SOLEDAD ROTHCHILD ♠ THE MUSE ♠ MAGICIAN’S ASSISTANT ♠ TWENTY-NINE
“Remember, if you fall off the stage: leg extended, boobs up.” Burlesque
“Soledad, you’re scaring the children.”
It was a joke they always made - the girl who was more caricature than human being, those wide cartoon eyes always glossed-over and dead inside, always somehow set both on you and nothing in particular, that eerie smile like the tremble before an earthquake.
The muse, the assistant, the sidekick - unveiling magic and gore with the flick of her hand and shimmy of her shoulders. The defective doll, the Coney Island queen, Vanna White on acid. The circus in all of its raw authenticity - the smell of thick perfume pumped through an old-fashioned spray bottle, crushed popcorn and wet sand, cotton candy and the bodies beneath the board walk.
“The children,” a dead voice, lipstick applied like a knife slitting her lips open and springing red blood, “are scaring me.“
It begins like this. The fondest memories she has of her mother come attached to sequined flippers. Having an anonymous father and freak show exhibit for a mother ( Esmerelda Ortiz, WOMAN FISH! blared the neon posters when she was young ) was a recipe for disaster, the reason why Soledad is now nothing more than a trunk case of bizarre things.
Growing up in a traveling circus, namely the Carnival Noir, meant learning more off of road signs and ticket counters than she did textbooks, a different desert or dead-end town every quarter, carving her name into train cars, stealing the hoops off of the pierced man and putting barrettes into the bearded lady’s hair.
It was no place for a child - all the booze and body parts, bread, cheap wine, and cheese shared around a bonfire to ease their rumbling bellies - especially with the way in which Soledad’s mother chose to get by. The woman’s affairs were endless, so many and so often that Soledad liked to keep a tally with pen and paper. There were the men in the circus - the ring master, the tellers, the strong acts - and then there were the patrons, men who’d let go of the hands of their children and wives to come gawk at the dingy tank Esmerelda was writhing in, clad in shiny flippers and a bustier, the water a ghastly shade of green around her. They’d always slip her their card out of sight of their families, and she’d lick her lips and tuck it into her bra.
That night, Soledad knew that her mother would be stumbling into their tent smelling of vodka and the mouth of a married man, that she’d have to wash her up and comb her hair and listen to the woman moan and groan for hours.
“You should be thankful, Soledad. Your father left you with nothing more than that prissy last name and those big eyes. I’m going to teach you how to make it.”
To survive those nights and most else in her life, Soledad opted to find the dark humor in everything. She was a crafty kid, wise beyond her time, expert at sneering sarcasm and making onlookers uncomfortable with her even speech and odd stares. They called her Wednesday Addams. ( And then she’d elbow them in the gut. )
Her favorite way to pass the time was just outside of the Carnival’s main tent, where she’d set up a rickety little table, shoe box, and empty tin can to collect tips. The adults were more than happy to dump their kids at Soledad’s little “kiddie stand” for five bucks while they indulged in the horrid splendors inside, and Soledad was even happier to make some extra cash while causing a fright. She’d created a scary little puppet-slash-magic show out of red string, socks, metal gears, and broken buttons - played with shadows and lights to echo the beauty of Burton trapped inside of her cardboard world.
And when she’d shut off the flashlight and finish, the kids would whine. They would always whine.
Soledad would lean over the box, head cocked, wearing a Cheshire cat smile as she turned the socks inside out to reveal the marker-made stains of blood underneath. “They all died.”
Soledad, you’re scaring the children. Good.
Soledad was seventeen ( a pretty girl in that odd sort of way, all cryptic and crazy in the eyes, scared all the boys away ) when her mother had just gotten done with her stint on the Coney Island boardwalk and claimed with great fanfare that she’d fallen in love with a Jersey man - that the two were getting hitched. But before Soledad could even make a move to pack her things, there was more news.
“He wants a wife, not a wife and a teenage daughter,” Esmerelda explained, and Soledad still remembers the moment like it was yesterday - the cigarette falling from her mother’s lips, the leopard print bra, the lipstick smeared just a smidge on her right cheek. “I’ve given everything I’ve got to you, Sol. It’s about time you learn what it’s like out there on your own. No Carnival, no me.” She’d seemed rather pleased with herself when she slid Soledad a silver business card. “Mommy found you a new job.”
She was to be the assistant of a man they called Mister E, who traveled the states in his caravan of dreams to perform roadside shows and alleyway haunts. The vehicle and its gaud - red and black, frills and feathers, all the wrong edges and a glow like hell emanating from the inside - matched the man himself. He was older, had to be in his thirties, had a white scar that ran from his eyebrow, down his cheekbone, and into the side of his lips, wore embroidered coats and thick boots, spoke in dark riddles ( the joke was always on you ), and threw red confetti in the face of whomever he felt needed it.
Soledad was immediately infatuated. As was Mister E with her. The man taught her his craft ( the rabbit out of the hat, sawing her in halves while different parts of her shook with silent laughter, an arrow shot at the apple in her mouth, and everything else that got the crowd hot ), and she adopted his style like she’d finally found her place at his side - an aesthetic of feather boas shaking diamonds, short flapper dresses and sky high heels, and sleek bobbed wigs painted black like tar.
Mister E would glance up from his workshop desk littered with frights and delights, grin at her black sequined dress and feathered headpiece, the purple lipstick and eyeshadow that gave the illusion of glamour and death.
“You look like a 1920s Hollywood star…”
“…that just fell off a building.”
An even smile. “Thank you.”
They performed all across the country, from audiences of five to those of five hundred, and the crowd was always taken by Soledad in particular - her dry wit and slow claps, her cutting remarks at participants and the way Mister E split her into pieces and put her back together without so much as a blink from the girl.
Mister E took notice of this, too. It began with the man shorting her tips and pay here and there, then his backhanded compliments, then days in which he would steal her ideas for new acts without even a nod in her direction. It wasn’t until she found him drunken and sweaty, slobbering all over some woman who looked a little too much like her mother for Soledad’s taste, that something in her snapped.
They say that the legend that was Mister E went mad in the months that followed the departure of his prized assistant, tried to poke his own eyes out with his own arrows, tried to actually saw himself in half.
Soon, he was committed to a mental institution. And Soledad? She was long gone, nothing more than a napkin with a black lip print in her wake, the soiled and stained thing tucked under a stage or pinned beneath a poster board like a note of departure.
In the years that followed, cases like Mister E’s popped up frequently. Boastful men who valued mannequins over partners, boasted real magic under false pretenses, would hire a new beautiful and strange assistant - make it big for a while, then go mad ( or disappear or worse ) in the months following.
And every time, there would be nothing more than that napkin kissed black left behind.
Soledad’s ventures eventually brought her straight back to New York, wandering the boardwalk and looking up her mother to no avail. Apparently, her track record had piqued the interest of a very particular circus, and when she descended the grand steps tucked deep inside the Waldorf-Astoria, she could see why.
The place is a beautiful nightmare, a glimmering version of every slanted circus that put its hands on her in her youth. It’s her shoebox diorama come to life - the black and red satin, the lipstick, the illusions, the bent walls and bent people, smiling emptily and playing with their own minds.
At Cirque, Soledad is an assistant to all, though she is committed to none, providing her services to any illusionist that may need a girl in the clouds or magician who’d like to pirouette her into the form of a blackbird.
But Soledad is an honest to god carnival girl, the personification of circus gothic, knows the blood and grit of faulty contraptions and funhouse horrors, tellers missing their front teeth and knives still stained from the last girl on the wall.
You’d do best to remember that, lest she leave you another dark kiss.
♠ BRETT FOWLER ♠ PARTNER Of all the mad magicians Soledad aids at Cirque, she’s most fond of Brett. He matches her intensity, unsettles others almost as well as she does, and they test each other, pushing and pulling in some broken method of trust. His ego is so reminiscent of Mister E’s that it makes her infatuated, nostalgic, and enraged all at the same time. She’ll catch his knife in her hand when he throws it at her sometimes, smiles evenly as she wipes it off with the hem of her dress.
“I’m an assistant, aren’t I? I assist.“
♠ CRYSTAL BELROSE ♠ ACQUAINTANCE She hates to play double agent among the sword fiends, but one of Soledad’s favorite sights in the world is Crystal’s piercing act. “Crazy knows its brand of crazy, honey.” They’re both girls who left trails of blood behind, and when they look into each other’s eyes, they see the same red.
♠ ZARA BISHOP ♠ INTEREST Soledad is fascinated by Zara’s fascination with her. If it worries her that the starlet is studying to play a role ( Clara Riley, a doting magician’s assistant, a beautiful sideshow, a stunning extra in her own life, until Clara grows feral behind those red lips and bright eyes, begins to murder the magicians she assists to take the stage herself instead. The film would be set in New York in the 1920s, in the homes of the deranged, elite, and excessive, adorned by beaded dresses, gilded saw chambers, and horrid glamour. ) that is eerily similar to her own life story, she doesn’t show it.
Instead, Soledad lets the wide-eyed actress trail her around to get into character, shocking and scaring her for the fun of it, throwing spectacles her way in the hopes that she’ll never be able to uncover how exact the similarities of Soledad and Clara’s stories really are.
♠ AMBER DAVID ♠ “LITTLE SISTER” Amber is so much of what Soledad could have been - the vibrant imagination with the opportunity of the elite. But rather than resent the girl for her fortune, Soledad has taken her under her wing, playing older sister to the girl who, like Soledad, seems to have been plucked from another time. Sometimes she feels like she might be corrupting Amber, but she just as quickly shakes the thought away. What would be the humor in that?
SOLEDAD’S FACECLAIM IS AUBREY PLAZA &. NON-NEGOTIABLE. SHE IS TAKEN.
