Beyond the Curtain

09 | rule 87

RULE 87: DO NOT HANG WITH OUTSIDERS. YOUR CIRCUS FAMILY IS ALL YOU NEED.

✷  C  H  A  P  T  E  R     N  I  N  E  ✷

I stood where the circus had—just hours prior—been docked for the foreseeable future, and my knees crumbled beneath me. My lungs struggled to gasp for air as the corners of my vision blurred.

My knees collided with the hard dirt ground, filling the air with a hmph! It was the only sound for miles, but it wasn't supposed to be. The hustle and bustle of the circus lasted far beyond the standard operating hours. Where there was a circus, there was commotion.

Many of the circus members were night owls. Even though we had to rise before the sun most days, many people liked to blur their nights with their early morning wake-up calls. And so, there was never much time for quiet, especially with the night circus in full swing.

Quiet provided time to mull over the conditions of your life, and many people—when confronted with the trajectory of their life—did not like what they saw. Miss Nymphadora had that effect on people, but she also brought us together.

And she was now the one to tear us apart. Or, at the very least, she was the one to tear me apart.

She had broken her own rules, but she was never one for being the poster role model for how she wanted us to act. She supplied and enforced the rules but nothing more.

Miss Nymphadora had never been a mother figure to me. She found me, yes, but as soon as the opportunity arose, she handed me off to the many different circus hands who helped raise me into the person I was today. She was not much, but she was all I had. She was not fair in the way she ran her business, but she gave me a place to sleep, a place to work.

But that was all gone.

Part of me wished they were playing some elaborate joke on me, but I knew my imagination was the only place this idea rang true. Miss Nymphadora was many things, but a liar was not one of them.

Or so, I had thought.

While the contract bounding my life with Miss Nymphadora had its ups and downs, there was one solid piece of comfort in it: everything was explicitly written out. Again, or so I had thought.

Miss Nymphadora and the circus were gone, but she had not severed our contract. I was, as far as I knew, still a working member of Miss Nymphadora's Three-Ring Circus, but she had effectively demolished the contract in spirit.

Hot tears rolled down my cheeks as I still struggled to catch my breath. I had grown comfortable with the fact the circus could quite literally not abandon me with no notice.

Many of the circus hands had advised that Miss Nymphadora was a selfish creature. She never did anything for someone else, and I had seen it firsthand. Even when she saved my life over twenty years ago, she had only done so so she could add a werewolf to her collection of circus workers.

But she had never quite so defiantly gone against me before. I'm sure I had been lucky to skirt her devious tactics; I was one of her prized performers, after all. But there had always been a hope that the unconventional relationship between Miss Nymphadora and I had been different. I had needed it to be different.

Sighing, I watched as the wind swept a few leaves through the air. I felt akin to a leaf, having once been a part of something bigger, something greater, only to be disregarded from the whole when no longer serving a purpose. My body sunk further into the ground, and the constant flood of tears softened a patch of dirt beneath me.