom dangling like a sickly moon knocked from its orbit, who has lost its companion satellite.