Emily Lu Wang is a third-year law student at Yale living in Brooklyn, New York. Her fiction has previously been published in Epiphany Online and the Harvard Advocate. She is currently working on her first novel.
At my mother’s high school graduation, one of the wealthier families donated money to be spent on ceremonial doves. You know how rich people spend their money, my mother said.
On graduation day, she watched from the front row as the principal and the teachers retrieved their doves from the cage and gathered in a semicircle. When the principal stepped to the lectern and began to speak, the chemistry teacher struggled to still his dove, which flapped its wings and flexed its talons in panic. He moved his right hand to the bird’s throat, index finger wound around what must have been its carotid artery. It settled.
At the conclusion of the principal’s speech, of which my mother could only remember the vaguest contours—something about wandering, rumination, and the importance of nature, all of it very Thoreau—it was time to release the doves into the air.
But by now, the dove had stilled completely. As its three companions fluttered skyward, it sat motionless, and when the teacher thrust his hands forward to encourage it along, it fell to my mother’s feet with a muffled splat.
. . .
I parcel out memories into two categories: before and after that summer, real and unreal. Real: My mother pulling on her diner uniform, arm by arm. The shirt strained against her chest and nipped in tight at the waist, like the figures of women on television. God, the way men once looked at her.
Unreal: Her calves splayed on the hospital bed, two beached slabs of salted wind-whipped wood.
. . .
My mother’s hallucinations began in April. My mother would absentmindedly brush her fingertips on my shoulder, against a neighbor’s forearm, or along the fireplace mantle, as if checking affectionately for dust. Possibly goose down from one of the couch pillows, she explained each time.
Then came her discovery of sparrow tail feathers, their dense ash-brown barbs nestled in my hair. The morning of my high school graduation, she plucked from my heat-permed curls a single plume. My daughter, the bird, she laughed.
One week later, when her boss at the diner sent her home, she told me it was because of the recession. I slinked into Dan’s Diner that afternoon to beg, on account of my first college tuition payment due in September. Dan sat me down in a roughed-up booth. The sweat on my thighs suctioned my skin to the leather seats. He stayed standing, so I had to swan my neck to look at him, and even then I saw more of his nostrils than his eyes. I caught him staring down my shirt and felt a flush spread all over my neck like hives. I had just turned eighteen and looked about my age.
He said, The recession hasn’t been easy, sure. But it wasn’t that. She kept dumping out the soups because she said she found bird feet in them.
What was there to say? I turned around and walked out. When I got home, I changed into a nicer shirt, then drove to the Roseville summer fairgrounds to ask for a job.
Tell me about yourself, Brian the manager, said, eyeing my legs, right to the point where cotton bunched up beneath my crossed thighs and half-tanned skin peeked through. I uncrossed my legs.
Would you describe yourself as a team player?
I nodded.
Brian ran the freakshow—the sideshow, he corrected himself—tent, he told me, but he was also the magician who performed Mondays through Wednesdays at eight, and he was working towards landing the Thursday through Sunday spot. Those shifts, the tip jar practically filled itself up.
I looked at the freckles on his left cheek and the faint creases of smile lines indenting his skin. When I think back to our first meeting now, I remember the moment in every magic show when Brian laid out with a flourish the birdcage, the wand, the top hat on draped silk. The way his hands floated over the tools at his disposal, pretending each of those objects didn’t have some untold inner life: a false bottom, a secret compartment, a mirror.
Why do you want to work here?
I made my voice go low and breathy. I’m looking for some experience, I said.
I wasn’t naïve; I could see two things clearly. First, all the money my father left behind in my college fund was gone, or going to be gone, soon, if we were going to keep the house. And second, I saw the way Brian was looking at me, his mouth pinched tight, like he had suddenly become aware of his lips and his tongue: where they were, and where they weren’t. He could have bared two rows of teeth like a shark and I would have offered him my neck.
It was a strange thing to feel, but in the moment, I really meant it. I told him this later that summer, and Brian said to me that when we first met, he imagined sawing me in half, then pulling me out of the box smiling and intact. I was too pretty to have a doppelgänger, and all the magic tricks he knew involved either halving or doubling.
That part about the doppelgänger isn't true. He was just being sweet. Actually, all pretty girls look the same. Nice teeth, straight hair, long legs.
Anyway, my voice cracked; the moment was over. But I got the job.
. . .
I spent six days and nights a week in the first room of the freakshow tent where I manned the cash register. On a slat shelf behind me, conjoined twins floated in a foggy jar of formaldehyde. Their baby skin glowed white like emaciated moons.
Brian didn’t let the non-paying visitors see what lay just beyond the curtain, like Dana, the woman who was born with two extra arm stubs that she splayed out hissing like a dragonfly. She was nice, but she kept to herself. In the backstage changing area, she clutched her costumes close to her body, as if we hadn’t all seen her naked dozens of times. That summer, I collected so many passing glances at the oddest of bodies that I would sometimes feel surprised, catching sight of my own figure in the steam-fogged bathroom mirror. The plainness of it. The only distinguishing feature of my body, freckles and small childhood scars excepted, was a faint litany of fading tan lines: pale bands on my arms from my work uniform and my bikini’s reverse shadow.
Oh no, women would murmur when they entered the tent and spotted the twins. The twins curled into each other, their bodies attached at the sides as if they were a pair of wilted lungs. Sometimes the women would try to look over my shoulder and really scrutinize the twins up close. They’d say something like, Their eyes are closed, they could be sleeping.
As if anybody slept suspended in a glass of formaldehyde.
I’d wait until they got so close I could smell their hairspray and the powdery smell of their face makeup, and I’d clear my throat and say, Five dollars for a ticket. They’d look at me with their lips curved in upturned sneers, but they’d pay up.
. . .
You shouldn’t be working all summer, my mother said to me at the end of my first week. Six days a week, how many hours a day? You should be enjoying your last summer before school.
She stayed up to wait for me, every single night, to make sure I got home safely. I’d see the lights on and knew she’d be at the kitchen table, tracing the wooden ridges absentmindedly and staring out the window.
We need the money, I said.
We have my unemployment.
It’s not enough.
She fell silent and turned to gaze out the window. We both knew that she hadn’t heard from all the job applications she had submitted. Not many places were hiring, and anyway, word about her had travelled fast.
That summer, the worst of the crash hit our corner of Sacramento County. Half of the homes on the street—pastel stucco split-levels with identical floorplans—were up for sale by the bank, and you couldn’t hear kids playing outside anymore. The front porches, for the most part, were empty, strange for the summer. We barricaded ourselves against the absence. It made us nervous.
Her hands began to pass along the table surface, and I realized I half-expected them to turn into talons. But her hands were the same as ever, their general shape pretty, and her fingernails trim, though the skin had grown taut and shiny over the years.
Look, she said, catching sight of something. She pressed her face to the window, her voice low in wonder. A white peacock. Can you believe it? With those feathers, it could be wearing a wedding gown. I joined her at the window. Across the lawn, scattered handfuls of toasted rice glowed dimly in the moonlight.
I see it, I said, following her eyes as they tracked something moving across her field of vision. It’s incredible.
We stood there by the window, shoulder to shoulder. I counted the freckles along our suntanned arms. A neighborhood dog barked, breaking the silence. The sharp silhouette of a flock of blackbirds rose from our neighbor’s maple tree, startled and aflutter.
She glanced at the blackbirds, then back to the front lawn. Suddenly, she folded into a kitchen chair. A tear slid down from her cheek onto the table, and I wiped it away quickly with my palm. It was warm still.
. . .
This part, I’m not so proud of.
I needed over twelve thousand dollars to enroll at Davis for the fall quarter. It was a staggering amount of money to need and not have.
The tent got about two hundred visitors a day, give or take, mostly take. If I overcharged each of them by fifty cents, or a dollar when possible, then on top of the hourly wage and tips, I’d be most of the way there by the tuition payment deadline. And if I made it through that first quarter, I could take on a part-time campus job.
Of course, my scheme had its hiccups. If any of the fair employees were in the tent, within hearing distance, I charged the usual five dollars, and then I needed to be careful that none of the regular visitors caught on.
Three weeks in, I had a big scare. It was Friday night, and I was ringing up one of the fairground organizers. He had paid with a fifty, and I was handing over his change when Brian came up from behind me and said, I’m so sorry, sir, here’s the correct change. He handed over an extra dollar. Camille rang you up wrong; she’s new.
I must have charged him an extra dollar out of habit.
When the organizer slipped into the show, I watched Brian in my periphery as he moved around the tent. He had this buggy look in his eyes, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to grovel.
I said, I really need this job. I have to pay for college somehow.
You don’t need to say anything, Brian said. It was just an honest mistake. You’re a good kid. He mussed up my hair and went backstage, and I tried to make sense of the cold curdling in my stomach when he called me a kid.
. . .
Brian’s main trick was turning one thing into two things. He had all these theories about magic tricks he tried to explain to me, but his favorite one was this: All magic tricks engage either your memory or your imagination. Disappearance is memory; doubling is imagination.
Or maybe it’s the other way around.
I never went to his shows, because the magic tent was strict about not letting employees sneak in, but he’d practice on me in the mornings when business was slow. He’d begin with a quarter, flashing it between his index finger and his thumb. A sudden flick of the wrist, and he’d be holding two quarters. At first I pretended to be surprised. Laugh and clap. When his show kept tanking and he wanted real feedback, I finally told him the truth.
You need to start with something bigger. If I were in the crowd, I’d walk out, right then and there, if I realized I paid ten dollars to watch some guy do quarter tricks.
What if I did it with handkerchiefs instead?
Even bigger. It needs to be flashy. Or you could make something big disappear, I said.
Easier said than done. He reached behind my ear and pulled out a daisy, then stepped into my space like he wanted me to kiss him. I turned my head away. Breathe evenly, I reminded myself.
You’re an amazing girl, he said.
Let’s practice the show again from the top, I said.
We kept brainstorming all summer but couldn’t come up with anything. One month in, he decided to change directions completely and switch to card tricks, but that didn’t end up working out either.
. . .
By mid-July, I had grown closer to some of the tent performers. We developed the habit of stepping out in between shows to badger the food stand workers for stray pieces of funnel cake and small cones of cotton candy. The performers must have caught on to the fact that Brian treated me a little differently, because they started whispering to me about him, and about the twins, especially.
Lionel (stage name, The Tattooed Man) was the first to ask me, Do you know where Brian got them? The twins?
I don’t know, I said.
We think they’re his, he murmured.
Like his kids? He nodded. He has a wife? I asked. Lionel ignored the question.
He continued, One time, I snuck in after closing time to open the jar, just out of curiosity, you know, and I swear, he caught me in a flash. Didn’t even have the chance to unscrew the lid.
I looked at the patch of green-black ink that spread from shoulder to shoulder and all over Lionel’s chest like an oil slick and thought about the stack of dollar bills wadded up in my wallet. It wasn’t anywhere close to enough. I had been depositing the money every week and watching my bank account, as if checking the balance every day would somehow make the number rise more quickly. I had skimmed an extra thousand dollars, maybe fifteen hundred, tops, but I’d hoped for five or six thousand by this point.
I don’t know, I said again.
He studied me for a moment, then hooted. I get it now. You’re fucking Brian.
Quiet, I whispered. But I felt a smile curve onto my lips and I didn’t do a thing to stop it. Lionel marched back into the tent, laughing. I stood in front of the polyester curtains covering the entrance and tried to feel indignant, but I kept on picturing the way Brian’s eyebrows creased in focus whenever he tried to pick out the ace of spades without looking.
. . .
The first time Brian and I snuck out between shows, we met in the empty lot at the edge of the fairgrounds next to the highway, where delivery trucks parked in the mornings. We had fifteen minutes and rushed to keep it under ten. His lips were on mine, and then his hands were on my chest, feeling me up, not that there was much. He pushed my back to the dirt, and I felt every rock pressing into my spine.
Stop, I said the way I thought I was supposed to, like I didn’t really want him to stop.
He let his hands hover above my skin and pressed his fingertips along the sides of my stomach. You want me to stop, he said. You want me to stop. On my skin, someone had turned the radiowave frequency way up. I could feel it everywhere.
I went, No I don’t. I rushed through the words. I didn’t want to hear myself, even as I felt my mouth form the shapes. A stray car whooshed by us on the overhead pass. In the silence between breaths, I heard the faint and faraway cries of birds.
. . .
Sparrows, doves, falcons, hummingbirds. Birds with elaborate feather patterns, gorgeous blurs of blues and greens and pinks spread against the sky like whirling hazes of cotton candy. Plainer birds, with only brown and beige feathers to speak of, but sweet in their own way. Some of the birds, native to California; some, briefly resting before continuing onwards; and others, with no particular reason at all for being in town. Birds small enough to cup in one hand, their little talons pricking skin like springtime rose thorns. Birds with wingspans as long as I am tall.
Birds, birds, birds.
When they buried my mother, I watched as they lowered the casket into the ground and I realized, I’ve made a mistake; that’s the exact opposite of what she would have wanted. But it was too late. I said my prayers and threw my dirt.
. . .
How is your mom doing these days? Brian asked me between shows. The performers were all hanging around in the back lot, passing around a jug of SoCo and orange juice. I sat on the railing and enjoyed the metallic chill against my skin.
She was in the kitchen this morning by the window, like always, and she was waving her hands outside the window and yelling. When I asked her what she was doing, she told me she was shooing away the hawks. She said the hawks were eating the toasted rice meant for the blue jays. The neighbors saw. As I said this, I kept my eyes fixed on the rickety Ferris wheel making its rounds because I didn’t want Brian to have to look like he felt sorry for me.
I hate how everyone knows and not one single person understands, I said. The jug came to me and I took a sip, then passed it to Brian. The orange juice had gone sour in the heat and I puckered up. Other than the birds, she’s mostly okay, I added.
I heard toasted rice can really mess with their digestive tracts, he said. You should tell her that. He nudged his hand along the railing until it was cupped just over mine. I pretended to not notice. From across the circle, Lionel was shooting us glances and saying something to Marge, who let out a shrill laugh, the silver piercings along her throat glinting in the sun. I avoided looking at Dana.
I said, Sometimes, she gets it in her head that I’m her sister. In her mind, we’re back in the seventies and she keeps on telling me I’m wearing my pants all wrong.
Brian laughed at this. You should show her the internet. It’ll blow her mind.
. . .
If I could pick someone to lose my mind with, I’d pick Brian. Even now.
. . .
I tried to convince my mom to come to one of Brian’s August shows because I wanted them to meet, or at least inhabit the same space for an evening, so I could watch her watch him. She refused.
I’m not much of a fan of magic shows, she said. I think paying money to be tricked counts as making the same mistake twice. She and I had just awoken from a nap together, tongues sour with sleep. I yawned and tucked my head against hers.
But you’re not being tricked, I said. It’s just for fun.
When you were little, you loved this one television special where the magician plucked out doves from handkerchiefs. You would go wild every time. But you were such a pain in restaurants, because you would always snatch every napkin from the table and throw all of them up into the air at once, hoping for birds.
She laughed and stretched, and our feet brushed against each other beneath the bedsheets. She said, I would watch all those napkins slowly drift and desperately wish that just once, one time, a bird would fly out from a fold.
When did I stop?
Oh, I don’t remember. At some point we were sitting at the diner, and I realized I couldn’t remember the last time you had, you know, raised a ruckus. That bothered me, too. That it stopped, and I hadn’t noticed.
. . .
All of the people who worked at the sideshow tent were trying to move up, not just Brian. José, the fire eater, told me that he was trying to learn a trick that involved blowing three big rings of fire, and then one little ring that passed through the centers of the first three. He demonstrated it with cigarette smoke, and I held my breath as discreetly as I could, picturing the inside of his lungs with a shudder.
Coney Island will eat that up, he said. Time to get out of Shitsville, California.
That’s my hometown you're talking about, I said.
You should figure out that trick soon, so you can stop practicing so much, Dana said. Your cough is starting to sound real nasty.
Occupational hazard, José said.
Brian walked up to us and we fell silent.
You’ve got a little bit of pink sugar on your cheek, right there, Brian said to me. He brushed his thumb against the spot and gave it a noisy kiss. Dana rolled her eyes.
Brian and I had gotten less shy around the rest of the performers, and some of them, especially Dana with her face all pinched-up, weren’t too pleased. She thought Brian was too old to be messing around with a girl my age. She wasn’t wrong, but it’s hard for me to think of Brian like that.
Still, when he put his arms around me, I saw how Dana looked at us and I wriggled out from him. My elbow accidentally knocked over my bag, which spilled all over the floor. And there it was, my wallet, fat and brimming with the week’s stolen cash. I bent over and snatched it up, but not before everyone else caught a look.
José whistled. Miss Moneybags. Where’d you get all that from?
Must be nice to have the boss for a boyfriend, Dana said.
Dana, Brian said sharply. Come on. Don’t be like that.
Am I wrong? she asked, and folded her arms around her torso. She absentmindedly grazed her extra arm stubs when she was upset or nervous. Tell me I’m wrong, Brian. Camille.
Tell her she’s wrong, Brian, I said. I could feel sweat gather in my armpits, along my lower back. He stared her down, and she glared back. A beat, then she turned around and left.
. . .
It turned out Brian was better at making things disappear than we all had thought, because eleven weeks into the summer, the two fairground organizers called me in and asked for help reading the tent ledgers.
The taller one said, There’s something fishy going on. Maybe you can help us figure it out, Camille.
If this was their way of getting me into trouble, they were being awfully cruel about it. My hands shook as I traced my index finger over the columns and explained what each heading meant. I wondered if they could feel the nervous heat radiating off of me, or if the sweat on my skin was going to leave a wet crease along the paper ledger.
We charge five dollars a ticket, I said, moving my finger down the salary column, and each of the performers takes a cut of the ticket sales. I’m paid hourly. So is Brian.
But they weren’t looking into me at all. By the end of the hour, they had figured that Brian had stolen maybe fifteen thousand dollars from the fair. On top of the money that I had stolen, not that there was really any comparison. The trick was that Brian had the patience to steal his money quietly, by doing things like understating tent attendance, or filing for maintenance expenses that never happened. It was a lot smarter than the way I had been going about it.
The tall one said, I also heard some people saying that the sideshow was charging extra for tickets. Six dollars is what they told me. Can you back that up? he asked me.
I braced myself against the desk and felt dizzy, like I was in a bad dream, running from something, only I couldn’t remember how to move my legs, or I was in a maze and couldn’t find my way out of it, couldn’t even remember the turns I had taken, or how I’d gotten to where I was.
Brian told me that the afternoon and evening shows cost a dollar extra, I lied.
That bastard is probably pocketing that extra cash, too, the shorter one said. The taller one reached for his phone and began calling the police.
As soon as they let me go, I ran to the tent to warn Brian. I had never run that fast in my life, but I felt I owed it to him.
As soon as he saw me, red and breathless, he knew.
Come here. Quickly, before they get here, he said. He walked behind the cash register and reached for the jar of twins. He unscrewed the lid and reached in, pulling the twins out by the left one’s head.
They're not real, I said.
Of course not, he said. He pulled off the head and his fingers dug around in the skull of the decapitated infant. His hand re-emerged clutching a thick wadded-up roll of hundred dollar bills.
Laid out on the table, the twins look like the dolls I played with as a girl, their plastic skin too shiny and smooth to be true. He reassembled the dolls and put them back in the jar, then wiped his hands dry.
The money’s for you. For your tuition, he said.
I can’t take it. It’s too much.
No, it’s not enough. I know how much college costs. Take it, he said, pressing the roll into my left palm. I quickly shoved it inside my bra; I didn’t want them finding it inside my bag. The wad felt even larger wedged between my underwire and my ribcage.
We stared at each other for I don’t know how long.
Smile for me, he said. I smiled.
Beautiful girl. Laugh for me. Maybe this will be the last time I hear it. I opened my mouth, but before I could make a sound, I began to sob.
Brian, I said. Everything in my body strained for the sound of the organizers barging into the tent. Brian, I’ve stolen money, too. They think that was you, too.
He held me. Okay. That’s fine, he said.
I pushed him away. No, it’s wrong.
You should go before they get here, he said. I nodded and walked backstage, but nobody was there. The performers must have known what was coming, I realized. Dana. I crouched in the back until the entire tent fell silent, and then I walked out into the empty delivery lot and listened for birds, but they were silent, too.
. . .
Yesterday, a call came from the San Bernardino state prison where Brian’s still locked up. Lionel told me that Brian’s serving extra time because he got busted in this big racket with one of the gangs. They were smuggling cigarettes in with the produce.
I let the call go to voicemail, like the rest of his calls. I promised myself, the first time he called, that I wouldn't pick up until I enrolled in college. Next quarter I will, I keep telling myself. The quarter after next, at the very latest.
I don’t want to lie to him, and I want to tell him the truth even less. Most of the money went to the hospital bill, and the rest went to funeral expenses. It was all gone before September came, every cent of it, and there was nothing to do except find work elsewhere. I would feel bitter, but it never felt real in the first place, the money. It appeared out of nowhere and disappeared just as quickly.
Outside, two young boys play tag, chasing each other around bushes and across cement driveways. Their family moved into the neighborhood last month, and their plastic toys are already scattered across the lawn like technicolor tumbleweed. In the late afternoon light, the boys leap limbs akimbo, their hair a tufted and glowing mess. The sound of their laughter: bright and gurgling. From the kitchen window where I stand, they seem to be taking flight.
