Read Online The Circus in Winter by Cathy Day - Free Book Online Page B

Verna mourned. She dreamed of the old circus days, longing for the steam locomotive and the romance of cinder, for the sweet promise of escape. Sometimes, she wished it was a hundred years earlier and old Hollenbach was still around to save her. For the time being though, she'd have to make do in a world without sideshows.
Chapter the Last
    How Chicky Bowles Avenged Caesar
and Found His Place in the World
    Â 
    VERNA NAMED her son Charles Bowles, but his teachers insisted on calling him Chuck. In grade school, the kids called him
Up Chuck
and
Num Chuck,
which inevitably led to
Dumb Chuck.
The girls called him
Chuck Chuck Goose
and flapped their arms and honked. The boys called him
Fuck Chuck
and
Chuck Sucks,
until one boy stumbled upon
Chucky,
which started a new theme:
Yucky Chucky, Sucky Chucky, Chuckman, Duckman, Fuckman.
When they ran out of rhymes, they just called him
nigger.
Nothing much rhymed with it—bigger, jigger, digger—so they left the word alone, all by itself.
    Verna hated the name Chuck. She called her son Chicky, because he was such a tiny baby, her little baby chick. But year after year, he stayed small, his body refusing to grow. In fairy tales, Chicky saw others like him: fairies, elves, goblins, gremlins, gnomes, and hobbits. When he was ten, the doctors gave him a name:
achondroplastic
dwarf.
The kids at school would find other words:
Shrimp, Teeny, Tiny, Lucky the Leprechaun, Munchkin, Shorty, Shortstuff, Pee Wee, Pipsqueak, Tattoo, Baby, Itsy Bitsy, Runt, Half-pint, Junior, Mighty Mite,
and
Gary Coleman.
    Over dinner, Verna told her sometime boyfriend Reggie (Chicky's father) about the doctors' diagnosis. Despite Verna's reassurances that Chicky's size wasn't his fault any more than hers, Reggie shoved himself back from the table and slammed out the screen door. Standing in the backyard in the fading summer light, he threw up his arms and screamed, "What do you expect from a family of freak-show niggers?" From the bedroom window, Chicky watched his father sitting in the backyard, smoking cigarettes one after the other, flicking them like fireflies into the air. In the small hours, he heard the screen door squeak, footsteps coming up the stairs. He closed his eyes and waited for his father to come rub his back—sometimes, once in a while, Reggie put Chicky to sleep like this—but he fell asleep waiting. In the morning, Verna awoke to a half-empty closet and her grocery money gone. They cried for a while, then went downstairs to make pancakes.
    Â 
    IN THE TENTH grade, Chicky wrote an essay for school about the history of dwarfdom. All of his findings were true, albeit somewhat monstrous and bizarre. His teacher, Mr. Flowers, suspected the entire paper was fabricated, but because he'd always felt sorry for the little guy, and because he didn't feel like checking Chicky's sources, he decided to "let it slide." Mr. Flowers gave the paper an A and felt better about himself for having done so.
The Pros and Cons of Being a Dwarf
by Charles Bowles
There are many cons to being a dwarf. In ancient times, dwarfs were left outside to die, either from exposure to the cold and heat or from being torn apart by wolves. Sometimes they were sacrificed to the gods so the tribe could get rid of its sins. In some parts of the Orient and South America, small children were captured and placed in small crates—their heads free outside the boxes, their bodies crouched inside. For years, the makers fed the children's mouths and emptied their wastes through small trapdoors. Over time, the children became like root-bound plants. When fully grown, the children were freed and taken away to some faraway land, "found" in the woods by their own makers, who displayed them in freak shows as an ancient race of being never before seen on Earth. Once in ancient Rome, the dwarf population decreased. A ruler who loved to be entertained by dwarfs decreed that a small percentage of newborn children should be deprived of