"This work creates a compelling mélange of sophistication and bestiality, art and dispassionate reality as it guides the reader toward the inevitable."
The cats had never liked her.
They met for the first time under the big top, the cats in their cage, the sawdust on the floor, his gun in its rack at the rear of the cage.
"You're the girl?" he'd said, eyebrows forming the upper curve of a question mark.
"Yes —" though she could hardly be called that, anymore.
"Huh," he expelled the sound like a laugh, but only one corner of his mouth curved, and his eyes drooped, weary.
Had he seen her shiver? Smelled the acrid scent of fear and deodorized sweat? (He'd always been more animal than man.) Or did he sense the beasts' reaction to her presence?
The tigers seemed an extension of him then, that first time: long, furry arms with teeth that glistened. They lunged against their cage, maddened, eyes and teeth shining, shining.
Her shoes trembled where they dangled from her hand. Laces criss-crossing, they climbed over one another in an endless dance, desperate to leave.
"You'll be dancing with the cats," he said, no inflection in his voice. "You know that."
She nodded, faint from hunger. She'd paid the taxi instead of the hot dog vendor.
If she didn't get the job, she was dead — no, worse than dead; she was old. Jobless, homeless, useless.
So she danced for him, and he had to let her stay.
She had never danced this way before. He controlled the cats but loosely. They fought his mastery; she could feel it. Her fear propelled her into tighter spins, higher leaps, pushed her harder and farther into the dance than she had ever been before.
The cats wound around her as she moved, serpentine, their hides rough against her skin. In and out and around they went, leaping and tumbling in response to their master's will. Frenzied, she saw nothing, heard nothing, until the music stopped.
She finished, and her legs shook so violently that she sat down in the middle of the ring. Still, he watched her, the stretched planes of his face now loose, chin and jowls hanging motionless between the lines that framed his mouth. Power must be a heavy thing, she thought, light-headed.
"You can stay," he said. "I'll keep the cats in line."
She might have loved him then.
For the first time, her joy and her fear combined into something new, spiraling up and out into an emotion that she could not describe or understand.
Her bunk in the supplies trailer was cold, her meals lonely. She came to him at last, asking for extra blankets.
"You'd be warmer here with me," he said. And truly, she had never been warmer.
Several years passed. The cat act had never been more popular, they said. He said nothing, but his hands were proprietary where they framed her shoulders like parentheses.
He'd said the cats would grow accustomed to her over time — had to, since she'd dance with them every night. This may have been true, but they never lost the taste for her flesh. Deep down, past intellect and reason, she knew this.
She came to believe that adrenaline had a flavor. She tasted it every night as she danced — metallic, like the barrel of a gun. Yet, somehow, days and nights, weeks and months passed, and she, herself, adapted to the cats.
Did her body tire of fear? Stop producing the right chemicals? Did she somehow forget those first bright visions of sharp teeth and cruel claws?
Perhaps not, but her turns became less precise, her leaps, her pirouettes more tame. Time had dulled her dance of fear.
And he pushed her from his bed into the cold night.
"I guess we'd better start looking for a new girl," he said. The unspoken cruelty? She was a girl no longer.
Who would have an old dancer? An old circus dancer? There was nothing left for her now.
Hysterical in her grief, she raced to the tigers' cage to fetch his gun. She would end it, end it all now. She would kill him... no, herself... or his beasts!
She was only half-way to the gun when they woke.
She hoped they'd be quick.
Elle Van Hensbergen lives with her darling 11-year-old beastie, her beloved Mr. Man, and her dog (the cat) in central Texas. After she received that BS in Engineering that she'd been wanting, she attended the Odyssey Workshop. When she is not reading, she is often writing.