Princes, duchesses and paupers alike sit in her audience tonight. When they leave they will swear there was music, fire, and illusions they dare not try and explain for fear not only of those who will insist that such things can’t possibly happen, but of the overwhelming voice in their head which agrees. They will all be wrong. She has no such orchestra, no pyrotechnics, no illusions.
The acrobat has only a particular talent for stealing breaths straight from the lips of those who watch her.
She discovered it when she was very young, with the breaths of other children in the village. She used to play with them when she was alone, whipping them into her own personal wind, blustering through her bedroom, ruffling the pages of open books and sending the sashes of her dresses fluttering up towards the ceiling.
The first night she ever performed, she began to save them.
There had been very few in her audience that night, in the smaller, shabbier tent reserved for the penniless few who would take a cheap ticket. They had been a gormless, glassy eyed crowd, numbed to the sight of sub-par illusionists and crudely-painted clowns. But when she, in her simple white dress and her flowing not-quite-black hair, had stepped out onto the splintering wooden stage, all such trivialities were forgotten.
She kept them in an empty honey jar, not only the breaths from the first night, but all the breaths she had ever snatched from the unsuspecting lungs of her ever growing following.
Until she was upgraded onto the larger tent, her name- sweet and exotic and spoiled by cockney-ed tongues- printed onto the programs and posters, and the innumerable breaths could no longer fit into the one honey jar. Until they occupied two, and then ten, and then hundreds. She collected empty jars and bottles like girls in fairytales collected books. They crowded into her trailer, filling the shelves and the cupboards and the space beside her bed, climbing clumsily on top of each other, leaning precariously on walls, until she had ten thousand of them.
Tonight, for the acrobat, is no different than any other. Tonight, for her audience, is the only night like this they are ever likely to see.
It is not unusual for men to leave feeling empty after one of her performances. Nor is it rare for that same emptiness to gnaw at them for the rest of their lives, somewhere very deep in the bottom of their lungs. But what is strange is what happens to the gentleman in the third row that night; how as he watches her move his world begins to melt, and she takes breath after breath after breath until his sight dims and his heart slows and everything around him seems to blur.
He stumbles out of the tent that night feeling half empty, and wakes up the next morning still breathless. He feels as if she has winded him, thrown a punch into his gut and knocked the air right out of him- air he cannot seem to regain. It takes him the rest of the day and the proceeding night to realise that his breath will not return, but by the time he arrives at the field where the circus was to retrieve it, all that remains are scattered popcorn kernels and folded programs and torn confetti. The tents are gone.
In the meantime, in her tottering, clinking trailer, the acrobat hears something rattle. She tries to block it out, as she has blocked out the sound of jar-hitting-jar for so many years, tries to allow the movement of the wheels below her and the trotting of horse’s hooves outside to send her off to sleep.
But as long as something continues to rattle, there will be no peace.
He searches widely, and into the far corners of the world. He follows the sounds of horses and the trails of popcorn and caramel and wide, excited eyes. His travels take him to distant lands he would never otherwise have dreamed of seeing, China and India, but he remains blind to the wares of wallahs on the streets and the parading dragons that slink glitteringly past him. Already he has forgotten the stories told to him over bowls of spiced broth as he sits amongst the beggars, hoping to hear a snatch of where the circus might have been, or where they are headed.
A year of rising and falling moons passes until finally, somewhere in provincial France, he finds her again.
The tents, to the weary eyes of the gentleman, are magnificent. They are red like fire and gold like the sun and every smear of chocolate or moth-bitten hole is hardly a blemish but an embellishment to ornament perfection. With his enduringly half-empty lungs, he breathes out a sigh of relief as he feels the ticket stub pressed back into his hand by an usher, tangible and real, finally not just a story about a ticket stub, but the thing itself.
He doesn’t take his seat in the third row. He has learnt from last time. Instead, he ducks through the entrance, around the outer ring of seats and jumps over the barrier between the audience, the stage and the flap from which the performers emerge.
The world behind the tents is nothing like the world outside it. The gentleman knows; the gentleman has seen that world. He has seen every type of person, tasted every type of cuisine, but those were all continents and borders away from each other. Back here, amongst the trailers and equipment, people like the ones he has seen all over, and people who in no way resemble them, sit side by side. In corners, feats of just-plain-magic are performed to audiences of white mice or rabbits or the turkey leg the performer is saving for after rehearsal.
The whole arena is lit with torches which stand at varying heights, so in some spots it is dark enough for the gentleman to hide. He does not look like he did one year ago this night, sitting apprehensively and a little sceptically in the third row. Then, his sleeves were too big and his cufflinks too shiny, his suit jacket too well pressed. Tonight he looks more like the circus folk, sun-browned skin, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, waistcoat hanging open, trousers loose and shoed in sturdy boots. But still, he doesn’t want to be seen.
So he waits, cloaked in shadow, as the acrobat glides towards the tent flap, until the noise from the tent falls into a desperate hush. There truly is no music, the gentleman realises incredulously. In what feels simultaneously like eons and no time at all their is raucous applause from the tent and the acrobat floats back through the flap. a certain swell in her chest which wasn’t there before. The gentleman follows her.
Should he have followed her one year ago this night, the gentleman would have seen a different woman. Each footstep he matched would have been placed almost an inch off the ground, as if she walked on the air itself. Her fingertips, though limp, would have the same grace as if they were skimming the surface of some unseen lake, leaving a glimmering wake. Tonight, however, the acrobat is tired. Her footsteps are desolately ordinary, and as she walks she wrings those delicate hands.
One year, for one year something in her trailer has rattled, a constant, unremitting clatter which demanded to be heard. It rampaged through her head at night and shook desperately at her ribcage, constantly and unforgivingly. By day she tore through her ten thousand jars, trying to find its source, by night she lay awake, listening, trying to pinpoint it, and just when she thought she’d found it it would stop, for one blissful moment, and start again just when she had quite forgotten where it could be. Consequentially, the acrobat has found no rest, even her dreams seem to rattle.
The gentleman loiters a moment at her door. He never thought what he might say to her when he got here, how he might go about asking for what it was he had lost. He brings a hand to his chest, trying to feel for the words, as if perhaps his slighted lungs will know what to say. But they only murmur halfheartedly against his fingertips. Finally, he gives up. Trying to formulate coherence in a circus is like trying to light a match underwater, there is too much of a force to the contrary.
He doesn’t knock, if he knocks she might not let him in. Instead he slips through the ajar door, where she is waiting.
The acrobat is not alarmed. Perhaps she ought to be, in some distant corner of her mind she is faintly aware that strangers shouldn’t be in here, especially uninvited ones. But somehow she can’t seem to fathom the words to tell him to leave. Because suddenly, and for the first time in three hundred and sixty five nights, it is quiet. No rattle, no clatter, just the blissful sound of nothing except the breathing of the now-very-flustered man who is standing slightly too close. The man who made the noises stop.
He opens his mouth to say something, but his tongue is equally tied.
Overwhelmed by relief, gratitude, proximity and that certain other ethereal something which lingers around any circus, the acrobat leans very slowly forwards and upwards. Her lips part his, and with hardly a whimper the gentleman allows her to take every breath he has left, until he is quite empty, and falls lifelessly to the ground.
It takes two heartbeats for the acrobat to realise what she has done as rattling starts again. But no, it is not the rattle of one jar, it is the rattle of all of them. It is the cacophonous clashing of ten thousand jars. It is not just in the trailer either, the whole circus, the whole field, perhaps the whole world is quaking beneath her as if, angered by this cruel twist of the fates they created, in a petulant rage the gods had taken the earth between their massive hands and shaken it with all their might. The jars fall from their places balanced on top of each other and smash, one after the other, around the acrobat. A whirlwind of did-you-see-that-s and but-that’s-impossible-s whip through her hair and blast out the windows until the earth stills again, and everything is broken.
The acrobat sinks gently to her knees beside the colourless body of the gentleman, avoiding the splinters of glass that encrust the quivering floor. She brushes his forehead with the back of her hand, sweeping away the hair which he had allowed to grow too long on his travels to find her. His eyes are closed, and a smile tints his still lips. She presses a hand to his empty chest, but nothing beats. No breath is left. She sits amidst the ruin of his last hope.
Until, in the corner, something rattles.
And there it is, surrounded by the shards of its lost brothers and sisters, the last jar. The gentleman’s jar. Half of his breath endlessly rattling, trying to find its way back to him, calling him to it, bringing him closer and closer to the acrobat. Wildly and without a second thought, the acrobat springs to her feet and dives across the room. The soles of her feet are scratched and pierced by millions of tiny glass daggers, but nonetheless she runs to grab the last of her collected breaths.
It struggles in her fingers as she holds it, sensing the proximity of its possessor, the urgency of the moment, the acrobat’s own rapid breathing. As she picks her way back through the wasteland of her trailer, it wrestles with her hands. She has almost reached him, is almost close enough to revive him, when with one final and monumental effort the jar launches out of her hands and tumbles to the floor before she has time to catch it.
Time, in a state of disbelief, forgets itself as it sees the jar fall, and slows so that the acrobat must watch in excruciating detail as her own hands flail to catch it, must listen to the elongated clunk as it hits to floor and rolls towards the gentleman, the hiss as the lid opens and the breath ghosts out and away, pausing to rustle gently through her hair.
Numbness, and then a pain. He’s gone. This man she has never known, who has rattled beside her for this long and sleepless year. Even though he is a stranger, she can’t help but feel like she has lost something, like she owes something. Her lips still tingle as she kneels back down at his side, and she realises.
Its like knowing just when to leap, just when to throw your head back and point your toes. Its like feeling the pirouette in every sinew of your legs before you’ve even decided to do one. Being an acrobat is not a skill or an art; it’s a knowledge. Taking people’s breath away is as much of a nature as breathing your own. It comes to her like a routine does, floats easily into her head. She could never have given him his own breath back, because she would always have had the power to take it again.
Leaning down, she places another kiss on his lips, and gives to him what he took from her the moment he brought back her silence. His lungs well with half of her inhalations, so that the pink blossoms in his cheeks and his eyes blink awake and suddenly his hands are in her hair and he is kissing her fiercely, trying to give them back. He has lived this half empty life, he knows what she is sacrificing for him.
But that is not the life they lead. They lead a life eternally breathless, in eternal wonder. And never do they feel empty, when together they are always so decidedly whole.