Dreadmartha Writes: Little Lovely Things
a lil something something where i study ras's father (aka the best character ever)
The Magnificent liked a lot of strange things.
Or, as he saw it, he liked things other men didn’t know enough about to enjoy.
He was, he sometimes supposed, something of an oddball.
The Magnificent had lots of time to think on this, being as he was the head acrobat and the strongest man in the circus.
Well, not stronger than the Strongest Man On Earth. But that went without saying.
He was, onstage as much as off, the backbone of the circus.
Onstage he stood up tall and wiry and straight as an arrow as someone stood on his shoulders, or as he held one or more other people up, while they held up another person and so on.
The others would do turns and tricks with him holding them up. His daughter, who tied up her purple red hair and smiled for the audience with the pride and grace of a much older woman, would do splits in the air, then catch her younger brother when he jumped from the ground up into her waiting arms, some seven feet above him.
The Magnificent could never look up to see his children’s perform, because doing so would almost certainly destroy the whole precarious structure. But he could feel, in the tremors that went through the arms and legs of the others, when things were going well.
Once he felt a sudden strain in the hand on a man on his shoulder, and knew that the man was not only going to fall, but that his daughter would lose her bearings and come crashing down as well. There was little under his feet but straw thrown over cement.
Before he could even imagine his daughter’s jaw colliding with the cement he reached out with his mind and held the man up. The man’s hand did slip but, with The Magnificent holding onto him and just keeping his torso where it needed to be, he was able to keep his legs in position as well.
When The Magnificent’s son jumped the seven feet into his sister’s arms everyone applauded, and very soon dispersed.
The other acrobats slipped and jumped down, first his son, then his daughter, then the others, until the whole structure was dismantled, person by person.
The Magnificent let go of the man on his shoulder.
He landed gracefully, a grown man of similar build but much younger.
“Thank you, Papa.” It was a nickname that reminded The Magnificent of Ernest Hemingway, and as much as he like the paternal nickname, the tie to Hemingway made him worry about guns.
Guns were something he distinctly disliked.
“Your wrist,” The Magnificent pointed to it. The man was rubbing it and holding his hand very still. “Are you alright?”
The man shook his head.
“Tendonitis?” The Magnificent couldn’t keep the dread out of his voice.
The man shook his head again.
“No, I don’t think so.” He tried to smile. “Nothing bad, Papa, I’m sure.”
The Magnificent was distinctly unsure.
“You should rest, and get some ice.”
“Yes, Papa.”
“And let me have a look at it later.”
“Yes, Papa.”
The man wouldn’t look him in the eyes, and his reluctance to do so made The Magnificent worry that he had done something wrong by saving the show.
It was only when the man slipped away to ice his wrist that The Magnificent realized he’d embarrassed him by not letting him fall.
Moments like these made it hard for The Magnificent to feel magnificent.
He had his own small ways of coping. Little things, the things he liked because they were peculiar. Or, as he liked to think, because others didn’t notice the value of them.
He relished the feeling of being good enough when he caught one of the other acrobats as they swung free of a trapeze. He savored flour on his fingers, and the moments that he took to think about how much softer his hands were when they were covered in white. He watching storms coming in the distance and smiled when he was quick enough to sidestep the first icy rain drop and slip into the colorful shadowy warmth of the tents. And, when he stood under the spotlight and felt it hot against his skin as he plummeted through the air and reached out in the last second before he connected with the ground and swung neatly back into the air so quickly that the spotlight couldn’t keep up, he started to feel magnificent again.
It was a process, he told himself, like everything else.
He saw that the wounded man from his shoulder took care of his wrist, and fashioned a brace for him out of spare cloth and some narrow shims. To help the man win back his pride he asked him to teach Rasputin a few new moves.
It worked, despite Rasputin’s grumbling.
The other bits and snatches of happiness The Magnificent claimed when he thought he’d failed someone were much simpler.
He liked to think of them as ‘little lovely things.’
It was as simple as having everyone sit at the tables and stools and spare boards they arranged in the tent that served as a mess hall, putting a fresh pot of coffee in front of his place at said table and watching it being drained of its contents as breakfast ran its course, until all that was left of the thick black liquid was a thin red brown sip that he or the Strongest Man On Earth would simply pour into their mouths straight from the pot.
As simple as seeing flowers appear in one of the vases his wife kept, and knowing that his wife or their daughter, perhaps with Rasputin in tow, had picked them and set them in the vase with no other intention than to bring some of the beauty they saw outside into their home.
As simple as his wife’s smile when, after a long day sitting in her stall near the World’s Smallest Pony and brushing her beard, he would call her his sweet honey bee. As simple as his own helplessness when she would touch his hands and not mention how rough they were, or how oddly tall and thin he was.
How she would touch the scars above his eye and, instead of the ugly feeling that bloomed in his stomach when others looked at it, he felt somehow manly and handsome. Like he was worthy of her affection, and that he was man enough to protect her from the glaring eyes of the people outside her stall. Man enough to look out for their daughter, look after their son, and not let his failure to keep his own father safe happen again.
The accident that happened when he was still a boy, when the hand of god tied a knot in his father’s windpipe when he went for a swim. It was a think that, to his young mind, could only be done by someone with the sorts of powers he was starting to see in himself.
For years he had been convinced that he had killed his father, that there was so great dark part of him that had been waiting to kill the man and then use his new famililessness to go out and kill again.
He spent years trying to find a way to only develop goodness in himself. By working hard, by learning, by loving and trying to be loved in return.
In time he wondered if he could kill at all, he, who trapped flies and released them rather than swat at them.
One night he dreamed of swimming down to his father, who stood up straight at the bottom of a black lake, looking up at him. He heard a voice whispering through the water, and he awoke with his lungs full of water.
He coughed and sputtered until morning and, rather than understand that he was haunted by his own grief, he accepted his dream as a vision and decided that he had been cursed.