Mon May 06, 2013 1:08 pm
In the middle of the night two men stole across the abandoned circus, the performers long since retired to their beds. The Carnival in town had kept everyone distracted and now was the perfect time to follow through on their orders.
Trained hands went to unlatch the cage in which one of the tigers was kept, luring it out with bits of raw meat. These men were no strangers to wild beasts and within moments the tiger was locked up in a new wooden box and carted out away from the circus, leaving nothing but a shallow set of wagon tracks that disappeared nearly a mile away. There would be no sign of the tiger the next day, or the day after that, the beast seeming to have disappeared into thin air.
Thu May 16, 2013 1:28 am
The issue hadn’t been the latch on the tiger’s cage. It hadn’t even been the lock on the door to the shack that housed the cage. In truth, all of that was rusted out, second-hand and barely worth the metal it was made from. But that wasn’t the issue for the circus’s main act, who, under it all, ran the circus.
It was the hand that was meant to guard it.
Cecilie was a tall woman, with raven black, curly hair and a heart-shaped face, and wore frightfully bright, mismatched clothes that were nothing but sewn garments that had no correlation to each other. Silk was bound with wool in dreadfully apparent places, and her leggings – purple with bright yellow stars – were fading and torn at the ankles. Still, despite that she wore garments as varied as her hired hands, she had a stride that only royalty practiced. Her hips seemed to move graciously and independently from her legs. Her left arm, muscled and wiry, swayed with her scepter in her fingers while her right was barely wrapped around the man’s bicep. He had the appearance of a sausage ball. He was round, oddly hairy in places and then completely bald on his head which displayed the reflection of the opalescent moon. The man moved with her, but struggled, his clubbed feet barely keeping with her long strides.
She kicked open the useless excuse for the door and shoved the man inside the shack. He stumbled, his back meeting the empty tiger’s cage with a sharp kiss. “Get in there,” she said, her tone low and carnal.
“I was here—“
“Shut up.”
She reached for her scepter. It was a long, slender thing, likely made of wood and painted an off-white to give it the appearance of stone. The top was clawed, holding a bright, ocean blue jewel that was small enough to slip out. She reached inside, withdrawing the jewel so only the painted-gold claws remained. The man’s eyes widened and he began to move to his feet, stumbling, his hands trembling.
“Mes Cecilie, d—“
She sent the scepter down against his cheek, its claws raking across his skin. A spatter of blood came from his cheek and onto the dirt floor. She said nothing. When his head turned one way, she withdrew the scepter the opposite to strike his cheek again, until she was beating him swiftly, rhythmically, with no care for his bleeding, no care for his swelling eyes, his worthless tears. Her ears were unaffected by his cries.
When she was done, she lifted the scepter and began to clean it with a cloth that she had tucked in her breast. He lay breathing, staring at her, one of his eyes bloodshot and swollen.
“Now,” she said, still cleaning. “I think you understand that it is very important to me that you take care of my animals, Dovin. That is why you’re here. It is why I feed you. It is why you have a place to rest your head at night and it is why you’re still out of prison. Isn’t it?”
He barely nodded.
“And that means, when you lose my expensive animals, the only way for you to understand is through these means. Isn’t that true?”
He stared at her. His pupils became empty wells.
“Now, then. Stand, my dear. We’ve tigers to find.” And people to beat within an inch of her life when she found out who took them. After all, Cecilie didn’t murder. She wasn’t a monster.