Horton the Great, Part 1

I’ve always considered my parents to be supportive of my ventures, regardless of how ridiculous and impractical my stunts were.

And they’d sit there, my parents, the lone audience members in the school auditorium, where I’d lie suspended upside down, dangling above the stage, holding on to a pistachio colored duster and performing my interpretation of Holst’s “Planets”, through twelve symphonies.

My dad read the paper, tapping out the ashes of his pipe frequent enough to glance up at the tip of the feather duster, momentarily admiring my grace and form as I strategically writhed around the rope in tune to the tinny record player that announced each symphony with a cauldron of hiss and scratches.

When I was fifteen they were there when I walked the tightrope across the steepest part of Marmite Cavern. They sat on makeshift chairs provided by the ample granite, which periodically rose up out of the blackness like bleachers for my adoring crowds to sit in, who would gasp and say “That Horton, I knew him when he was a boy, when he performed his human mop trick at the Galdry Peninsula Moose Lodge in ‘22”.

My parents sat there in the dark, with lanterns on their heads. Patiently they would wait on the ground, staring up and critiquing my technique, “You’ve got your foot awfully close to that stalagmite, son, a drip would kill you.” He puffed his pipe towards the end of his last syllable. Mom would hum a tune, and her twee voice would flutter out into the crevices of the cave, surmounting each level until the water would begin to drip, and I’d dismount, hiking back to the gorge with mom and dad and we’d joke about the day when they’d be hauled off by social services.

And it happened one day on a wintry morning in December, when the last of the leaves had fallen off the trees, and that familiar desperation in knowing that for the next three to four months, the rain would hamper any stunt-making until spring when I’d rush out on my unicycle, practicing for that rehearsal date for Mr. Barnum come July. That date punctuated with a large red circle, incomplete in its hastily drawn presence.

They came in a white wagon, clinical and surgical the separation was. Mom and dad were in the kitchen, thinking of what they could cook with only a can of sardines and stale macaroni that the weevils had inhabited during the Spring prior. It caught them by the surprise, but in an awkward way, in the way unexpected out of town guests would when they arrived suddenly, without notice. Out of town guests, did not talk rationally to them as they fretted about the lack of clean linens for them, that they’d have to make do with only one wash cloth and mom returned to the empty parlor-- home to the broken chair, the stool with three legs, and four charred logs that sat in the corner that to them served as our fireplace—and seemed perplexed at the inappropriateness of guests gagging her husband and strapping him down into the white gurney. “Why, I don’t think we need guests staying here tonight if that’s the way they are going to behave” “I don’t believe I’ve ever had guests act like that why Horace, could you see them out, dear?”
But I was upstairs, flipping through the family album and wondering what it would do for my career to be seen as an orphan. I could get into the papers more easily, and Barnum would pick me up in a heartbeat.

And in a few minutes it was silent downstairs, after the feet tramped across the wooden floors and I heard the door close, and the closure of the wagon’s hatchback, the start of the motor and the careless silence that greeted me as I descended the rickety staircase, being careful of the missing step, even pausing for a moment to look down at a picture of my mom and dad hugging that was swept up by the gust of wind that came to me at that moment, lifting the picture off of the dirty floorboards, where everything died.
My next memories were of the circus, time spent with the trapeze artists, as her personal assistant. And nights spent on the trapeze and high wire. I was an apprentice to Glenda the Amazing, and I followed her sequined tuchus as it bobbed and weaved around the high wire while her jaw was wired to a gummy pink circle. The wagon I slept in had all the amenities, and I’d stare into the mirror and dose off to dreams of increasing importance. I foresaw having my own trailer one day, with Glenda as MY assistant, and the world could go to hell. I’d planned the murder of Barnum for awhile now, and that rage burned in my little vacuous heart and each night I fell asleep after the release of murderous rage left me calm, tranquil and self assured.