Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 41

This is issue Forty (Extraordinary) One of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet which is being published in June of 2020 and is being sent out free to subscribers as a bonus to add joy to this daily more complicated world. (Contributors were paid the usual rates.)

Readers who’d like to support the zine are encouraged to subscribe, mais oui, but also to donate to Color of Change, buy books through Black-owned bookstores such as Frugal Bookstore, and bookstores damaged or closed in the civil unrest as we try and change our world, including DreamHaven, Uncle Hugo’s, Magers & Quinn and Moon Palace.

Made by

Gavin J. Grant

& Kelly Link.

Proofreader: Jenny Terpsichore Abeles.

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet issue number 41, June 2020. ISSN 1544-7782. Ebook ISBN: 9781618731685.

LCRW is (usually) published in June and November by Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027 · smallbeerpress@gmail.com · smallbeerpress.com/lcrw. twitter.com/smallbeerpress · Paper edition printed at Paradise Copies (paradisecopies.com · 413-585-0414). Print subscriptions: $20/4 issues (see page 30 of the print edition for options). Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions are available through EBSCO. Dear Print Subscribers, please continue to email your old and new addresses to us at info@smallbeerpress.com. Thank you! LCRW is available as a DRM-free ebook through weightlessbooks.com, &c.

Contents © 2020 the authors. All rights reserved.

Cover illustration Mirrie in the Sea Storm © 2020 by Vicky Yuh (vickyuh.com).

Thank you authors, artists, and readers.

In reasons to celebrate

— an LCRW story will be reprinted in the Best American Short Stories.

— Laurie J. Marks’s Elemental Logic series was on the Otherwise Honor List.

— Sarah Pinsker’s collection Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea: Stories won the Philip K. Dick Award and is a Locus Award finalist.

— John Crowley’s collection And Go Like This: Stories is a Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award finalist.

— Margo Lanagan and Kathleen Jennings’s chapbook Stray Bats is an Aurealis Award finalist.

Please send submissions (we are always especially seeking weird and interesting work from women writers and writers of color), guideline requests, &c. to the address above.

No Justice: No Peace.

Magicians & Grotesques

Rachel Ayers

The boy was not my first encounter with death, but I did not expect him to haunt me as he did.

He lay pale and cold against the dew-damp grass. I remembered him from earlier that evening, when he’d been lively, taking in every inch of our circus. Now his eyes stared blindly up at overhanging black branches. His towhead blond hair, light as snow, curled against his neck. His throat had been cut, and now only a raw red wound was visible below his chin. He had been fifteen, maybe sixteen.

We stood in a ring around him, huddled together: the fat man, the strong woman, the dwarf, the magician’s assistant, the tightrope walkers, the jugglers, the animal trainers. Now the boy was the freak show and we the spectators.

I held Sydney’s hand, in the dark, where no one could see it. He was warmth on a cold night, though he was a foot shorter than me. On my other side, Comfort stood, a pillar against the darkness.

Shit, said Dougal, and spat on the ground beside the dead boy.

I felt Comfort wince. I leaned my head on her shoulder, pulled Sydney closer on my other side, and he swayed nearer, too shocked to resist.

Dougal glared around at us, his face contorted hideously in the half-light of the moon. What are you all looking at? he snapped.

Grace and Hannah, the twins, took a step back as though he’d whipped them—they’d had the bad luck to fall directly under his gaze.

Get moving, he said. Get away from here. Pack your things. We got to get out of here.

We vanished like a trick in the dark. Sydney dropped my hand and disappeared, too short to track in the crowd of acrobats and tumblers. Comfort stayed with me a moment longer, but then she broke away, too. Her absence left me cold.

The shiver along my skin wasn’t from the night air. I saw him when I turned toward the train, trailing behind the others. He was a flickering ghostlight that cast no illumination.

He was startled, his hands held out in front of him in entreaty.

The dead want so fiercely when they linger. Whatever connection holds them here, they burn with it more than the living ever want anything.

He had been about my brother’s age. A young man, more than a boy, but death robbed them both of their maturity. I could still feel him watching me as I hurried away. John, I thought, or prayed. I missed him no less than I ever had. For all the spirits I had seen, John had never appeared to me.

In our tent, I packed clothes, wands, hats, throwing them into a trunk to secure them against the movement of the train. I didn’t know where William was, and for the moment, I didn’t care. I threw cards and coins and scarves into their boxes, my hands shaking. We should have had more time to pack neatly and get everything loaded onto the train.

What’s going on?

I jumped when William appeared at the door of our tent, reeling with drink.

Dougal says we’ve got to pack, we’re leaving, I said. My voice shook. I hated when he drank, when he was impotent and angry.

He came closer, looming over me.

His breath was hot against my ear. We have time, he said. He grabbed my hand and held it against his trousers. The last thing I wanted. I closed my eyes and pressed against him. He was flaccid, but he clawed at me with one hand, shucking trousers with the other, my hand still clenched in his, and I found his cock and gripped it, stroking the way he liked until he had his tiff, grunting against my shoulder.

Aww, Jilly, he panted. You always know what to do.

I waited until he heaved himself away. He crashed into one of the benches lining our tent, tipsy with wine. I wiped my hand on my skirt.

The dead boy watched from the entrance to the tent, head tilted to one side, either in curiosity or because his neck had been cut.

Go on to bed, I offered. I’ll pack.

William pointed a finger at me, grinning, and went reeling through the dead boy.

I packed our things, ignoring the towhead boy, without care for where they landed in trunks. By the time the grinders made it to me, the ghost had faded, and I helped haul the trunks to the train, letting the others pack the benches and drop the tent.

The train moved out before the police arrived.

The Golden Age of the circus had slipped away from us almost before we’d known it was upon us; in spite of our efforts to maintain the glamour and mystery of the art, we were as likely to be treated as vagrants and thieves as respectable citizens.

In my mind’s eye, the dead boy traipsed through the carnival, always around the corner ahead of me, a phantom wisp, leading me around and around the simple circle of the circus to the calliope music.

I wished him peace.

I did not know he would follow me.

Our next venue was a small town in Oklahoma. The grass was thirsty brown and crackled underfoot as we went about our jobs. The tents went up overnight, a magic trick for those who didn’t have to do the work of it. In the morning, curious boys cut class to come and see what was happening.

I amused them with card tricks, coin vanishes, and a coy smile, inviting them to come see the clowns, freaks, and elephants that evening. That was a slight exaggeration; there was only one elephant. But there were two on our poster, in perfect balance on their giant red and gold balls, twining their trunks around a buxom blonde with come-hither blue eyes.

Is she in the show? one of the boys asked me, a tall, thin kid with pale skin and freckles. He pointed at the blonde.

What, I’m not pretty enough for you? I teased. I was not quite so lovely as our painted mascot, with my own dark hair and a nose too large for my face. And I was too skinny, without much in the way of breasts.

The boy glanced at me, then smiled shyly. You’re nice, he said.

I laughed, tossed a coin in the air, and made it disappear, showing him my empty hand. He looked impressed—small town.

Come back tonight for the show and see some real magic, I urged him, and he took his friend, a taller, freckled boy, back toward Main Street and school.

In the afternoon a scowling man in a minister’s crisp white collar came to glare at us. He read the sign carefully, glaring at me as I practiced card tricks.

Good clean family fun, I assured him.

I saw the ghost of the boy, standing just over the minister’s shoulder.

My face must have been a mask of shock, for the minister frowned in puzzlement, and he turned to see what I had caught my attention.

Of course he saw nothing. Very amusing.

He went on his way. I hoped it would not lead to trouble. The ghost was gone now, but I was still shaken. I had never seen a ghost so far from the place he had died.

I hoped his family had found the body. I hoped they did not have unanswered questions, but I knew that was a foolish hope. He’d been no more than a child—any death at that age was a labyrinth of unanswered questions. I knew it well.

I flubbed a coin toss. Fortunately, there was no one watching.

The shows were almost perfect that night. Attendance was high, crowds in every tent. William drank only cheap dandelion wine, so he was cheerful and precise during our tricks. The twister and the trunk suspension went well for the first showing, and the bit with the dove and the card sleight-of-hand, always popular with the children, went smoothly.

In the last show there was a snag in the trunk suspension and for a long moment I thought I was going to need him to untie me. I closed my eyes and thought of how angry he would be—and this late, with this much wine in him, I did not want that. A slow breath out, an extra twist of my wrist against rope that suddenly seemed cuttingly sharp . . . and I was free.

I saw in his expression that he’d started to wonder, counting out the seconds before I rapped softly at the back of the trunk to give him the signal, but he played it off as merely an extra suspenseful moment, to the cheers of the crowd.

By the time the last stragglers cleared out of the midway, I was exhausted. I watched Linus, Inch, and Sydney sweep the last few visitors toward the entry gate. Inch gave me a wave and his usual sedate smile; Linus and Sydney, in their clown costumes, made lewd gestures until I signaled them back with a rather unladylike gesture of my own. They howled with laughter and went on their way.

I ate a dinner of popped corn drizzled with caramel and watched the last of the crowd disperse.

A flash of movement inside the grounds caught my eye: a child, quick and lithe. Hair pale as moonlight. I followed him around the corner, intent on shooing him out with the rest of the public, but then recognized the ghost.

He disappeared into another alley made all of the striped tent fabric that billowed in the cooling night breeze.

I meant to call out to him but my throat closed around the words. I quickened my pace, wondering at my own actions; I had never chased a ghost before.

I ran, and went tumbling into another body.

Jill? Sydney asked me, picking himself up as I did the same.

So sorry, Sydney. There was no sign now of the towhead boy. I brushed dirt and straw off my hands and knees.

Sydney looked distracted; there was still white grease streaked around his neck and ears. Did you see . . . His voice trailed off before he could finish the question.

I met his eyes for a moment, searched them. He looked spooked, certainly. Maybe, I said, and he nodded, then turned and limped away between the tents, whistling a defiantly jaunty tune.

We were underway to St. Louis, the car rocking underfoot, before I got to my bed. William growled and shoved me away, drunk and belligerent and not fully awake. I sighed, drew my thickly knitted wool sweater on over my nightgown, and made my way out of our bunk and down to Comfort and Inch’s compartment, my bare feet cool on the metal walk that linked one car to the next.

The cars were organized by occupation, not by any particular fondness of the occupants for each other. The strongman and strongwoman of Windsor Fete Circus had always bunked together, so Comfort and Inch slept in the same bunk, though they were not married.

There was a game of faro going when I got there. Grace and Hannah, literally