The Prospect of Magic

M.O. Walsh

ISBN: 978-1-60489-049-5 Trade paper $16.95

ISBN:  978-1-60489-048-8 Library binding $27

 Pages 160

The Bearded Lady had few other skills.

So, when her traveling carnival expired and spilled its inhabitants like marbles through brick-paved Fluker streets, she slid sideways into the nearest motel she could find, a scarf wrapped loosely around her chin. Having decided not to return to the cluttered trailer she shared with Frederico the Fat Man, she had also decided not to attend the funeral of their ringmaster, Abidail Ploofop, whose recent and unexpected demise had just spelled the end of everything.  She would not hold hands with her fellow carnies and mourn, nor would she mingle in with the curious locals. In fact, Darby Ducote, the most delicate of Bearded Ladies, would not even be there to hear Margo the Mind Reader give her soon-to-be famous eulogy for Ploofop in the town square; the speech that, legend has it, wrapped a hopeful message around the mind of every person in attendance.  The one that, some say, paved a path for their collapsed and road-weary carnival to make a permanent home in that small, Southern town.  No, Darby Ducote wouldn’t be there for any of that. She felt she no longer needed this type of carnival company, never wanted to be near it again. You see, Darby Ducote was a believer in signs.

Always had been.

She took it as a sign for instance when, at fifteen, her father lifted her knees and split her in a place she was uncut, that her life would be marked one.  And the subsequent way his seed took root in her young womb so easily affirmed to Darby that her God was a sign-giver of strict, knowing, and physical natures. Not merely an idle thing in the clouds. So, when her father later pulled her into the sparse woods and ridded them both of the fetus, Darby fully expected something beastly to come of it. She imagined jagged lightning through her navel, a swarm of locusts in her vagina, the look of her insides out.

In fact, she imagined so much of this grotesque retribution that, upon awaking with a full and red beard that next morning, Darby did not feel the worst end of the stick. Instead, the long red hairs on her face seemed only to hide her new and shameful expression, which Darby took as a sign of God’s tempered grace.  She humbly declared, “Ok, Lord. I get it.  I read you. All of life’s stuff is out of my hands.” And it was not long after this that, like an answered prayer, The World Famous Ploofop Travelling Carnival rolled through her hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska, and her father urged her away.

But now, after twenty five years of service, suddenly turned loose in the small place of Fluker, Louisiana, Darby has begun to consider her penance paid. She’s found no lack of signs to deny this. The quick oblivion of their hundred-year-old ringmaster, for instance, and the way the elephants broke loose when it happened. The way they stomped her marquee into splinters, and a patch of soft hair fell from her face.