Short Fiction - Be Careful What You Fish For
She sat there, her knobby knees bent in such a way that her long folded legs stuck out awkwardly in front of her shapeless body. The shallow steps only made her look longer, stiffer, like stale spaghetti. She held her arms out, resting her elbows against those boney knees and fiddled with something between her fingers; a twist tie perhaps, from her home brought lunch. The party food wasn’t good enough for her; something about an allergy; she complained too much. An under-bite further extended the lengthiness of her neck and accentuated the crookedness of her protruding front teeth. She turned to me and smiled, her top lip remaining pointed as though it was fixed there like a beak. I smiled back, making sure to stretch it into my eyes. Her laughter burst forth with an uncomfortable mixture of a snicker and a guffaw reminding me of the donkey I once fed at my uncle’s farm. It died; drank out of a water bucket that came in contact with the electric fence. Once she was finished with her girthy display of self gratification, her too-big-for-her-face eyes crept across their sockets to meet mine. The turn of her head slowly followed. Her skinny pointed nose lengthened as she peered down at me, expecting some form of response. I hadn’t even been listening.
The door to our left creaked open and a manicured male hand reached through. A ruckus of noise oozed in, followed by a round face I knew all too well. He smiled knowingly at my annoyed expression and squeezed the rest of his size onto the tiny landing. Small talk made me even more exasperated while he commented on her looking beautiful – I begged to differ – and how apparently people had been praising her new look after we’d left – I doubted it. Turning on my charm, I sparkled my smile all over him; I knew I could use him as my escape clause. He foolishly adored me and didn’t have enough smarts to realise I couldn’t stand him. With a wink and a nudge, I coaxed my derisive-looking best friend back into the party scene and took off leading down the stairs toward the exit sign.
The streets were abuzz with tinkering, tunes and ludicrous hollering; the travelling fair was in town. Glancing back I saw that he was hot on my heels, just as I figured he would be; he always was, his ridiculous puppy dog eyes tracing my every move. He was always scolding me for acting on my annoyances with that idiotic follower back there. I had a tendency to quickly take my leave of her.
She just likes you and wants to impress you. Why don’t you give her a chance? I sat with her for a whole five minutes listening to her ranting about fighting this, crying that, thinking about divorce or something or other that didn’t affect me. She’d get over herself.
I wasn’t so sure about my new devotee though. He seemed to think that getting a haircut and tending to his patchy facial hair would distract people from his pudgy, robust physique. Just because others seemed to have encouraged and been impressed by his slow physical progress, he showed it off to me like I’d be amazed as well, but my standards were higher than that. After bumbling through the crowds, he stopped me at a fishing booth and won me a bowl, which turned out to be a dirty bag with a piddly little creature in it. His unjustly proud face reddened with naïve delight which emphasized the unappealing blotchy discolouration in his cheeks from adolescent acne. I tilted my head at just the right angle to add legitimacy to my adoration of the slimy swimmer.
His awkwardly large smile, with teeth too straight and white to be natural, guided me into a dimly lit, faded and tattered tent. It was quieter here and smelled like musty, mothball covered old lady closets. Pushing my sideways grin past my disgusted nose squinch was difficult but he didn’t even notice my efforts and smugly pulled me along with his gorilla-like arms. I realized too late that it was an oddities exhibit as multicoloured smoke that stank and stung my eyes poured out of a poorly rendered mock cannon. The human cannonball stood next to it, eyes squinting and mouth half agape, having an air of drunken deliberation. Clearly, he hated the scene as much as I did.
Next we approached a calmer sight, my escort’s hand weighing sweatily on my shoulder as I searched for an escape from my escape plan. A soft hissing melody came out of nowhere to strangle us with its enticing notes. In front of us was a woman, wearing an elaborate brown-grey vintage gown, who was glaring at me between heavy locks of mousy hair and her long, thick, carefully fluffed facial hair. Her freckles were scattered haphazardly across her nose and cheekbones making her look filthy. Above her head read a sign: The Bearded Lady – The furry fury: pursuer and punisher of unavenged crimes; what a mess of nonsense. Stiff, ugly and useless would be more like it. She didn’t move an inch while we stood there but her terrifyingly piercing eyes weren’t blinking as they followed our departure.
Excited, my entourage goofily loped toward the last display. With his big back turned, I stealthily began backing away until the crowd parted just enough for me to see the main attraction. Centre stage was a boy -- or was it a wolf? Entranced, I drew nearer, overhearing torrents of scathing remarks that denounced the wolf boy as a mutt, a beast, an abomination to men and animals alike. He just sat there, like a dog, and took the abuse with mild eyes.
Looking around, I noticed that while the majority of the mob was jeering the spectacle, my cohort looked unimpressed and pitiful which drew out his long jaw to Neanderthal lengths while his thickly groomed brown eyebrows matched the image. I laughed and he looked in my direction with so much confusion that it rewound his evolution further and turned his features monkey-like. It seemed that the wolf-boy had perked up a bit upon spotting my interactions with his evolutionary equal and I noticed that with the similarly forsaken and confused looks on their faces they could both easily be a part of the same freak show. Stepping back I chuckled mightily while loudly pointing out the fact; they didn’t seem nearly as amused as I was.
The crowd around us quieted as my taunts became more boisterous and pointed, enticing the other onlookers to take part in my cleverness as well. My chest vibrated with hilarity as I witnessed my companion’s transformation continue; his shoulders slumped, elongating his arms while his clenched jaw protruded with his embarrassment.
I looked around at the spectators with a big grin but their reactions were nothing like what I had expected. Their disgusted faces baffled me and I could feel my smile slide off my face and violently hit the floor. The jeers that had been thrown around my head toward the wolf boy were now hitting me as though I was the mutant. In fact, as I turned back around, eyes widened in humiliated terror, I noticed the he-dog himself looking intensely at me as though I was an interesting part of his entertainment. Deep in his mane of dirty grey fur, his yellow-green eyes unnerved me with their vigorous glow. It was as though he could see straight into my thoughts. A glance to the right made my breath quicken when I realized that my personal cave man suddenly had his own companion, my best friend who must have left the party sometime. She was holding him affectionately, both of them regarding me in the same fashion as the mutt. They all stared at me as though they were waiting for me to perform some sort of revealing act. Behind them I saw the human cannonball chortle drunkenly with the bearded lady held gracefully in his arms; she smiled ridiculously, her cold eyes sparkling with gruesome enjoyment.
I wasn’t in the mood to play these games anymore. Deciding quickly on an apt response to this nonsense, I took off as fast as humanly possible. As I made for the tent’s exit I felt the air thicken and chill around my limbs. My feet began slipping on the muddied earth beneath me and then, just as my right foot lowered nearest the opening, it felt as though the ground had vanished and I fell. Instead of hitting the ground at my feet I bounced off of something plastic mere centimetres from my face. Confused, I spun around and the world spun with me. Cold distorted faces were staring at me through a smudged barrier as muffled cackles echoed in my ears. Slimy wench isn’t she! A monster! Freak! Terrified, I searched for the slimy creature in question. A small boy was rapping near the base of the obstruction and the noise radiated deafeningly around me, shaking the walls of my confinement.
Shadows of the troupe that had been watching me spun into focus as the confusion around me settled. I reached for the one who had brought me to this disastrous place but my body wasn’t moving like it should have. My balance was negligible in this contraption that made gravity seem fiction. It was like being in a dream world but my dream turned nightmare as the shadows grew out of proportion around me and through the darkness I was able to see my reflection in the walls encasing me. A stream of bubbles rose around my orange bulbous face in a whirlwind of a silenced scream.
