The Circus left that night.
In the darkness—out of all the
countless tents that morning—only the Big Top remained, its red and white
stripes showing gray in the dim moonlight.
It was drained of color. Clouds
scudded across the sky, casting strangely shaped shadows along the ground—curving
and rippling, seeming to rise up from the grass to grope the surroundings.
Everything had been packed up—vendor’s
booths, animal tents, performer’s tents, wagons, trollies—disappearing under
the fabric of the big tent. It was
almost like magic.
Nothing breathed that night. It was quiet; the type of quiet that makes
shivers crawl along your skin, or perhaps the kind of quiet that suffocates
you. That is to say, it was not a good
quiet.
In the thickness of the dark, unseen
by any, a huge cloud left its track in the sky and descended toward the open
field where the tent stood, alone. It
came closer and closer, billowing and getting bigger and thicker before finally
settling right above the Big Top. It
hung there from an invisible string, the unseen puppeteer using a master’s
touch. Then it enveloped the tent, coming
down to the ground and wrapping around it until the tent could no longer be
distinguished in the thick whiteness.
Slowly, carefully, the cloud rose
back up, higher and higher, carrying the tent within it. Farther into the sky it flew, until one
couldn’t separate it from the other clouds.
The night sky hadn’t changed. It was the same as ever. Clouds puffed and evolved into odd
configurations; a dragon, an ice cream cone, a trolley flitting across the pockmarked
face of the moon.
And one looked rather like a very
large Circus tent.
The Circus had gone.
