The Circus

A flash fiction piece I wrote for a creative writing class during my senior year of high school.

Rose woke up cheerfully the day after her ninth birthday. She tore off the comforter and giddily pulled her head through the collar of her new red taffeta dress. She shook out her blunt blonde bob and decided that today was the day to grow up.

Eager to begin her transformation, Rose skipped breakfast and locked her bedroom door. Her eyes blinked toward the tower of toys and dolls she had been so ecstatic to receive yesterday. But that was the past. Now she was onto her tenth year, closer to the double digits, soon to be a teenager, and teenagers don’t play with little baby dolls.

She walked over to the pile and kneeled beside it, her bony knees cushioned by the underlying tulle of her dress. The closest baby doll stared at her with dim, lazy eyes. Yesterday, she had named it Elizabeth. She dragged the doll onto her lap by its sock covered foot. Its lash-rimmed lids bobbed open and closed with this disturbance. She clenched the plastic wrist in one hand and steadied its rubbery body with the other. With one swift pull, the arm popped clean off. Rose was delighted to peek through the shoulder to the hollow carcass of Elizabeth’s limp chest. She continued to yank each limb off, one by one, like she was plucking the petals of one of her mother’s precious garden daisies.

After momentarily examining each separated body part, Rose threw aside the detached legs and arms into her open closet. Next, she secured the doll’s empty head between her bare knees. She giggled as the coarse hair tickled her thighs. Clasping her legs tighter together, Rose yanked Elizabeth up, decapitating her and revealing the rubber socket of her neck. She catapulted the lonely torso to join its former fellow body parts. The lifeless lump rocketed towards the dark closet like a human cannonball. Rose clapped in awe before reaching back to the rest of the dolls she had yet to improve. Skulls and limbs torpedoed through the air. Rose accompanied the performance with manic shooting outbursts. “Pp-yew, pp-yew! Boom!”

There were no more dolls intact in her bedroom, but Rose knew that her self-reinvention was not completed yet. She looked into the closet and saw the body parts, pathetically lifeless like a collapsed pyramid of elephants. This display saddened her as it did not parallel her new attitude.

Without a sound, Rose crept out of her bedroom and returned with a pack of dental floss and her mother’s cosmetic bag. She pulled out several arm lengths and gnawed it the thread into smaller strings. One by one, she knotted loops around the mutilated ankles, wrists, shoulders, and toes. She hung each twisted ornament on its own clothes hanger and let them dangle in the closet. Poking at the pieces of her shrine, Rose watched them dance and sway like flying trapezes. She covered her mouth with one hand, restraining herself from squealing too loud.

Satisfied with her creation, she turned away and dug through the makeup bag. As Rose imagined her mother’s elegantly made-up face, her fingers found crimson lipstick, midnight blue eye shadow, and fuchsia blush. Facing her brass floor length mirror, she flipped open the blush circled her fingers in the chalky powder, and smoothed it onto the apples of her cheeks. Then with her other hand, she daintily patted the shadow on her lids until they were an opaque shimmer of blue. To finish her look, she uncapped the lipstick and began to fill in her puckered lips. Unhappy with her thin smile, she carefully painted beyond her natural lines, hoping for the illusion of fuller lips like her mother’s. Instead, through the mirror, a silly clown stared back at her.