Stare.

            Do not allow the shivering dust to creep into your eyes. You will not blink this time around. His pearl-gray eyes, glittering with youth, are yours to conquer.

            “Look at me.”

            The side of your mouth jerks upward, pulled by the string of his punching words.

            “What do you think I’m doing?”

            “Blinking.”

            As if on cue, a shot of wind hungrily slices through the naked window of your railway carriage, biting straight into your unveiled eyes.

            You blink.                        

            The century-old maroon train quivers beneath your sweating feet. Your face is pushed up against his. Cheeks feel around in the dark, sugary tears crusting between.

            His mouth leaks clusters of empty dreams into the suffocating air.

            “Be mine.”

            You turn away.

            You are back in your heartless uncle’s lair. The Ringmaster’s Car. It is three times the size of the eleven stable boys’ quarters—combined.

            You saw his home once. It reminded you of a squashed sapling. There was a lone bed jammed against a crumbling, faintly maroon wall. You think that there might have been something else—slippers? A nightstand? A jewelry box? You are not sure. It was too long ago.

            Your soul eats fire.

            It feeds on it, a moth to a flame. You were born for the flame. You will die for it.

            You are the phoenix.

            Your cheeks tell the story.

            The flawless Ringmaster has slapped you for your daydreams. Why haven’t you perfected the Russian bar repertoire yet? Or the aerial silk routine? Why can you still not fit into your size OO leotard after starving yourself for three days?

            His thousand-pound tuxedos don’t pay for themselves, you know.

            You taste that disgusting potion flooding into your mouth again. All of a sudden you are leaping to your feet, swinging your charred arms around his dripping chins, pulling, tugging, choking off his wasted breaths…

            But instead you bow your head down, backside stapled to your chair.

            You have never been able to stand up.

            At dusk, you try to find him after your act has finished. After roaming through the city of cotton-candy vendors and intermission side displays, you finally spot him hovering by a Friesian horse. A frail-looking little girl is running her bony fingers through its mane.

            You look over your shoulder. Besides the skeleton girl, no one else is here, so you advance, gently tugging him behind a dressing room tent. He shifts away from you to see where the little girl is, but she has gone; he steps back around to wrap his hardened arms around you so gently that you want to cry. You almost cannot feel his embrace.

            The cold vanishes as soon as his warmth pools from within you like an oozing candle, burning vigorously in the dying firelight.

            Together, your eyes comb through the stars.

            “They’re pebbles of fate, you know.”

            You nod, hair bristling under his whiskers. He silently smiles at you. You smile, too.

            Because you remember now. It was the jewelry box.

            What was inside?

            Today, the Ringmaster discovers your greatest secret.

            It is furiously pouring. You arrange to meet with the stable boy in his carriage, oblivious to the fact that the Ringmaster is assessing a Friesian horse there.

            The stable boy caresses a flyaway from your face. You devour his mouth with yours.

            And the Ringmaster sees it all.  

            You don’t even realize he is there until the screaming.  It is the only language he can speak.

            “You dirty little tramp! Are you sleeping with the pigs in the carriage next door too?” he screeches, metal on chalkboards.

            Your ears rain blood, blood, blood. You are drowning in a sea of blood.

Where is the fire now?

            You do not know what this sense of having nothing anymore is.

            Sometimes you wonder if this is what the Ringmaster suffers through every day. You would empathize with him if it weren’t for the fact that empathy requires the presence of a heart. Yours has been locked away into the jewelry box that disappeared along with the stable boy.

            “Please, please give it back to me,” you beg him in your dreams, though somewhere inside, you know it’s useless. Even if you ever got hold of that box again, there would no longer be a key to open it with.

            But you know the Ringmaster’s secret weapon now, and you shape it to be your own.

            You are not the Ringmaster; every day you choose not to forget your memories, no matter how painful they may be, because you know that they are the source of your strength.

            So you use your past. You use these memories.

            Piece by piece, you fill in the gap where your heart once was with shards of shrapnel woven together with your memories of the stable boy. Now you have beaten the Ringmaster, because he has never understood that there is strength in humanity. 

            You memory of the jewelry box has given you broken, invincible armor.

            Today, you will discover yourself.

            The Ringmaster has decreed that you will breathe fire in tonight’s performance. It is by far the most unsound act the circus has ever performed, but that does not matter; thrill is what the white-hot flame of the Ringmaster’s soul feeds upon.

            Tonight, you will flirt with death. But tonight, you are also the phoenix:

            From the fire’s ashes will you be reborn.

            The fuel is in your mouth.

            Your feet cling on to the fire-lit baton. The ribbons ensnaring your wrists pirouette you higher. You are rising, rising, unstoppable, and you can vividly see the whites of all the audience members’ sickeningly fascinated eyes illuminated by your torchlight.

            Your uncle is just another set of those blank eyes.

            Now, your life is in your hands. What you will do with it is your choice. Yours alone.

            You inhale.

            You spray the fuel over the torch.

            You breathe fire, flying.