Everrett Mac (ex_maths16) wrote in regulation, @ 2008-03-15 21:54:00 |
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Current music: | kimya dawson - tire swing |
the sound of our voices made us forget everything that had ever hurt our feelings
Who: Everrett and Arabella Mac
Where: A circus camp in Moscow, Russia
What: Joining the circus, meeting a seer and generally scaring themselves silly.
When: Summer of 1997
Rating: G
Status: Closed; complete
To the foreign ear, Russian was a harsh language, seemingly all clicky consonants and quickly slurred vowels. Half of the time Everrett Mac felt as though he was being barked at by his barmy old Aunt, even as she grabbed at the skin of his cheeks and pinched them until they turned the colour of her lipstick. They were free of her now, and had been for at least a couple of hours, and as Everrett pressed his face against the bars of the gate, he could feel her pinch-marks fade away, cool against the rusty old metal. The bridge of his glasses was beginning to press painfully against his nose and he pulled away again, both fists wrapped around the rungs as he tried to figure out the best way to pick the padlock without anyone noticing.
"We'll tell them we're their children," he said to his sister quietly, his voice whispy and wavering, almost as if he was unsure about it. He wasn't unsure - that was just his voice. It'd always been like that.
Kicking at some gravel by his feet, Everrett stepped away from the gate completely and dug a hand into his pocket, pulling out an old safety pin covered in fluff. The clunky old camera around his neck swung to and fro, reflecting the light from the dying sun overhead in its lens before taking an unplanned picture of the caged-up bears behind the metal barriers.
"I don't think they'll believe us," Arabella said uncertainly. "I haven't learned any Russian besides 'feed me' and 'I hate borsch'."
Her head craned up, staring at the rusty metal bars that seemed to stretch up into forever. She could hear the squealing of another gate shutting in the distance. It sounded like old swings on a playground, shuddering under the weight of children's laughter.
Her fingers laced their way between the bars as she pressed her head half in, amber hair swinging against iron. She wondered if they had crafted them from that metal to keep the faeries out or if it had been done to keep them in. She wondered what it would be like to be an acrobat or perhaps a bear tamer and it was that that made her add, "But even if they don't believe us, perhaps they'll let us join anyhow. Circuses like twins, don't they?"
Everrett's nose scrunched up thoughtfully and he fiddled with his father's old camera, clicking the lens cover back on to stop it from taking any more surprise pictures. "Maybe," he said. "But only if the twins are freaky. Perhaps we should try and grow beards." He crouched down slightly and let his arm slide through a gap between the bars, lifting up the heavy padlock and shoving the safety pin inside. "We can do tricks, though, can't we? You've seen me make coins disappear lots of times." Biting his lip and furrowing his brow, he fiddled with the safety pin a bit more until he felt the bar of the lock come loose. Grinning, he rose to his feet and slowly let the chain come loose from around the front of the gate.
"After you."
"That's you. Stuff like that always happens to you," she complained. "I can't even get my hand to disappear when I stick a napkin over it." Arabella stepped over the chain, her eyes scouring the landscape.
It was barren, the bright colors of the tents fading in the dimness of twilight. The bears didn't have their costumes but were, instead, leaning against their cages in slumber, the faint sounds of grunts breaking the night. She could smell hay and timothy as she breathed in, marred by the clinging smell of animal hair and manure. It was like standing in a barn and she stepped forward, her urban mind overwhelmed for a moment by the sheer newness of it all. Heavy shoes drug forward slowly, her thoughts leading her faster than her toes.
"Where should we go first?" A finger reached out slowly, pointing to a tent with a flag drooping from its mast. "There?"
Everrett stepped up behind Arabella and peered over her shoulder at the desolate land; the greyness of it all reminded him of some of the more graphic comic books he had tucked away between his Spiderman ones. The comics that he only took out when he knew no one else was in the room.
"No," he muttered, taking hold of his sister's elbows from behind and swinging them around until their gaze pointed in the direction of a black and white striped tent, much smaller than the rest of them. "There." Something about it seemed different from everything else in plain view - it looked like the kind of tent that would hold a fortune teller, a gaggle of real circus freaks, maybe a man covered from head to toe in tattooes.
His mis-matched trainers scuffed along the gravelled land, gathering dust along the loose laces, and his footsteps were lighter than Arabella's.
"Everrett..." she said, her voice going impossibly small. And Ara's voice was never small- it was always too loud, crashing through conversations and scattering them as if words were crows on a telephone pole. "I'm scared."
The boy stopped mid-step and turned to face his sister. Ara was scared. Ara was never scared - that was always Everrett's job.
"But this is supposed to be an adventure," he reasoned, scratching the back of his neck. His long, thick hair bunched up against the collar of his shirt and the arm handles of his bag as it blew with the wind. Their Aunt had tried to cut it, like all the rest of them had, but the scissors had broken again. Every single pair that met the sandy-coloured strands snapped in two. His hair, he felt, would be long like this forever.
"In adventures scary stuff always happens, but good prevails. You know that."
She couldn't give voice to her fear and her eyes went to his hair as he scratched the back of his neck. There was a scab there still from where their Aunt had poked it as her slashing at his hair grew madder, her inability to change him - to make him fit the mold. Her fingers went to her own hair, ruthlessly cropped - where Everrett could not be forced to conform, Arabella could. She swallowed hard as she looked at him. Her bubblegum went sour in her mouth and she spat it out, grinding it into the dirt with her heavy heel, knowing it would stick.
If I asked you to cut your hair, she thought to him, would it stay short?
That letter that he'd gotten. The one that hadn't made any sense. She knew as she watched his fingers still scraping at the red mark on his neck that it had to be answered. But maybe... maybe she could hold it off for a time. Maybe she could have one last adventure with him before they had to grow up.
Arabella knew all about growing up. It killed you, even if adults said it didn't.
"That's right," she said, jabbing her head up. "Heroes don't turn back." Even if it meant losing the ones they loved.
That’s the spirit, Everrett thought, his hand falling away from his neck, finger dotted with dry blood. Beaming, he ran forward and linked their arms, walking them back toward the dark tent. Its opening was billowing in the wind and he caught a flash of colour from inside. Maybe it wasn’t as daunting as he’d originally thought it to be. Most things tended to turn out that way.
“What do you suppose we’ll find? Do they have fortune tellers here? Maybe she’ll be able to tell us where… where I’m going.”
"May-" She started to say that she didn't want to know. But it wasn't fair and it struck her that it was like something their mother would say and so instead, she brightened her voice and said, "Maybe. If we cross her palm with silver."
Digging in her pocket, she pulled out an old tarnished coin, squeezing it in her palm for a moment before she opened it, her fingers unfurling slowly. "I brought this..." For you was the unspoken conclusion. Silver was magical in all the stories talismanic- it kept people safe.
Everrett glanced down at the silver in his sister's palm but he didn't take it from her. He let Ara keep it. She needed it more than he did.
They got closer to the tent and something in Everrett's steps wavered, slowed down. It was Arabella's turn to lead them now. It was always when the final steps came closer that Everrett backed down, remembered who he was. What he was like.
"You go in first," he whispered, unlooping his arm from Arabella's and gingerly lifting the opening flap. It was dark inside except for a couple of flickering lanterns, reflecting the colours of the cotton walls, red and yellow and orange, like fire.
Nose leading the way, she stuck her head into the tent. Her persona shifted from nervous to fearless as she sensed Everrett's hesitation, always his shield for the things that frightened him most.
The heady smell of spices choked her mouth for a moment, the scents so strange and foreign that they collected in her throat for a moment, brushing against her tongue. The air was thick with smoke, a blueish fog that made it difficult to detect anything besides the soft clinking of metal and the faint outline of a person. Another forceful step landed her in front of cushions and she saw, in innocent surprise, that the fortune teller was not a woman but rather a man, his hair crowned by a pale turban, the wrappings slowly unravelling as they spiralled down long black hair. He was sitting cross-legged on the cushions, breathing from a long pipe that trembled against his lips. The eyes that followed the twins were mysterious but not unkind.
His fingers were very long and very pale as they stroked the flute at his side. With a slow flourish, he replaced pipe with a flute and blew a low, long note.
It echoed through her body and her foot took another step, not looking behind, at Everrett, but rather, ahead.
"Say something in Russian," Everrett whispered harshly, squeezing his lips and clenching his teeth so that the words pushed out from the side of his mouth. He looked at the man before them with something close to suspicion in his eyes, but he imagined it was mostly hidden by the thick reflection of his glasses. Fiddling with the frames, he bit back a cough as the thick air trickled its way down to the back of his throat, cloying at his lungs.
The tent seemed so much bigger inside - the ceiling was taller, and the smoke curled up to the inward peak, curling around before disappearing into the coloured fabric.
But she didn't say anything. Instead, Ara thrust out her hand, opening it so that the silver glinted in the faint light between them.
The seer set his flute down, wrapping her palm in thin fingers as the coin slipped away somewhere down his sleeve. He began to speak to her in Russian, in a language she believed Everrett could not understand, of the life that she would have and of the separation coming. She began to tell her brother of it, to repeat words... or parts of words. She had always protected him, after all.
"You're going to travel across the ocean," she whispered. "And there's a war, and something else, that you won't know." The fortune teller was staring at her with wide black eyes as if he knew she did not tell all of it. "And we'll be separated for a little while but then I'll find you." And then, the last part- was something that she didn't understand and she held it in her ears for a moment before saying anything, rolling the words across her tongue. "I'm going to marry a bear."
That, for once, was a direct translation.
"You're going to marry a-... shut up, you are not," Everrett muttered shakily, his hands trembling before he scrunched them into two tight fists by his sides. He tore his eyes away from the strange man's dark gaze and watched the back of his sister's head, frowning intensely at it. He wanted to tell her to shut up about the other stuff, too. About the ocean and the war and the separation. This man was barmy, like his Aunt and everyone else they ever met. None of what he had told Arabella had made sense.
"I don't like it here," he said quietly but firmly, still speaking to the back of Arabella's head. Her amber hair shone in the lamp light and it looked like fire, like the fabric billowing around them. "I want to go. Now. I want to go now."
"It's true-" she said. "He says it is." But something in her brother's voice was tugging her as hard as if he'd grabbed her elbow with sweaty fingers. She could smell the salt in the air underneath the smoke and cedar. That was what fear smelled like- salt and acid. If she put her fingers in her mouth, Arabella knew she'd taste it.
She took a step back but slowly. Ev couldn't know that she was still scared.
"It's alright." Defiantly, Ara added, completely contradicting herself. "I guess that's the sort of fortune you get for a dollar." It was neither fair nor true and she noticed that the seer's eyes glittered darker as they swayed towards her, hinting of a curse unspoken. "You're right. Let's go." But she didn't say to where.
Away, Everrett thought desperately - even into the arms of crazy Aunt Grusha. He longed for Venice again, for the water city and the museums and strange, bronzed and statue-esque men. Anywhere but here. He grabbed Arabella's hand and yanked her away from what could have been the clutches of the fortune teller, his knees giving way beneath him as he turned to run from the opening. He squeezed his eyes shut and prepared for a fall and a scraped knee against the worn carpet underfoot, but instead his shins met with a hard and shiny surface that stunk of bleach and Fairy washing-up liquid.
"Were haff you two childrens been?" A voice called from a space that was beneath him... or above him... - stairs. "I go looking all over town for you-..."
Everrett twisted around on the kitchen floor and stared gawk-eyed at his sister, their hands still linked tightly together like two intertwined hot-wires. His red and green sneakers were still smeared with the gravel, the laces black with it. Had they been there, or had he zoned out again during one of their many imaginary playing sessions?