Circus

He was driving in circles around the village in a beat-up car. A giant, orange loudspeaker was strapped to the roof. It shook as he bumped over the gullies and ruts in the road.

A woman with dark skin and enormous green eyes sat in the backseat. Like some strange, leggy insect trapped inside a glass, her knees were crushed by the driver's seat and rose up to her chest. One very thin, long arm hung out of the open car window. Her hand slapped the outside of the door in gentle rhythm to the music that blasted its way through the drowsy air of the village.

Maybe a coyote official's wife? She wore large feathered earrings and was too pretty to be anything else, thought Lara.

The strongman guided the steering wheel with one hand. From her seat in the cafe, Lara could see the stumps where his fingers should have been. He held the microphone close to his mouth in the other hand.

"Attention, ladies and men, for there are no 'gentle' men in this village- have you no plans for tonight? Then gussy up in your finest and walk towards the river, but not so far as the cemetery! Prepare to be awed by the magic of our circus, the best little circus west of Our Lady of Monserrate!"

Lara smiled at the reference to the recently demolished statue in the city. She took a sip of her beer. Despite the fact that she had no tongue, the memory of the taste consoled her. She tried not to choke. 

Or to recall the pain when they cut it out.

Watching her waiter shuffle back across the road with a limp he tried to hide, Lara felt the urge to grab him. There was nothing the matter with him, but with this country, she wanted to say. He didn't need to feel shame about a mangled leg.

Not out here anyway, not in one of the coyote colonies.

Later that night as she waited in line, Lara glanced once again at the neatly made child's bed planted under a far corner of the circus tent. 

So surreal she thought. Like everything now. 

Green ninja turtle sheets, and a yellow stuffed monkey leaned against the pillow. Standing in what would otherwise be a field if not for the tent, grass grew around the metal legs.

The strongman doubled as the clown. The juggler had just one leg. The acrobats were deaf and signaled to one another from their platforms. The butterfly woman's skin had been badly burned.

The woman with the green eyes, it turned out, was just a girl. 

Blind too.

She sang, a song of resistance. Her deep, powerful voice made Lara's heart stop. The crowd roared in raptured defiance. Lara cheered her first mangled words since the cutting. Tears wet her cheeks.

The girl bowed and then walked back towards the darkness. She picked up a stuffed yellow monkey from a chair on her way out.