The stars fell out of the heavens, tumbling from their seats in the velvet black sky. They slipped below the backdrop of glowing tents echoing with screams of merriment and perhaps something else, and the girl with silver eyes caught them in her palms.
She held their secrets, burning in her grasp, and listened to them whisper until their soft death. When they were nothing more than ash, she let them fall through her fingers to the earth, and felt their fire burn in her.
The past and future, you see, were written in the stars. The life lines on human’s palms mimicked constellations they failed to see.
And now they belonged to her.
*
“Come one, come all!” bellowed the ringmaster. He danced his grey top hat across his fingers, dipped into a bow in front of the growing crowd, and flashed a smile that promised he was full of secrets, full of dazzling mystery, full of magic. The milling individuals who happened to find themselves near his magnetic energy were pulled further into his mystical sphere, despite his forgettable face. They hovered nearby, circled ever closer, and listened with rapt attention.
“If there’s a part of you that wants to get lost, do it here, forget the cost,” he coaxed. He walked back and forth on his small stage— pacing like one of the caged cats— in front of the big top tent. His grey suit shimmered, like static, in the flickering candlelight, and the white flower pinned to his lapel glowed like a beacon. The thick fabric of the tent rustled in the chilly autumn air, red and white stripes flirting with the wind. The ringmaster smiled, a red and white smile, flirting with the crowd, and beckoned them closer. If they knew they were being reined in like animals, they didn’t mind.
“There are marvels to wonder at here, if only you let go of your fear.”
Adults in the crowd murmured, shared knowing smiles. Fear. What was there to fear from a circus, where clowns danced and laughed, and wild animals weren’t wild? Why should any person hesitate to enter such a marvelous tent when they knew that inside the silk aerialists, daring cyclists, and hypnotic contortionists waited patiently for them?
But children hesitated, hid behind their mothers’ skirts, and clutched at their fathers’ hands.
Children knew the secrets of circuses. They knew the price to pay to enter the circus, something adults forgot, or didn’t realize. Adults lived their lives in ambiguity and shades of grey, but children still saw the black and white, the good and evil. The magic they wondered at as it entertained them could just as easily eat them alive.
The fortune-teller watched the people unwillingly drawn into the circus, and she smiled. The children always knew. Adults could be fooled. But children… children saw the shadows dancing out of reach of the light. They knew the shadows promised to get their fill, too.
“It’s alright,” she whispered to a nearby girl. Her black hairwas knotted intricately atop her head, and when the fortune-teller spoke, the girl leapt away, eyes shooting to the woman’spetite face hidden behind a sheer black veil. Her eyes were deep brown, and grew large as saucers in her face as she took in the fortune-teller.
Perhaps the fortune-teller looked frightening. Maybe it was her eyes, silver as the moon, haunting, and luminous in a place where darkness thrived. Maybe it was the contrast of those piercing eyes against her skin, black like damp earth, eyes that looked decidedly unnatural, inhuman. Or maybe it was her smile, secretive and alluring… containing everything the circus hid. All the light, and all the dark.
Whatever it was, the young girl tried to shrink into her mother… and found her missing. She looked up, found only an empty sky, and whirled around to frantically search the dispersing crowd for her protector, her guardian. A cry leapt from her throat, a warbling call sounding over the heads of unaware adults, and when no one answered, she turned back to the fortune-teller with tear-filled eyes.
“Are you lost, child?” the fortune-teller asked, gently. The girl sniffed and nodded, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. Behemoth tears slipped down her cheeks and shattered on the cold, hard earth below her feet. The fortune-teller offered a sympathetic smile. “Come here, darling.”
The girl hesitated, but she looked around at the thinning crowd, vanishing into the smiling maw of the looming big top. The unremarkable man with the top hat danced and sang—“Where better to waste your life than at the Circus, my dear? No one will ever find you here.”—leading the parade through the now open flaps, and the people filed in behind him, clapping their hands and smiling. No one missed the small girl with frightened eyes. She moved hurriedly toward the small booth set perhaps twenty feet from the entrance, encased in its own black tent.
The fortune-teller, with her silver moon eyes and warm candles and pretty crystals, seemed safe, welcoming—a haven in the dark. The girl moved toward her and left the circus at her back. The ringmaster watched, hovering at the entrance to the big top, one eye obscured by shadows, and flashed a hungry, toothy smile only the fortune-teller saw before he, too, disappeared, and the big top became a homogenous wall instead of a welcoming smile. And the girl was alone with the fortune-teller.
“What’s your name, child?” The fortune-teller bustled around her small booth to pull out a hidden stool with a deep purple cushion on it for the young one, and when she sat, the fortune-teller draped a shawl of the darkest blue, with scattered stars stitched into it, round her shoulders.
With a start, the girl realized it looked like the fortune-teller’s eyes.
Deep blue lined her silver eyes, slashing harshly out in the end, a bird’s wings against her dark skin. A bruise-like purple covered her eyelid, and a layer of white-like mist settled over that. Yellow dots encroached on her inner eye, and sprinkled themselves below her bottom lash line. Her eyes were a foggy dusk, weeping falling stars.
The fortune-teller blinked, and the girl hid her face in the shawl.
“Ofelia,” she whispered into the fabric. The fortune-teller smiled.
“What a lovely name.”
The girl peeked over the edge of the shawl. “What’s yours?”
The fortune-teller smiled. Magic—the good kind of magic, the kind that soothes your soul and sets you free— shone through it, and the girl relaxed just enough. “I have a great many names… but you can call me Asteria—Ria, for short.”
Ofelia smiled. “Do you have any hot chocolate?” she asked, shyly.
Asteria chuckled and turned her back on the girl, rummaging through a small cabinet behind her. She turned back around with a flourish, brandishing a lovely, fragile looking mug—thin as an eggshell and just as white. The lip curved out and had rivets in it that made it look like a blooming flower. In Asteria’s other hand was a can of cocoa.
“Let me warm some water and we’ll whip some up while we wait for your mom to come back, hm?”
Ofelia nodded her swift agreeance, and Asteria smiled.
Sometimes, Asteria knew before they spoke where her guests would end up. She didn’t get many, anymore… in recent decades, the individuals who visited the circus more often disregarded the fortune-telling booth as a frivolous scam. They moved past her, and the weight of their hearts went unknown, and their fates became blurry and unfinished. Some, though, still stopped and looked again, thoughtful. Some smiled and tugged their families or friends with them, careless to the fact that they had no interest in having their futures—or pasts— divined. The eager ones, she knew, would find their way to a well-lit tent. They’d find everything they were ever looking for. The magic they encountered would be warm, light, and welcoming. It’d heal every wound they ever suffered, fulfill every wish they ever made. The circus would become the home they never wanted to leave. Most often they were children, fates divine and safe and warm.
There were others—usually the ones who approached like they were going to war. Those ones knew before she did where they’d end up.
Circuses have a dark side.
There was another young woman. Asteria saw her lurking just beyond where the dim light from her tent could reach, skulking in the shadows and waiting for her opportunity. Her eyes were huge in her face, sunken into pale, skeleton white cheekbones that stood too tightly against her skin. Asteria catalogued her twitching movements, the anxious way her eyes darted back and forth, cutting through the night, and she knew this woman would find her, too, and the circus would be the one place she never wanted to be.
For now, she ignored her. In time, she would invite the woman in for tea. Not now, though. Now, it was someone else’s turn.
Ofelia… this girl was one of the good ones. Asteria didn’t know what brought her to the circus so young. It wasn’t her job to know. The stars only told her what seemed to matter. In Ofelia’s case, the circumstances of her death were irrelevant. All that mattered was where she was going now.
Ofelia’s lifelines were clear. Asteria heard the stars murmuring about the joy that trailed her from the moment of her birth to the moment she was brought here before she ever even read Ofelia’s fortune. They whispered about her heart… full of kindness and compassion. Overflowing with empathy.
It’s been said that fortune favors the bold. Asteria found that fortune favors the kind.
Ofelia had a soft heart. There was nothing in the world that did not move her to tears, whether they were of joy or grief oranger. Ofelia felt, deeply. And she loved deeply. She loved every minute of her life, right up until her final breath.
Now, Asteria knew, she would love every minute of her death.
While she warmed the water for the hot chocolate, Asteria asked her questions anyway. What she loved. Who she loved. How she practiced her kindness. Ofelia was a child; she thought nothing of the questions. She answered honestly, because that was all she knew to do.
“Cain was my best friend,” she said of her dog. Her voice turned mournful when she mentioned his death. “He got run over by a car when I was six.”
She loved her best friend. Rachel. She had cancer, and Ofelia shaved her head in solidarity of her fight against it. “That’s why it’s so short, now,” she said importantly. Asteria nodded and smiled. Ofelia delighted her. Her soul gleamed, shone out of her bubbling smile. If she could have, Asteria would have asked her to stay.
Instead, she gave the girl her hot chocolate and listened to her gush about her mother—an angel, if ever there were one, Ofelia was sure. She listened to Ofelia rattle on about her Abuelita, and the flowers they planted every summer. The lake her Abuelo took her fishing on, and the birds they fed in the backyard when they got home.
When the hot chocolate was gone, Asteria had said nothing more, only listened with rapt attention to the small, sweet child in front of her. At last, she fell silent, and Asteria tilted her teacup toward the girl.
“Would you like me to read your fortune, Ofelia?”
Ofelia’s sparkling brown eyes lit up, gleamed with excitement, and she nodded her head rapidly. The shawl fell from around her shoulders into a puddle on the ground when she leaned eagerly forward. Asteria didn’t mind. She took the white mug from the girl and tilted it this way and that, studying the remains of the chocolate painted on the sides of the cup.
The birds painted through the chocolate were stark against the white of the tea cup. Asteria fought a small smile when she saw them, and couldn’t resist beaming when she saw the candle.
“You will have a good journey that ends in enlightenment,” Asteria said. Ofelia cocked her head and settled back, disappointed.
“Enlightenment?”
Asteria chuckled and set the mug down and examined Ofelia, drinking in her innocence and lack of regard for such a fortunate reading. The girl had no idea what kind of soul she was, or the joy she would find.
“You’re going to be very happy, Ofelia,” she told her. Ofelia’s disappointed look faded, and a small smile crept across her face as Asteria cleared their mugs, placed them back in the cabinet, and stood to walk around the table and pick up the shawl. “That’s all that means. You’re going to be very happy.”
Asteria returned the shawl to the girl’s shoulders and pointed to a small tent between the big top and hers, a tent faintly ringing with music. Ofelia’s jaw dropped open slightly, and she gasped.
“That’s my favorite song!” Then she took note of the woman in white, small, almost laughably tiny next to the tall tent, with the same brown skin and soft eyes as Ofelia. She smiled, a welcoming, warm, familiar sort of smile, and Ofelia nearly shook with her excitement. “That’s my Abuelita!”
Asteria nodded, watched the woman in the corner of her vision who also stared at the glowing white tent, where shadows moved in intricate dances, bowing to each other and twirling along the seams of the canvas. She made no move toward it, so Asteria returned her attention to the soul in front of her.
“Why don’t you go with her, and dance with them?” she suggested, and Ofelia’s eyes shot to her face.
“I can do that?”
A puff of laughter burst past Asteria’s lips. She squeezed Ofelia’s shoulders and leaned down to whisper in her ear. “I think you must.”
Ofelia stood so quickly the stool beneath her toppled backward. Asteria let it. A cloud of dust coughed and rose around them, but neither cared. Ofelia took several quick, light steps toward her future… but she paused. Looked back. Smiled.
“I almost forgot to give you your shawl back!”
She started to pull it from her shoulders, but Asteria lifted a hand, staying her. Ofelia paused and Asteria said, “Keep it. It’s a gift.”
“Are you sure?” Ofelia asked.
Her face was wide open, eyes searching the fortune-tellers features. She must not have noticed the tears, because the corners of her eyes did not crease in worry, her small mouth didn’t purse, and her feet didn’t move to go back to the black tent. Asteria battled her urge to weep and forced a smile.
“I’m sure, child. Go on.”
Asteria didn’t watch her go. She didn’t need to watch her to know she would grab her abuelita’s hand, smiling as big as the sun, and disappear into her afterlife. It was too painful, sometimes, to feel the weight of such lovely souls, and have them ripped from her moments after their meeting. She could not bear, this time, to watch Ofelia leave her behind.
Ofelia would be happy. Asteria had meant it when she said it. So now she turned back to her table, righted the felled stool, and returned to her plush velvet chair.
The woman who had hovered for so long outside wandered over to her booth looking lost… searching the darkness for answers she knew it didn’t hold, longing for the fortune-teller to tell her something she didn’t already know.
Asteria could not provide her that comfort. The stars never lied. Neither did Asteria.
So when the woman sat down, and while Asteria brewed tea for each of them, she said, in a voice like a desert—desolate, empty, burning—“I don’t have anyone left.” She lifted her eyes to find Asteria’s and she didn’t even blink at the appalling shade of silver. Her own were glazed, absolutely dazed in awe of her loss. “They’re all gone. How did that happen? How did I end up alone?”
Asteria didn’t answer. She stared at the open sores in the woman’s skin. She looked down at her own hands, stared at her own smooth palms, and grieved for the young woman in front of her. Then she shook herself, and forced herself back to work.
She offered her the hot tea and watched the woman down it as if she were dying of dehydration. “What’s your name?” Asteria asked, as gently as she had asked Ofelia.
The woman shifted on the stool and shrank into her ill-fitting clothes that hung from her skeleton like they were rags on a board. “Katie,” she mumbled. “I’m Katie.”
Asteria nodded and urged her to take another drink to settle her nerves. She did the same for herself, drinking the bitter liquid deeply, letting the heat spread through her chest. It was a salve against a wound she could already feel opening up. She tried, the way she had with Ofelia, to get Katie to talk. But Katie was a grown woman, and she was one of the souls who knew the dark side of magic… knew the dark side of everything. She knew without asking Asteria what would happen to her, and she didn’t want to know. She evaded every question as if it would save her life to do so. Eventually, Asteria knew they would not have a conversation. Katie would only continue to sit there, as long as Asteria let her.
“May I see your cup?” she finally asked, and took it anyway when Katie didn’t respond. She only stared, vacantly. Seeing nothing.
Asteria felt the stars rearrange themselves in her veins, aligning themselves to Katie’s story. Marking her birth. Her bleak childhood, overshadowed by liquor and fists. Her inability to resist the siren call of the darkness. The pills, and her descent into madness and manipulation. And finally, the explosion at her home, where her life was snuffed out by her hunger, and three others with it. One of them an infant’s.
She nodded when Asteria read her fortune to her. A chain and a cross.
“I’m bound by my sins,” she mumbled, and excruciating pain struck Asteria, searing through her heart. Asteria bit her lip so hard she tasted blood, and when she swallowed it, she could’ve sworn it was acid. The woman finally lifted her eyes and a flicker of life flared.
“What’s that?” she asked, gazing over Asteria’s shoulder.
Asteria glanced back. The tent that loomed this time was different from Ofelia’s. Not light, or joyful. This one had black and white stripes, a dance between the light and the darkness, and a dim red light streaked across the ground beneath, like blood. A man stood beside the entrance, slim and tall, clothed from head to toe in black silk. He resembled Katie… except for his eyes. His eyes were a piercing blue, probing through the night to stare at her. “Is that my brother?” she asked, voice quaking. “He—he killed himself three years ago. That can’t be my brother.”
Asteria turned back to Katie and saw the fear written all over her face, twisting her mouth down and tightening her eyes, darkening the deep shadows already leaching the color from her cheeks.
“I don’t know,” Asteria answered honestly. “Why don’t you go find out?”
Katie shook her head, slowly. Her contorted grimace grew more pronounced, more pained, more petrified. Her words shook like a bird’s uncertain song, and they fell from her tongue like bombs, exploding on the table between them, the shrapnel of her terror cutting them, scarring them both.
“I’m scared.”
Tears raced silently down her cheeks, and the pain was back, throbbing this time through Asteria’s spine.
“Most people are.” Asteria’s voice came soft, floating on the air like a feather. Teasing the wind with the promise of staying afloat before finding a safe place to land. Katie tore her eyes from her fate and searched Asteria’s face for answers. Asteria reached out a hand and covered Katie’s with it. Her smile reached deep into the earth, felt the pain that scarred the world, and dripped with suffering. It was the most honest, sad smile Katie had ever seen. Soaked in agony. Brittle. Balancing on the edge of a scream. But all Asteria said was, “It’s okay to feel the fear. Nothing can hurt you now.” And her smile fell.
Katie stood, almost unwillingly— like she was resisting her skeleton, battling every movement her body made as if it were moving of its own accord.
Asteria watched her go— the woman with her hesitant, reluctant steps, and her desperate, absolution-seeking glances over her shoulder. Asteria didn’t smile again; it wasn’t her job to comfort the souls of the dead, and even if it was… sometimes there is no comfort to be given.
No, all Asteria could do was bear witness to her pain, and hope that was enough.
So Asteria watched, and she said nothing. The stars slipped into their places as Katie peeled back the tent flap, hand clenching that of the man beside her, and he guided her inside even as the bloody red light engulfed her, swallowing her scream.
Asteria wished she could open the veins in her arm to bleed the stars out. People make their choices, she knew, and often they were terrible. But sometimes she felt the loss of the damned as acutely as she felt the loss of the blessed—a gnawing pain in her belly, a cut in her soul slowly widening into an abyss, until it consumed her.
Sometimes we make our choices. But there are other times when our choices make us… and all we have are bad options to choose from.
Asteria didn’t know if bad choices made a bad person when that’s all they were given. She only knew what the stars told her, and what she felt when she spoke with those departing souls.
Maybe Katie was a horrible person. Maybe she had done horrible things. Made choices she knew would hurt the people around her.
But what other choice did she have?
Exhausted and hollowed out by death, Asteria turned to her own teacup, turned it this way and that, searching, searching… and found nothing.
An empty cup for an empty soul.
She stood from her chair, gathered the cups, stashed them away in the cabinetry behind her chair. She hid her cards, covered the crystal ball, and kissed the carnelian stone hanging above a canvas of the constellation Pyxis. She exited her booth, slipped around the side, and vanished into the big top. This tent seemed so ordinary compared to the other two she had seen that evening. So nondescript, forgettable, lost to its surroundings.
It was fitting that the tent itself should so remarkably resemble the fate of the people who wound up within it.
She stood silently, a wraith with a heartbeat among souls without bodies, and she watched them. Most laughed, or smiled. They clapped their hands in delight of the magic that saturated the air and drenched their senses. They basked in the palpable joy, feeding on their own happiness. The stars swirled around her veins, raced through her heart and her head, whispering about all the good and bad and shades in between.
They didn’t shift into place. They just kept humming, and the people kept laughing.
There were worse ways to be lost to the world, she thought.
The circus faded slowly. The elephants went first. Their trumpeting songs were mere whispers within moments. The lions followed, with the scent of the flesh-hungry breath still floating on the air. The aerialists vanished mid-toss. One second the crowd was looking up, watching for the landing, and then they were staring at empty space, still smiling.
The ringmaster commanded their attention, with his booming, hypnotic voice. He redirected their eyes to the contortionist, folding himself over and over into a box. When the ringmaster closed the lid, then opened it again, gone was the contortionist. The ringmaster kept up this game, pulling attention all over the big top, to clowns whose smiles disappeared after the rest of their bodies did, and to girls in sparkling leotards who drew shrill whistles that rang out over emptiness.
Eventually, the ringmaster was the only one left, and he stepped into the middle of the ring, took a deep bow, and flashed a red and white smile. His grey eyes found the fortune-teller, and he winked.
“Show’s over,” he mouthed.
His echoing laughter remained long after he was gone, and still the patrons sat there, their smiles fading. They looked round at each other, murmuring in growing disquiet, waiting for an act that was never coming. They waited. And waited.
The lights dropped slowly, submerging the arena in inky blackness gradually. If it happened all at once, they might have noticed.
Finally, the tent was dark. Quiet. The circus was gone, with all its entertainers, and all its guests. And still Asteria waited, with bated breath.
Light returned just as slowly as it had crept away. The growing brightness illuminated an empty tent, and with a sense of despair, she heard the ringmaster outside, bellowing for one and all to shed their fear, because the circus was here.
The darkness receded completely, and she left the tent, her steps heavy. She settled herself in her booth, and she waited for the next visitor. No one came to see her, this round. They couldn’t resist the allure of the darkness dancing just past the edge of the light’s reach. As in life, their souls hung suspended, trapped in shades of grey in a world made up of black and white.
The fortune-teller sat alone.
The big top sang with laughter as it filled.
The ringmaster found her gaze, smiled a hungry smile, and winked.