LOBSTER BOY

The Cherrytown Circus runs thrice a year — come one, come all, he’ll wait for you here.

Through the bulbed gates, behind the luxe velvet drapes, a man named Lobster Boy waits. Through the crack of that same old, rotted panel, he looks for Cherrytown’s sweetheart. She sits in the third row, next to her Daddy, plump with the money of the mayor’s office, next to her Momma, back straightened with a girlish shame. As always, through the shadow of her father, she grins at Lobster Boy; Lobster Boy retreats, her radiance shatters him, heals him, defying the ugliness through this red-striped tent. Red are her cheeks and palms when he smiles and trots out on the latest mare. Red are his eyes from the peanut dust that pollutes. Red are the peonies that she tosses; he catches them with his cleft hand. 

Red is Daddy’s fattened fist as he watches his little girl fall for the freak, through the dynamite’s haze, through Cherrytown’s judgments, through the curse of his own damned marriage. Red was Momma’s sweet tongue, which had lied in that vow; Red was Daddy’s heart, which had broken and bled. And yet, despite this curse of Daddy and his Daddy and the one before him, Lobster Boy, whose body was an oversight of God, waits for his sweetheart, like she's fate.

Through the Mayor, who now waits for the dressing room to empty, through his gilded threat, through the Mayor, who’d kill for his little girl, for himself and the shame on the ring finger, through his sharpest blade, through its slashes and digs, through the hopeless struggle, through the final stench of elephants, through the familiar nutty air, through the big top tent’s spiraling hell, Lobster Boy loves her — for peony red is his blood.