Anglerfish

The knotted plastic bag in her hand is sweating condensation down her wrist. Inside, the goldfish floats cluelessly, opening and closing its mouth as if mocking her own gasps for breath.

The hill is steeper than it had appeared from the height of the tent’s crow’s nest, nothing but a slick of mud and loose gravel. She has to dig her heels into wet earth to haul herself up.

Her slippers are ruined and the muscles in her calves are strung taut by the time she reaches the top, but the view alone is very nearly worth it.

The Carnival lights are a glorious, washed out mess of candied apple red and plummy pink hanging in mid-air like heat lightning.

Ruefully, she holds Fishy up to see for itself but it simply continues to bob along the bottom of the bag, unimpressed and oblivious. Typical.

From far, far below, some of the girls wave to her, their faces too far off to distinguish. For all she knows, they could be crying, though she doubts it. She hadn’t thought anyone had even noticed her leave.

She doesn’t wave back.

Further atop the hill, her destination looms behind skeletal trees and wickered bushes: the Building.

Before her, the ground is littered with garbage: old rusted, chewed away tires, shattered remnants of ornate perfume bottles, blue-stained popsicle sticks, pinstriped popcorn bags, and wilted paper cotton candy cones from the previous girls who have come atop the hill.

The pile must be at least a meter deep. Probably, it’s deeper.

As lightly as possible, she steps gently atop the endless mass. She steps once, twice, three times, before it shifts underneath her and she stretches out her long legs to cross to a more stable patch, where an old boxy phonograph rests on its side, snuggled between a splintered apple crate and a shiny acrobat’s costume.

With the toe of her slipper, she nudges a stray syringe out of the way, and the phonograph flips under her weight. Her foot is pulled under the depths of the Junkyard.

It won’t budge. The slightest movement sends pain slicing through her foot.

She can feel herself sinking, being pulled down to become part of the Junkyard. How many other girls are sunken down there?

Across the Junkyard, the Building seems to glow.

Pulling with all the strength left in her, she forces her foot up even as whatever it is caught on slices deeper into her flesh.

She pulls once, twice, until she can see the ankle straps of her slippers.

Slipping Fishy’s bag under her armpit, she reaches with one hand to grab a piece of colored glass and begins sawing at the straps. The elastic strings come apart and the fabric withers away from her skin.

Her foot slips out like a spider slipping out of its old exoskeleton.

Vermillion blood streams in rivulets down and between her bare toes. The stale, cold air stings the slice in the side of her foot. She prods it with a hesitant finger and the wound easily peels open in halved slabs of flesh, revealing knuckles of white tendon and orange bubbles of fat.

The fluffy white fabric of her skirt frays as she rips off a strip. Hissing through her teeth, she tugs it tightly around the width of her foot and watches it soak through with blood.

She remembers when one of the Trapezists had fallen and a shard of plastic left over from one of the clown-acts wedged into her leg. The flesh of her calf had crisped to leather, bubbling up with black chestnut lumps. The whole tent had reeked of rotten meat and sulfur and stale urine, even as she was still writhing in her cot.

After they butchered her leg, the Ringmaster was sure to burn it.

Where she is going, there is no sickness or disease. At least, that’s what they say.

She’s heard the stories—muttered musings and backstage whisperings—of the Building and the shape it takes when you get near. Each described a rickety structure beyond comprehension; a beast with lungs and guts and deep, hungry mouths that seem to call to you, whistling between each jagged shark tooth.

She longs to see it. Weak as she feels from pain, blood loss, and excess adrenaline, she drags her dead leg behind her through the last stretch of the Junkyard until she stumbles back onto solid ground.

The Building that sits atop the hill, beyond the dead trees and the Junkyard, now just several feet ahead of her, looks mostly like an office building. Tall, but not too tall. Plain, but not uncomfortably austere. It’s all concrete and cheap masonry, each wall carved away with dozens of insect-eyed windows.

Distant neon lights bounce off the blacked-out windows, shining like the latex costumes the Trapezists wear.

Reaching the door, she tries the knob: a carved, once-copper globe turned blue with flakes of patina—stuck but unlocked.

How absurd to imagine that she could have been buried back there and all along the door had been unlocked.

Biting the bound ponytail of the plastic bag, she grabs the knob with both hands and leans her full weight on it. It kicks open with a tidal wave of dust.

She pulls Fishy from her teeth and ducks under the doorframe. The cloudy overhead lights are already on inside, as if it’s been waiting for her all this time.

One of the young Contortionists spoke of the lights atop the hill, how they hummed to her at night, even through the blacked-out windows, even though it is always night here.

The white lights hummed to her like a mother she couldn’t remember. Mothers are things from the Outside and no one remembers anything before the Carnivale del Contrapasso, but she swore she felt its brightness and warmth calling to her.

One night in the middle of her act, she bent her back into crescents and snapped her head skyward. Her eyes were wide and white as bone china saucers; cat-like mirrors filled up with rapturous light.

A week later, the Contortionist hiked up the hill, danced her way across the Junkyard, and simply crept inside.

The Contortionist was the first she knew to go up the hill. She never came back. None of them ever do.

Some say they walked through and out to whatever lies on the other side. Others say that they simply disappear.

But they all eventually come atop the hill.

She doesn’t remember her own calling, but she knows that there was no hum of light, no warmth growing in her belly. She only recalls waking one night and knowing. Knowing that it was her time. She never had a choice.

The walls inside are pearl-white, glistening. Ecru cubicles crowd the first room, stretching on endlessly like a twisting labyrinth.

Identical swivel chairs are tucked under desks where identical picture frames sit. Inside each are identical photos of dark, faceless shapes.

She could get lost here for a very long forever, but somewhere past an infinity of cubicles and tiled floors, a staircase cascades down from an ominous black opening in the ceiling.

She pushes forward. The staircase creaks under her as she ascends. Even halfway up the steps, whatever lies at the top is invisible to her. But the light is just as blinding when she pokes her head through.

How beautiful it is, the pure white light; it seems to dazzle through three parallel windows on the far wall.

In her early days at the Carnival, drunk on sugar, she would tremble her way across the highwire, the rough cord digging into her sensitive, uncalloused feet. The Walker who trained her would take down the safety net and make her walk back and forth, back and forth with her arms outstretched, until she stopped trembling so badly, until her tights felt more skin than fabric, until she walked without care.

Helplessness, the Walker told her, is the key to walking the highwire. There is nothing below to catch you, so all there is to do is cross to the other side. Walk the highwire or let yourself fall.

Just as she had back then, she chooses to walk.

Some nights, she and the other girls would sweeten their mouths with cotton candy until their spit was the same gummy pink as the rubber mats. They would lie in the unused safety nets and stare into the taffy colored lights until their star shapes burnt themselves into their retinas. Until they remained even with their eyes closed.

Every girl at the Carnival is walking the highwire, and one day, just like her, just like the Contortionist, they will reach the end or fall trying.

However, never in her time at Carnivale del Contrapasso has she seen a light as untarnished and untinted white as the holy slates of glass before her now.

The lights of the Carnival are neon yellow and spring grass green and cherry lipstick red and the brightest indigo. Nothing so much like daylight has touched her skin in all her time here. Perhaps it was the promise of the light’s warmth that subconsciously called to her. That is what made her hike up her tights, stretch on her slippers, and play a game of ring toss with a faceless carnie to win one of the weak goldfish with torn fins she had seen swimming in the spray painted kiddie pool in infinite circles.

The other girls had left alone. Unlike them, she has Fishy, and they are getting out together.

As she crosses the room, willing her useless body to move and leaving a smear of blood behind, the creaking floors sing in harmony.

The light is starting to burn, starting to blind her, but she stumbles forward toward her salvation.

She reaches her hands out to the three towering windows of light. They reach back. Oh God, yes, this house is a living thing, she realizes, white knuckling the plastic bag.

Yes, it is a hungry, goading, living thing.

The Building is her pearl-lined gate; not the safety net but finally, finally the end of the wire.

She gives herself to it willingly.

Its three massive mouths open wide for her. Her eyes are nothing but light—just white infinity.

She slips between teeth and into the belly of the whale.

She’s falling, falling, falling until her shoulder blades meet something soft and protruding. It writhes beneath her with hands and mouths and contorted bodies. They are damp against her skin.

The ballooned bag jiggles in her hand as Fishy flops around inside.

Her ears are full of light but through the muffle, shrill voices cry. Scream. Sob. Choke. She can’t see, but all around her stinks of ozone and the Trapezist’s gangrenous leg.

Frills, tulle, and latex tickle and squeak against her skin. A shaky, wet hand cups itself around her cheek.

Her own hands blindly follow the trail of their hand, their arm, their head, and eventually their bobbing throat; the gush of morbid warmth under her palms.

She lets the bag drop. Water sloshes. Then the sound disappears. The figure under her croaks, sputtering and retching up wetness.

The warm, fleshy walls around them contract. Voices scream, endlessly.

She feels her hands to the walls, to the figures thrashing under and around her, pulling her along with them, and all of it is bleeding.

There is a thrumming beat in the pinguid walls, gushing tangy, hot blood back into their faces.

She can feel the blood pulse against her hands like a wriggling fish, a living thing—because it is alive.

So alive.