Warren Adler 2009 Short Story Contest Finalists

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Jordan's fingers tap across the keys, bouncing like droplets of water on a sizzling grill. His fingers, extensions of his fast-flowing thoughts, peck the words, stirring them feverishly across the keyboard - the same fingers that have played across my body many times before.

He's a cob of a man - legs stunted since birth, mummified raisins attached to a solid ass - a man whose head melds to his square shoulders. Hoping for a best seller, Jordan divulges the secrets of his days in the circus – our days in the circus.

While painting my toenails, squatting in a corner of Jordan's orange shag-carpeted office, I do it with the cadence of quick pecking keys, purple specks on fairy toes, as his fingers drip with words. By the time the bashful clock sounds the noon hour like a cacophonous intruder, entering our space much like a vexatious fly, Jordan's fingers flame. Rapt, he stares with marble-round, inky eyes at the glowing screen, head dripping with sweat, running down his forehead landing on a course three-inch unibrow.

I can't help but look up when the pecking stops. Silence halts my hand in full swing, purple polish drips and lands on the orange carpet, beading up like a pill. The contrast holds my attention until the tapping resumes.
The circus, our home for many years, was filled with beautiful people, a hippodrome of sideshow sweeties, thorny little individuals who ate popcorn balls while the audience gawked at our fireplug shapes. We wore animal pelts and yesterday's sorrows, and not one of us had a nasty bone in our bodies. Trapeze artists, handsome and ruggedly fit, bared their souls while exposing the firmness of their middle - often giving the rest of us a quick wink from high above.

Our heterogeneity was as multifarious and widespread as the freckles on my face - a face given to me by a mother they called an anomaly, a woman who cultivated me in a trailer no bigger than a large box. She also gave me my wide smile, natural ruby curls, and stunted limbs, as well as a place to call home. Born into the circus herself, she could think of no other way to raise me, nor any other kind of life.

Again, silence, causing me to look up and see the puppet-frozen face of Jordan. His fruitful morning of exposing our life of show biz, freakish sideshow stunts, rhinestone outfits, and sadness that went along with it, was nearing an end, his fingers were still.

My mother called the other day saying, "Mona, I'm leaving the circus. I think I'm really sick this time and no one here will take it seriously." Her Lilliputian voice squeaked through the tiny holes in the receiver. I wanted to chase those words and pop them like the bubbles in a sheet of bubble wrap. I wanted to put them in my pocket and let them out in the woods where they could be free and land on trees and soil-covered rocks.
But instead I said, "Mother, you've been saying that ever since I can remember. When I as seven and sat near you on the couch, you said the same thing."

Since Jordan and I left the circus two years ago, Mother has called at least twice a week, like a returning bevy of swallows, chirping worried words that flit around my 30 year-old already over stuffed brain. But I don't begrudge her this - she gave me my scintillating red hair, flashing smile, and button blue eyes, so how could I deny her the opportunity to spew words at me whenever she wanted? At four feet-three inches tall, I tower over her like a bird over water. She used to say, "You got your father's height, he was almost a foot taller than me."

My mother, known throughout the community as Wee, was crushed when my father left her before I was born. They were in Philadelphia for a week when he escaped one night through the side of the big tent. I say escaped because Mom said he'd always felt trapped in the entertainment industry, where he rode the elephants and talked small talk to big people. Whenever she told me that story I formed a mental image of the moon slipping behind a night black cloud, succumbed by its softness, staying there where it's safe and circus daughters can't see. I pictured my father running with pygmy legs, arms swaying at his sides as he took off to God knows where.

Jordan resumes his steady typing, pecking like a happy chicken. The look on his face tells me he's writing a funny scene. After we married, we said we'd never have kids - never be responsible for subjecting tiny, precious ears to the sound of "geek." I can only imagine the kids I would have—long-legged waifs who towered over other kids.

Jordan wanted to get a Saint Bernard puppy once until the owner of the puppy reminded Jordan that the dog would be massive when it grew up. Jordan said, "What are you saying?" The puppy owner's face flushed blood red, his eyes bugged out, and he looked like he was ready to crawl into a hole. We left without getting a dog.

Instead, we got an ant farm that we fixed up to look like a tiny circus. The elfin red weed walkers play near miniature tents that I painted with my florescent pink nail polish. I made them ramps of straw and placed dried grass where they like to clown around, so to speak. I pretend they're us in our past lives, making tunnels with our minds, digging, delving deeper into our act, unearthing who we were and who we always thought we would be. I call them my army of midgets. Jordan doesn't like that. He thinks we should call them "God" and feed them nectar of the Gods, because that's how he felt in his time of show stopping, hand clapping, back stabbing, day dreaming, castle building life under the big tent.

He says, "You eat, in dream, the custard of the day," a quote he read by Alexander Pope. I've always thought that Oscar Wilde was describing Jordan when he wrote "One who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he see the dawn before the rest of the world."

When I talked to my mother on the phone the other day, her voice had the high-octane squeak of a broken fence. Her titillated, energized state, she offered, came from news that had just been delivered to her at her trailer. "Mona?" Her voice had a questioning Minnie Mouse squeak. "Guess what? We're going to Europe! The whole circus this time. We'll be leaving in a week or so." The prospect of a life abroad had cured whatever had been ailing her. She was no longer sick, but energized with her new predestined life.

Jordan's legs are swinging above the floor, scraping back and forth against the sides of a chair that doesn't fit him—his mustard-colored shoes sway like branches of sawed off yellow cedar limbs. He's anesthetized by his own words, inside the computer where he plays with language like toys, puppets, wagons over flowing with tools and gadgets. He likes those euphemisms, sentences of confusion.

He says this agglutination of coinage of the language will make him famous.

Jordan won't let me read the words on his screen, but will tell me the semantics of words that he's discovered or made up. He says his disgust for common words, his "logomasia," makes him want to create a whole new language. He could, too. I never know if his words are made up out of his own imagination. He's not like me. My only link to words, besides speaking them I mean, is when I play a dreadful game of scrabble.
I've painted every hard shell on my body now and feel like a purple-tipped wonder. I can't remember if I finished painting the fence I built for the ants, though. I have their circus set up on a worm-eaten, brown table in the living room that is almost eye level for me.

I let Jordan continue with his tautological passages, dreaming of the day his words would unmask the Kafkaesque soul of the dazzling little people—whose hearts are as big as Joe average down the street—and someday show up on bookshelves everywhere. Ah, the life of a writer.

Outside, bleeding hearts and dahlias peek through the window. Their colors are my energy. I want to eat them to absorb their pigment. I want to touch them to be like them and smell like them. Before they die, I'll pluck them and put them in a purple vase the color of my now dry fingernails. Then, when they die and the water takes on a putrid odor, I'll bury them under the eucalyptus tree where their stench can take on the tree's odor. Then I'll take the ants out and free them on the tomb, God's acre, the necropolis for circus ants that learned from the best.

Jordan won't like my plans, but when he sees this intelligentsia climbing their God, he'll know it was for the best and thank me, as he watches them, like us, expand their horizons.

Next time I'm going to paint my toenails pink and my fingernails electric blue, then I'll wave them in the air for the lost fairies to behold. Jordan says the fairies follow little people to help them and keep them from harms way. I wish Jordan were a leprechaun. Sometimes, while working in the circus, they'd have us wear green outfits that made us look like funny little impish characters. Jordan's thick black hair stuck out from his hat. His bright eyes and high cheekbones melted me like a hot marshmallow. I wanted to lay his little body out right on the stage and have my way with him. We would meld together and make one normal size person.
Jordan likes to quote people, like Joe Ancis who says, "The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."

Next time I talk to my mother, I'll tell her how people really do have wings, even little people—maybe especially little people. I believe in miracles and Jordan says if we try hard enough we can do whatever we want. He proved it when he moved us away from the circus and got a job to help support us. He says that when he gets to work in the morning, fitting himself into a small ferry booth on the north end of the island, taking money, giving out tickets to anxious travelers who only see him from the chest up, he feels worthwhile, "normal." Those who know Jordan don't look at him as an oddity; instead they know his soft-spoken nature and glowing spirit. Others, passersby who don't know him, often stare. Their loss.

I can hear Jordan's little belly growling and my nails are now dry, so I'm off to fix lunch. The last time we ate in public the waitress asked us if we wanted the child's menu. So the next time I go out to lunch, before I eat in front of another person, and before the server has a chance to ask me that question again, I want to say, no thank you—sometimes we even say, "Supersize me."