On a Knife Edge
Posters for Circus Caballero were plastered around town. Stu and I asked to go.
Pa said, “Sure, honey, if you’ve the money. I don’t.”
I did have some money in a piggy-bank my grandpa gave me the previous year for my seventh birthday. I was saving for a new dress, but it went missing even before I was seven and a quarter. Pa didn’t have time to go to the circus. He was too busy finding work. He told us the best place to find it was in one of the bars in town, so he spent most of his days there. We weren’t allowed in.
When she heard about the circus, Grandma gave us a dollar for bringing her firewood, warning us not to tell Pa. Uncle Joe gave us money for school lunches, but we went without. At ten, Stu was old enough to do jobs for farmers after school. In the week before the circus, he mucked out stables and picked fruit. Eventually we’d enough saved up for two tickets.
From the minute the ringmaster cracked his whip and announced the trapeze artists, Stu and I were spellbound. We flew through the air, galloped with horses around the ring, laughed with clowns. But the knife-thrower was the best. His assistant smiled as he landed one knife after the other - within a hair’s breadth of her ear, rubbing gently against her knee and one squeezing in between Peter Pointer and Little Tommy Thumb on her right hand.
Afterwards, I asked Stu to throw knives at me. He was already brilliant at throwing darts. I promised I’d stay still.
“We could charge people money to come look,” I said. “And you’d get some money to buy comic books and I could buy a dress and maybe a shiny clip for my hair.”
He loved comic books. He agreed to practise.
We ripped open a big cardboard box from the garbage behind the general store and propped it up on the side of our shed. I stood against the cardboard and Stu drew an outline of me with a black felt pen. When I stepped away, he started practising with our three steak knives. I cheered him on. At first, the knives hit the ground before they reached the outline or they barely glanced off it before falling on the cracked slabs. Soon, he was throwing them straighter and stronger, getting two inside the silhouette and one outside. After ten minutes he finally succeeded in landing all three outside but near to the body.
“Yippee! I’ll stand in now so you can practise with me.”
“You sure, Emma? Maybe I should practise more?”
Just then we heard Pa crashing through the house, calling out our names. The door to the yard opened outwards.
“Well, looky here. How was the circus? What ye all doin’ out here?”
“Practising our knife-throwing act to make money, Pa.”
He looked a bit puzzled, then you could see on his face that it made sense. “Good idea. Keep practising! If you’re any good, I’ll be yer manager. We’ll share the takings.”
He went back inside. We heard him opening and banging shut the kitchen cupboards. We knew there were only empty bottles in them.
I stepped back inside my cardboard outline, closed my eyes, focused on the dollars we’d get, dollars I’d hide where they could never be found. Dreamed of me and grandma going to the store to buy me that new dress.
Author: Kathryn Crowley writes short fiction and memoir from her home in Dublin. She has two published collections, 'Sweaters and Small Stuff' and 'Room for One More' with Emu Ink Publishing.