The light shimmying down from above the trapeze paints her body lavender. Poppy sleeps like a corpse: easy, thoughtless, on her back with her arms rigid by her sides. Her still face doesn’t flinch as the beams crisscross and flicker ahead. Microphone static pours in through the pockets – crawls through the bleachers, headbutts past the guards, gnaws its way into the gummy little world we call our own. A check and a cough, a check and a cough. Milk is far off, alien-bright, fellating the microphone and himself in one glorious ouroboros of a gesture. Come one, come all.

Glamor is the name of the game. If you dance, you must waltz: it doesn’t matter if you’re the clown inflated huge by prop-shoes and patchwork pants and forever-tangled smears of orange synthetic hair, or if you’re one of the beauties, choked skinny by skeletal corsets, glossed by makeup like a painting post-sell. If you sing, you must belt: it doesn’t matter if you’re the audience chattering and blabbering and drooling and mewling, or if you’re one of the singers with shaking hands coiled around a steel mic. If you are on stage, for seconds or hours, if anybody can see you, you must glow beneath their eyes, come alive, transmogrify – perform.

Our world is a sticky, infected post-apocalypse: popcorn crumb fossilizations and slushee oil spills and half-eaten hot dog buns thrown to the wind. Men laugh loud, their mouths blown amber by beer and bad teeth. Women clutch their purses. Women lean over the booths, giggle all the right ways, ask how much for another go – they want the big one, the dangling lilac elephant crucified against the boards by wires and sashes. And we ready the ball, reset the pins. It’s not a crime to want the big one.

Poppy wakes up, and it never ceases to be a shock: entering this new dimension, this world blasted with hyper-detail, every scent charged to tickle every nerve, every taste settling heavy-meaty-sweet on your tongue, every shape and color and sort of person trickling past like we’ve received a summons. She looks around. She blinks and blinks until the blinding electricity melts down, simmers cool. Then her face is bland and thoughtless again, and she’s thanking me for keeping watch of the dogs while she rested.

Ginkgo is the little one. He’s bones and hair wrapped around a twitch. His eyes are huge, perfect blobs of milk chocolate. They swish and rattle inside his tiny head. Tall ears crown that wobbly cranium and rotate incessantly at the first thought of harm – his tail, ramrod straight, locked and loaded, does not wag. He’s a rottweiler dysphoric in a chihuahua’s body. He watches and watches and watches. Hardly blinks. Thinks about barking. Doesn’t.

Sigmund is the smartest: you can’t tell until he’s on the course, though, running like a brilliant thoroughbred, tearing up the dirt in the pit or parading his heavy paws against the black world of the stage. He shoots through the barrels and the loops and the seesaws, immune to gravity, immune to defiance, immune to reluctance. He just goes. His coarse hair is thick as it orbits around his stout, strong body. It attracts all the dust and grime to lick at his ramshackle spots and stripes. His face, sort of small and dumb against his hunk of a fuzzy body, peeks through a frame of red-brown freckles. Poppy says he’s part corgi, part heeler, part this, and part that. They fuse unsteadily like a bad bomb. His legs, short, fight against his weight, heavy, and the rest of him – tail, joints, belly, fluff – aren’t happy, either. But his brain doesn’t mind. His brain is quiet, I think, except for when it explodes, rocketing towards the next obstacle.

Marble is the only purebred; the only certain. Every night before Poppy’s act, Milk promises that these are not special dogs, not custom-ordered, not rigorously raised. They were simply found and adopted, and worked and worked until stones caught sight of spark, until the magic happened. He has a whole spiel about how greatness can rise up from anybody. This is true for Ginkgo and Sigmund, who maybe aren’t meant to perform as well as they are, but Marble is the exception. He’s an irish wolfhound: giant, unfathomable things. You really need to see one. Tall, strange, a bad drawing that moaned and creaked as it hunkered off the page – scraggly hair leaks off his skinny frame, and a long head with black eyes awaits the sound of the next command, the crunch of the next treat. He’s not so spectacular at all the work, the juggling and balancing and twisting and running. But his existence is spectacle – tremendous.

Unfortunately, we are all madly in love with the spectacle.

 ♤

We had this farm when I was a kid. I want to tell you it’s on a different planet, but really, it’s in this far-back stretch of Iowa, where corn dances ominous in the dark and dogs go missing and old sofas breathing bug-beds are left on the sides of yard-sale ravaged streets. We were miles away from everything. I would fall asleep after climbing in the backseat of the car and wake up to realize we were still rumbling and jangling down an identical stripe of crop-kissed road. I was home-schooled, we didn’t have television; I was certifiably alien, a tiny soul folded tight in the very bottom of a bomb-shelter body. I only left home for the county fair.

Every year, I prepared for that very moment. I fell to my knees and prayed over the patches of pumpkins and tomatoes, the blobs of squash staining the garden, the playful roots, the flowering bushes. I sat in the belly of a honeysuckle patch and sucked fiendishly at the shy blossoms, counting the sweet, counting the sour. If more of the honey went down smooth, I’d be destined for a ribbon. If the batch was bad, I’d be certain to lose. I ran my palms over the begging mouths of rosebuds, savoring the press of the thorn. The sting as blood traced the pink-yellow-perfect bushels of imploding petals. I slept in the dirt face-down for good luck on the harvest, on my side for good luck on the animals, and on my back for good luck on mother’s jars of pressed jams, her endless swatches of quilts. I was always sleeping.

Until the fair came and we’d pack everything in those grand crates and drive and drive and drive, terrorizing the dust with our tires, letting the farm recede into a tiny haze against the penny-scented sky. There, we’d walk through the labyrinths, buy cardboard boxes wet and sagging with the weight of little puppies, poke at garlic fries and sip cinnamon milkshakes, watch the pageant girls wiggle in their heels, feel the grooves of tractor parts beneath our fingers. People would laugh and holler and smile, talk in their rowdy voices, offer a hand. Everybody reeked of the earth, everybody’s teeth glittered with shards of greasy food, everybody danced with reckless, dirty boots. Everybody was so beautiful, cooked beneath a perfect sun, wandering aimless in a crowd more densely populated than my hometown.

I’d go with my dad to stand in front of the judges, offering our sacrifices, tomatoes as red and mystical as rubies, pumpkins as fat and terrible as beasts, gourds slinking with their ferns reaching. Mom would be somewhere else, selling the litters of blueberries, peddling the sweet bite of strawberries. Packing away orders in dusty boxes, taking down names for future calls. In the moment, I wouldn’t think of anything but the features on the face ahead: a judge with a nose wriggling to be set free, a judge with more teeth than a horse, a judge with eyelashes dark and rare. So many people. Ooh, aww. They mutter and chant. They hand out blue ribbons.

All I wanted was a blue ribbon.

 ♤

Poppy sneaks on stage, weaves through the giant men wrestling props and the pixies grounded and the bearded women smoking. She waits, cozy in the dark warmth of an unseen stage, until Milk gives his speech about greatness. That man-made thing, as classic as fire, as tools. Synonymous with invention. It can be created, narrowed down, pulled from nothing and shaped into a blazing, beautiful something – like finding the diamond in the rough, the dog inside the wolf.

Milk applauds and his crowd mirrors him. Poppy nods, wordlessly accepting the waves of attention as they crash against her and try to drag her down. A raise of the left hand. Gingko runs in, a streak against dark, light chasing him, light brought about by his existence. One half of the stage is now a twinkling, glimmering world with plastic puzzles and hose-water tubs and ropes thicker than Ginkgo's torso. Poppy swipes her right hand, and so appears Sigmund: bolting across the world, light dashes and slices to keep up with his pace. Hoops atop hills, beams folding and sliding, towers begging to be climbed.

Poppy crumbles. Sinks to her knees. Keeps her head down.

The beast runs up from behind her and just when you think he plans to slam his paws against the grace of her back does he take a leap, sucking in all the air from the room, and he practically floats – a heavy, dense being, warring with physics. No telling where he’ll land until he skids to a stop mere yards away from the lowest branch of the audience. Little kids scramble for their mother’s arms and squeal.

He looks like a horse and moves like a dream. Poppy remains in the middle, an unconquerable pillar, but if you keep your eyes on her, you can catch every little flicker of her pulse, the throw of her hand, the command of her voice. Marble takes Ginkgo’s side and herds him to the seesaw, where they both take their places at opposite ends. Ginkgo cuts through the air quickly once Marble’s weight slams down his side; above them is a brand new platform, now perfectly level with Gingko, and he runs to complete his next objective, where Poppy will slip a peanut butter slab into his panting mouth.

Poppy is the sun. This act orbits her. Gingko will run around in circles, hitting this button here and performing this task there, before finding his way back to her. Marble will circle her, doing the tricks she demands, never straying far. Sigmund runs the widest loop, a Pluto in motion: his hoops fence the entire act, his swimming segments the blue shade of comets. Curling platforms ensure that every dog can find its way to her, no matter which level, no matter where they are; every path leads back to Poppy, her scent like heaven, her hands like deliverance. Milk often complains that the set requires too much effort – he must stand in the center, in the oblivion-black with only one light on him, spitting cinematic speeches to distract the audience from the sound of the platforms going up and the boards clicking complete and the hoops rising high. But this is what kids like. Dogs and wonder. I think everybody likes it. Poppy’s act embodies the entire circus. Absurd, maximalist. Everywhere you look: a brand new happening.

The big finish involves Sigmund and Ginkgo zigzagging back and forth around Poppy while Marble slowly rises, a King Kong in his own right, finding purchase on his huge back paws and tilting his head back higher and higher, until his immense height swallows Poppy entirely – and when the dog falls back down to his four legs, Poppy is gone. Eaten alive. Descended into a hidden compartment, of course, but one second she was here, and now she’s not, and no matter how the bleachers curve or the audience peers, there’s no way to see in through the strands of the trick. She has disappeared.

The music begins to clash and stumble, a comical mishmash of trumpets wheezing and drums clattering. The dogs look around, baffled. That part – I’m never sure how she got them to do that. One big, final note from the band sends the dogs running off. Gingko first, Sigmund second, and Marble at the back. Everybody claps, because of course they do.

Poppy doesn’t say a word. On or off stage. Maybe she should. There’s lots of people to introduce herself to, lots of people to thank. She passes the crowds who love her and the workers who serve her, eyes down, mouth flat. She meets with the dogs in the little side-spot off the stage that she’s designated for them and wraps her trembling arms around each of their necks, gasps into the meat of them.

I don’t know when I took it upon myself to bring all the dogs a giant bowl of fresh, cold water, but I’ve been doing it since Marble was a baby. I’ve been doing it since I first looked at Poppy and started thinking: what a show.

 ♤

I took up puppetry one year after a particularly bad loss. Normally we walk away with some kind of ribbon stamped against our chest or trophy heaving in our hands, but we left with nothing. Mom hardly sold anything, either. All we did for the entire three-day span was dizzy ourselves on neon soda and let stickiness consume our skin and gossip with strangers we’d never see again. Dad was charging ahead, cutting through crowds mercilessly. He wanted to slam the doors to the truck and not speak for hours. Mom and I lagged behind him, warmed by the energy, terrified by the gravity.

Everything was gunshots with him: a bang-pow into oblivion. When we fished together, he snapped the rod through the air in back-breaking jostles, sending the bobber far into enemy territory. When he’d get bored, he’d punish the worms, letting them squirm and wriggle atop his palm like failed clones of his fingers. While we beat the dough into bread, he sent flour exploding across the room, loose atoms of wheat. His knuckles shifted white with exertion. His face blurred pink with sweat. Whenever the farm dogs dared to barrel into his lap, he’d cuff their ears and hook their collars and pinch their tails, threatening the soft flow of their belly with his devilish nails.

Dad wasn’t gentle. I think we both slowly realized that, hovering behind him, watching the crypts of his shoulders heave his terrible weight forward. We had hardly ever seen him angry. Not ever before. But if it was anything worse than his tenderness – his cheap imitation of the thing – we had something to fear.

So Mom lingered. Grabbed my hand. Let me meander through the stalls we were ordered to rush past. I pet a goat; its dull, dark eyes blinking up at me, so lovely.

We found a vendor that sold beautiful handcrafted dolls and puppets. The sweet little faces poked out through hair made of yarn. Blue eyes buzzed against cream paint. Plastic hands cradled air. Clusters of dolls nestled together in makeshift nests atop beds of spare clothes and extra fabric.

There was a weighty, wooden ventriloquist’s dummy front and center at the vendor’s table. His head lulled off his shoulders, his square mouth cracked open in a waiting smile. He leaned against the old steel box filled with quarters and cigarettes.

“I’d rather not take this one home with me,” the woman behind the counter was a flash of pure pink. Dripping in sweat, triggered by nerves and heat alike, she kept twitching and stammering and failing to will herself out of existence. “How about a final day sale?”

Mom just wanted to buy something for me, wanted to give my shaky hands something to toy with on the tense drive home. When I didn’t protest, Mom wrangled the herd of loose coins free from her woven purse and exchanged them for the doll.

A fat, strange creature in my hands – like a baby, but uglier – I was so scared of dropping him, of shattering the dense yet fragile architecture that kept him in one piece – so I held on tight.

That summer, I finally had someone to talk to. I stayed in the bathroom for hours, my face contorting in the mirror. It was so easy to forget the sound of my own voice. The lilt of certain words, the droop of consonants. I could say anything. I said every word I knew. The Perpetually Unnamed Puppet – I took to calling him Pup long before I fell in love with the dog trainer – mimed them until my voice sounded more like his than my own.

So many performers say I was never lonely again after they discovered their craft. But that wasn’t the truth. Maybe I was more lonely than ever. I finally understood what I was missing out on: the back and forth, the free-fall swing of a stimulating conversation, the introduction to a person not of my own invention, making acquaintance with their rare little histories and preferences. But I was never silent again. I kept inventing new voices, new characters. There are an unfathomable amount of words in any given language. If I ever get tired of this, I’ll flee the country and find someone new to be in a brand new somewhere.

 ♤

Now, the puppets are higher maintenance than me. They’re divas: don’t let moisture collect in their boxes, don’t let dust collect on their hairs. Milk conceives a brand new character, commissions an artist to twist life out of felt and corduroy, tells me what to say. I don’t know if he writes the scripts, but whoever does has a way of making the audience crumble into laughter.

I don’t write the jokes. Of course I don’t. I’m not funny – I’m barely handsome enough to stand up there, bathed in fluorescents, the parasitic twin of an orange mop of fluff. But I work hard to ace the execution. I watch a lot of movies. It’s all I do once the lights go out, the tents fold up. I like studying people. When you spend your entire life without them, they become delicious exhibitions: aliens worth studying. Sometimes, when I’m insane with curiosity, I can’t help but imagine dissecting them, unveiling them. But for now, I’m a traveling ventriloquist with Milk’s Myriad of Majesty – and I share my act with Oslo, the orange creature composed of toddler scribbles and endless hair, Turnblad, the blind bat who makes terrible assumptions about the audience, and Pinkie, the girlish starlet hoping to impress Milk. I know their voices. The plush swarm of their insides. I lock them in dark boxes at the end of every night. So this is love.

I’m mostly embarrassed by what I do on stage. I try not to let Poppy see. By comparison, Poppy’s act is like a god weaving threads of life together until anatomy blooms, like a god blessing the audience with sparks of thought and inspiration and awe. Poppy herself is like a god: her blank stare is infinite, her freckle count is intangible, her undereyes are the ghostly purple of a sprawling galaxy. Her hands are strong and square. Her voice is heavy like a quilt settling over you, a time-defying thing, years of love and dust and memory and more written in every teddy-bear-patch.

I follow Poppy through the animal enclosure after the show. She needs to say goodnight to everyone; she’s afraid if she doesn’t, no one else will. The trapeze girl’s yappy little dog spiraling into insanity; the traveling entourage of barn cats splitting mice to share; the horses nipping apples into nonexistence; the petting zoo goats hate-fucking. She stands outside their makeshift pens, sure to be unfolded and destroyed come tomorrow, and watches their twitches and savors their yowls. She nods, then bows, straight-spined and imperial. The respect she has for these creatures is untranslatable – if she could find the words to tell me, I still don’t know if I’d understand.

“This is what my entire childhood smelled like,” I tell her. “This rich, impenetrable smell of shit and life.”

She thinks for a long moment. She never says anything without thinking: “Good smell.”

Poppy and I started sharing a motorhome six months back. She had roommates – the sword-swallowing slut, the ticket-taking girls – but I guess they all hated the dog hair and the bone-sucking and the weirdness. It was better for Poppy and I to share; in recent months, we had grown popular enough to justify fighting for our own individual homes, and Milk was grateful we hadn’t, so we certainly could do whatever we pleased. Gingko and Marble share a bunk, curled up together like an immoral experiment, enemies sewn together at the very seams. My puppets, imprisoned in their suitcases, stay strapped to the top bunk above them.

Sigmund coils around the back of Poppy’s knees while she sleeps, dead-silent, on her left side. I drive the van at night with the curtains drawn and the radio purring silvery, invisible jazz to keep everybody lulled. I nap periodically throughout the day, practicing my act only when Milk suggests I should, eating fair food like a vulture, going days without seeing myself in a mirror. Eventually, you learn your mouth and its sounds and its portals and its teeth so perfectly, you don’t need to watch it anymore.

Love buzzes between Poppy and I. At least I think it does. A jewel of curiosity is being weighed in her palms, I can tell – sometimes, when she looks at me, she’s thinking, and thinking hard, the type of thinking she does before saying one of those brilliant things she says. But instead she turns up the jazz on the radio or throws the ball for Sigmund or starts gnawing on her fingernails. The words are trapped: they feel odd and terrifying, a limb long asleep in her heart-brain-throat.

We kissed once. I’ve never told anybody this. It was at this year’s convention of oddities. Calves flickered past, gentle leads around their two necks; conjoined twins waited in line for butter-glossed pretzels dazzling with salt, dough intertwined with itself in the same fashion their torsos were; men with tattooed skulls and eyelids and palms and lips passed around a bottle of blue raspberry liquor, chanting it don’t burn it don’t burn it don’t burn!; everything you couldn’t imagine. Milk walked around the place, pimp-proud: he knew every single person there, their insides and out. How’s the extra kidney treating you? How’s the memory loss? He shook a million hands, kissed a million babies. He was beaming and sweating and slurring by the end of the night, disgusting and full-bellied, a dragon warming a nest of gold.

“Have I got a present for you,” he said to Poppy, offering her his ring-stacked hand. She stared at it. He laughed, revoking it, playing it off. Naturally, I was orbiting around her, so when she began to follow Milk through the carousel of side-characters, I followed as well. We passed the mirror house and the dirty port-a-potties and the pickle flavored cotton candy and the jugglers sending fire cartwheeling through the dim blue sky and the teenage boys strangling their hard-ons at the sight of women dissected by huge steel piercings.

At the very rim of the world where parking lot transformed into pier, a long white block saddled to a greasy truck shielded our eyes from the newly wilting sun. It radiated a low, heavy sound: cosmic noise. Water vaguely sloshed within. Everything was on the verge of creaking and moaning and crying. The car, the piers, the men with red-speckled eyes.

Milk guided Poppy to a fragile ladder braided up the side of the tank. He kept his hands floating around her just in case she fell – even when he’s giddy and drunken, you can’t hate the guy. Some kind of purity shines through him like a protective clause hidden in a bankrupt heart.

When she reached the top of the ladder, Poppy’s entire body froze. From behind, I watched her shoulders lock in place like a gun jamming, her head ram itself to the farthest position away from her neck, her hands fall to her side in trembling fists.

She let out a shaky breath. She was roadkill trampled atop tar. A death slow and horrid. The scream trickled out of her mouth like warm blood from a wound and it ricocheted endlessly through the one-dimensional dark surrounding us. An inhale – another scream – she couldn’t control herself.

The man in charge swooped in beside her and grabbed her leg, but in an instant, Poppy was upon him, snatching the skin off his face, pulling his hair, kicking and stomping and hating with undiluted rage. Rabid and crazed. Her weight forced him onto his back and she kept the leverage in her favor as she tortured his eyeballs with the blunt of her fingernails and danced on his stomach with her dirt-slick boots.

Milk dragged her off of him by her armpits. He dropped her on the ground unceremoniously; in a whisper, he asked if she was alright. An animalistic howl split through her poor jaw. He shook his head and returned to the man. He laid there, blood sprouting from the claw marks atop his brows, bruises forming in the crevices beneath his cheeks.

Milk dropped to his knees, delivered a hushed yet urgent monologue, slipped money in the man’s pocket and a flask in the man’s mouth, and just like that, the man did not argue or scream or fight, he simply gathered his men back into his truck and bled without another word.

When Milk walked back to us, he was tired; a dejected dad, disappointed.

“How could you?” Poppy breathed, her sobs eating her alive, cannibalistic.

“I thought it would make you happy,” he confessed. “I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

He was genuinely sorry. But Poppy was inconsolable. She sprinted through the patches of parked cars and the paths of weary tourists. We heard her thump down the ancient staircase that connected the lower levels of the beach to civilization.

“Make sure she knows I didn’t orchestrate this,” Milk sighed. “I don’t want her hating me for the rest of her life.”

I hadn’t even seen what had upset her so much; I hadn’t even told Milk that I planned to chase after her, but he knew me better than anyone once Poppy was out of the picture. I nodded and darted after her. It took a while to find her. I meandered through the cool sand and ducked beneath the pier’s underbelly of beams and boards. I walked and walked and walked.

I found Poppy huddled into a tiny knot, crying soundlessly, watching the ocean with tear-mangled eyes.

“It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen,” she told me as I approached her. She didn’t need to think about these words. They were as natural as fact. “The majesty of it took my breath away. Every curve of its body, the slope of its great fin, the perfect blackness of its black and the perfect whiteness of its white. It was so big and beautiful and impossible. Completely different from the pictures.”

“An orca?”

“A prisoner. Trapped. Imagine a worse hell than solitary confinement, worse than being locked in a closet without enough room to spread your arms or legs and only barely enough air to breathe.”

“I can’t.”

“You can’t,” she whimpered. She covered her face with her hands. “Why are human beings so evil? It needs to be free. It needs the ocean, and its friends, the things it had before we scooped it up and stowed it away. Did you know orcas commit suicide when they’re depressed? They bash their skulls against the walls of the enclosure until a brain-bleed leaks their soul back to God. They beach themselves on purpose, showing the entire audience that fragile meat of their belly, suffocating in a strange alien world because it’s preferable to surviving in their attempt at an imitation of your own. They are beautiful and complex and capable of such terrible, intricate thought – if they can suffer, they can feel joy. Why do they need to die for us to realize this?”

That was the most I had ever seen Poppy speak. All of it came muffled through the slivers of her palms pressed against her eyes. I didn’t know what to say. I reached for one of her hands and held it delicately in my lap. She let it flop loose, fingers uncurling. I dappled small kisses against her palms. She coughed and sputtered until the tension ripped out of her. With a deep sniff, she concluded her crying; she turned to look at me, face like the moon.

“Will you live with me?”

“What?”

“Everybody’s leaving me. I don’t do well alone. I need somebody with me.”

“You’re not alone,” I reminded her. “You have the dogs.”

“Of course I have the dogs. But that’s different. I’m still alone. Think about being in a room with your mother. How lonely that must feel. How, even though you love her, there’s still certain things you can’t say to her, certain things she can’t say to you. You’re half her. She’s half you. Sometimes you need somebody entirely new,” she held her hands out as if she was cradling the thought, a precious thing. “My dogs are my babies. I keep them safe and love them as best as I can. But I need somebody impartial. Separate from me. Somebody new. To keep me safe and watch me cry and love me when I’m being crazy.”

“Love you?”

She wasn’t looking at me. She was locked onto the gentle movement of the ocean, the way the tides folded and parted. Ebb and flow. Give and take. Joy and suffering. Love and loss.

“Yes.” She decided. “Love me.”

“Okay,” I nodded. “Okay, I’ll love you.”

Poppy turned back to me, her eyes closed, her face soft. I knew what I was supposed to do. I kissed her; our atoms barely touched. Artificially sweet from the candies, nostalgic from the tears: she tasted like innocence. At that moment, I could imagine marrying her. I had never loved somebody like that ever before. I didn’t even know I was allowed to love her until she gave me permission.

 ♤

The dogs like it when we pull off to the side of the road and unleash them in an endless green field. The rest of the vans push forward. We’ll catch up to them later. Poppy stretches her legs and lies on the dirt, back flat, prepared to fall asleep without hesitance. The dogs swarm her face. Stampedes of kisses and sniffles cover her skin. I throw the ball comet-quick and they give chase.

“Sometimes I hate my job,” I tell her. “I wish I could be a vigilante creeping up and down the roads as I pleased, doing whatever, never speaking to anybody except you and the dogs.”

“I’ll go with you.” She answers calmly, eyes still closed, sun painting her face.

“I’d never have to pretend I’m funny ever again. I’d just be my cranky, intellectual, terrible self, and I wouldn’t have to smile or self-reference anymore. I’d give my puppets to poor kids with a passion and then throw the ones that nobody wants into a river, to curse and haunt local towns for centuries to come. I’d start running and hate myself for it. I’d shave my head. And I’d never recite another one of Milk’s monologues for as long as I live. My words only.”

“You have nice words.”

“You’re lucky your act doesn’t involve speeches and ceremonies and all of that,” I groan. “He’d probably make you say so many terrible things.”

“He couldn’t make me say anything.”

“I know, I know. Not a soul could knock you off your perch, I trust. But think about it. He’d probably try.”

She perks up and peers at me through the veil of her eyelashes, grinning with an uncharacteristic deviance. Poppy hardly ever emotes; every display is a show.

“You know I’m the one who writes his speeches, right?”

“You’re lying.”

“This place was a mess before I showed up. Dog-trainer, ghost-writer, why not…”

“There’s no way. You couldn’t have orchestrated his whole deal. He’s always musing and rambling and gesturing and saying all of these things–”

“My things.” She nods. “My words.”

“How did you come up with all of that?” I started to laugh, baffled. Suddenly, I started thinking about the flow of the language, the waltz of the words. Everything felt different when passed through Poppy’s filter.

She taps the side of her head, “My voice is quiet. My brain is loud.”

“I want to know your brain,” I beg her, “I want to see your brain center-stage. Illuminated. Glowing. I want all of your brain in my hands. I want every memory and thought and preference. I want you.”

Overwhelming myself, I reach out and take her hands in mine. She lets me without a flinch. Her eyes narrow, but her wolfish little grin doesn’t droop.

“You can have me,” she promises. Then, she stiffens: “But don’t ask me to light the lights. Don’t ask me to dance for you. Some of God’s creatures – we’re not meant to perform.”

I open my mouth, feeling a little dumb, trying to articulate that it was all a big metaphor, that I’m drunk on circus-talk, but nothing stumbles free. She raises to her full height, letting me keep her hands in mine until that final second where we need to break away, creation-of-adam-in-reverse.

Poppy turns and chases after the dogs, her bare feet punching the perfect grass like stabs of lightning. Her skin is warm, the color of the sun. She’s swishing and dancing and moving without fear. She is wind as a girl. I love her like an overdose, like a clusterfuck, like dark matter, like everything.

When she trips, the dogs bound atop her, wrestling with her hair, nipping at her knees, dirtying her loose dress with their mud-stamped paws. For a second, I imagine them ripping into her, eating her alive, dog-teeth splitting synapses. It would only be natural. Poppy would love it, laughing all the way, until her head grew dizzy and she took to it with a religious perfection instead, silent and measured, receiving her fate. Instead, the dogs licked her obsessively, coating her in spit and love.

 ♤

My dad killed my mom that night. His rage stormed through him. She was gone in a flash – lightning, bright and quick. I was asleep while he did it.

I wore myself out so quick; I had been practicing in the mirror all night, saying words without moving my mouth, throwing my voice, shifting into girly highs and monsterish lows, pretending to be something I wasn’t, inching desperately closer to a better sound. The doll slept beside me in bed. My face was sore from the joy of overworking it, contorting it into new shapes. Everything about me was tired and high and sparkly, a day of wonder and fear, a day of relief and challenges.

In the morning, I went to their room, wielding Pup at my side. I stood outside the door for God knows how long, practicing under my breath in the voice I hastily invented for the puppet: good morning. Good Morning. GOOD MORNING. Good morning. I could do this, I promised myself. I would make them laugh and smile and gasp and the pain would be tossed out the window, never to be seen again.

I steadied my hand inside Pup. I readied his voice inside my throat. I pushed open the door. The scream that snuck out didn’t belong to me – Pup howled, pure and irrational confusion, the universe tilting. He came to life only to suffer. My two-foot-tall frankenstein.

Nothing has been sane since then.

 ♤

At night, when Poppy pushes Sigmund to the end of the bed so I have room to prance in beside her, I try to imagine how my dad could’ve done such a thing. How he could’ve taken his hands and shaped them into those talons, how he could’ve mocked her shivering mouth by huffing hot air against it. Poppy closes her eyes and sleeps. Sometimes she looks like she’s already dead, and I have to breathe, remind myself – just sleeping, just sleeping.

I look at my hands. They’re hidden in the darkness, but I know them well enough. They’re capable of anything. I’ve brought crowds to tears, made them sputter with deluded laughter, made them slap each other to lessen the absurd joy shocking their systems; I’ve pulled roots from earth, I’ve shook dirt off specimens, arranged petals in perfect order, husked green beans over sinks, counted corn by the rows, cleaned cherry tomatoes with the lick of a shirt. I’ve tamed a wolfhound with the gentlest of touches. I’ve felt the earth of every state of continental America.

I touch Poppy as softly as I can. She shifts and mewls a little, sleepy and wiggly, and searches for me in the black. I give myself to her. It’s the most simple and boring sight in the world: a boy and a girl and a dog, in bed, draped in darkness, not saying a word, not believing in magic, not fearing death, not thinking about stage lights or screaming crowds. Only sleeping.

♤

February 7th, 2025