Pearl-Handled Sword
Pearl, the sword-swallower, tells us about her childhood as if trying to piece her life together. Describes the way she’d sit on her clown father’s lap, says his pot belly jutted over his trousers and poked her in the back like a spike.
“Clowns!” we echo, one of us straight-faced and the other giggling, but she’s not joking around, and seems preoccupied. Her eyes look drippy and sad like she’s going over it again in her head.
“And he’d tell me how tough I was, that I should be in show biz, holding me stuck like that.”
“That part he got right, anyway,” my sister goes, passing a ciggie we share.
Pearl says she’s happy to live here in “Hell” since her father’s pre-booked himself into Heaven. We are too, we think. Soon it will be our Sweet-Sixteenth, and the stench of tobacco on our fingertips makes us feel as if we’ve finally arrived.
We agree that Pearl’s tough. We also agree about how it’s been terrible watching her pace like a lovesick raccoon outside Big Eddie’s caravan before he lets her inside again. Big Eddie, whose most famous trick is to break an iron chain over his heart by expanding his rib cage.
Sometimes we watch Pearl and Big Eddie through his open trailer window, the way he mounts her makes us glad to be safely locked together as a single unit.
“Sweet little helpless mousie, mousie, mousie,” Big Eddie grunts, because probably Pearl’s sword-swallowing, glass-walking skills don’t impress him.
Today Pearl is clear that no good will come from loving a man who can carry a horse over his shoulders and laugh. A new purple bruise on her face puffs like a rain cloud. She brings out a plate of chocolate chip cookies and we watch her put on her makeup, dabbing coverup over the ruined area under her left eye.
“I’ve never once choked on a fire-manipulation-act or a circus strong man either,” she says holding a wet little hanky. She’s writing a letter for us to deliver to Big Eddie, seals it with wax but isn’t sure which one of us to hand it to. I grab it first, slide it into our velvet handbag which is slung over my sister’s shoulders.
“Okay, thanks. Now, scram you guys. Tonight I have to perform and I need to fix up my face.”
Bozolo, the clown emcee, wishes Pearl good luck, then warms up the crowd by serenading her with “It Had to Be You” in his Betty Boop voice. The audience guffaws at his act and Bozolo swings his hips while batting five-inch eyelashes and doing his boo-boo-be-do.
Pearl stands ready in her satin dress, beaming at the audience, holding the pearl-handled sword against her thigh. We stand in the back where we always perch, and we shudder because we love and hate to watch her swallow that sword.
“Through my lips/lookout tongue/excuse me stomach/here we come!” Pearl spurts.
The lights seem to calm her eyes when she lays the sword flat on the back of her throat, plunging it straight down into her soul.
Pearl, mouth wide open as a pelican, stares at a glowing spot on the canvas roof and we wonder if she’s thinking about her dead clown father, wondering if she’s made him proud. When she pulls the sword out, the audience explodes in applause and the knots in our stomachs release.
“Suckers ask me why I swallow. I tell them it was either that or…”
This is what she begins to tell us later in our tiny kitchen, but doesn’t finish her thought. We hug her and ask her to stay with us. We tell her not to bother with Eddie, that we can all have some fun, just us.
“That’s okay girls. Thanks a bundle,” Pearl says, blowing a kiss before sliding on cherry lip goop.
“She’s got it all,” my sister whispers, dreamy-eyed. “She sure does,” I say.
All night we hear pounding on Big Eddie’s door, and we watch from the window of our caravan. “Please, for God’s sake Eddie, just let me in so I can sleep!”
When his door finally opens, Pearl disappears. What my sister and I learn on the last night of Pearl’s life is that some of us can’t feel our hearts beating until they’re pressed against steel.
For the Obits
The week we retire, Pinhead Jimmy looks sadder than anyone, and won’t leave us alone.
When we emerge from the goodbye party to breathe and stretch our legs, dark shapes and bruised-looking colors jump out at us from the octopus ride. All eight arms are folded down into a truck for the night. “It’s alive!” we chant, for the very last time.
The OctoRama has light bulbs for suckers, but it’s impossible to recognize the other rides when they’re slumbering. Like us, they crumple deep into themselves, faces locked inside their arms.
“When’d you gals start coochin?’” Jimmy asks, needy-like.
“Way back when we were drunk little virgins, friend,” my naughty sister goes, blowing Jimmy a smoky kiss. “Jot that down for the obits,” she laughs.
Jimmy blushes. I can see it in the dark. Despite arthritic limps, my sister and me have unusual charms. All these years later, Pinhead has a thing for one or both of us.
“Who was your favorite act of all time, girls?” Jimmy asks. “Apart from me that is.” Snickers.
His hair flops over a cauliflower ear— in this way he remains boyish. But his old man’s expression is a map folded tight in a glove compartment too long, like it hurts to be re-opened. He’s the epitome of a wilted performer, blundering in to ask about things he already knows. We’re used to his winky eyes, strings of saliva bobbing from his lower lip.
“I don’t know, Jimmy, I guess we never really had an actual favorite,” I lie for both of us as my sister grabs my hand. The two of us always ruminating about ways we might have saved our Pearl.
What a threesome we make on this final night: Sad, lovestruck Jimmy with his mouth turned permanently upside down, and the two of us with bald spots where our hearts used to be.
Meg Pokrass is the author of First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections of flash fiction and two novellas in flash. Her work has been published in three Norton anthologies, including Flash Fiction America, New Micro, and Flash Fiction International; Best Small Fictions 2018, 2019, 2022, and 2023; Wigleaf Top 50; and numerous literary magazines including Electric Literature, Lit Hub, New England Review, and other places. Meg is the Founding Editor of the Best Microfiction series.
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