The first time I fell upward, I complained to the ceiling.
“I came here looking for work.”
Below me, a girl with blue hair leaned on the rail around the ring. Above me, a wide net held my legs, arms and what remained of my pride.
“You found a circus,” she said. “Did you expect an office?”
My old troupe had closed three weeks earlier. I was thirty-nine, a tumbler with two trunks of costumes and no place to take a bow. I’d gone back to our empty fairground to fetch the last trunk. A bright hoop stood where our tent had been.
I stepped through it.
That was how I found the fae circus. An enormous tent stood on the other side, full of ropes, lights and people whose shapes didn’t all agree with mine.
The ringmaster had warned me about the gong. I’d thought he meant it would be loud. Then it sounded, and the ring’s gravity turned over.
The girl climbed a rope toward me, though “toward” had become a difficult word.
“I’m Pip. Don’t stand yet.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
She helped me turn in the ceiling net. Far below, the empty floor net looked like a pond I wasn’t ready to jump into.
Outside the ring, chairs and crew stood the usual way up. Only the space between the ring rails and its ceiling changed when the gong sounded. Pip explained this slowly, as if I might be a person who needed things explained slowly. At that moment I was.
The next gong sent us gently down a lowered practice rope to the floor net. I stayed on my knees.
Ringmaster Vesh approached carrying my trunk. He had very small antlers and the unhappy face of someone adding up expenses.
“The gate opens again at dawn,” he said. “You may leave then.”
“What happens before dawn?”
“We sell tickets. I hope.”
I asked for work. Vesh asked what I could do.
“Tumble. Falls. Comic turns. I can miss a chair seven different ways without breaking it.”
“Can you fly?”
“I’ve just shown you the full range of that.”
He didn’t laugh. Pip did.
That afternoon I tried to copy her act. She could cross the ring on two ropes, turning with the gong as if the floor and ceiling were old dance partners. I could cross half the ring, wave my arms and discover the net again.
“You keep waiting for wings,” she told me.
“Have you any spare?”
“No.”
I lay in the net. At home I had spent twenty years making a stumble look accidental. Here I was treating every real stumble as a disgrace.
I got up and made an ordinary running fall. My foot appeared to catch. My arms went everywhere. I rolled onto my shoulder, bounced to my feet and missed an imaginary chair.
Pip laughed before I reached the second chair.
“That,” she said. “Do that.”
I wanted the gong to reverse my next fall. Pip shook her head. Her aerial opening already used the first change. She would not abandon her own act to catch me whenever I got confused.
“Keep your opening,” I said. “I come in afterward. Two changes for mine. Exactly when we rehearse them.”
We practiced with the gong player, who had four arms and used only one. Pip showed me the safe parts of both nets. I made each fall small first, then larger, until I knew where my body would arrive. We stopped whenever a cue came late. We started again.
Before the audience entered, Vesh watched one run and checked his clock.
“Could we lose the second gong?” he asked. “Bring it under three minutes?”
I was standing on the upper rope. Pip pointed at the floor.
“Without that change, Oona’s last turn heads for the wrong net. We’d have to build another routine.”
“For tomorrow,” Vesh said.
“Perhaps. Tonight this one.”
He looked at me. I needed the job badly enough to agree to almost anything.
“Tonight this one,” I said.
Vesh sighed and moved the following act back two minutes. Then he opened the doors.
I waited behind the curtain while Pip performed her solo. The audience gasped at her first turn, then clapped so hard I could feel it through the rail.
My turn began with a chair. A perfectly ordinary chair, standing outside the changing ring. I tried to sit, missed it and carried on pretending I hadn’t meant to sit. The laughter startled me. I nearly missed my entrance.
Inside the ring, I climbed the low platform. Pip waited above with a rope. I pointed to the floor net as if it were a terrible distance away, though I’d taken larger falls all my working life.
Then I jumped badly, exactly as planned.
The gong sounded. My falling body rose. I spread my arms, caught the edge of the ceiling net and rolled into it, my boots sticking up like the ears of an astonished rabbit.
For one beat the tent was silent.
“I meant that,” I told the ceiling.
The laugh came like a door blown open.
Pip swung across beneath me, carrying the missing chair. We went through the next turn together. Her grace made my foolishness bigger. My foolishness gave her room to look even finer.
At the last gong we reached the floor safely. I could hardly breathe, but I was laughing too.
Vesh offered me a season. We would change the act only with time to practice. Pip wanted equal billing; I wanted a bed and payment. We agreed on all three before I unpacked.
At dawn I walked to the gate. My old fairground lay beyond it, wet and empty. I fetched the second trunk and carried it through.
That night, for our encore, I stayed in the ceiling net after the final upward turn. I bowed the wrong way. The audience looked up, laughing, while Pip took her bow outside the ring, on the normal floor.
“One of us,” she called, “has to know where the people are.”
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