Blessed Virgin of the Circus- 7.

LaShawn fiddled with his new electronic tablet. Secretly, deliciously. He’d grown up with everything he needed but that chunk of years when he was flying free in the artist’s life were, of course, leaner. He’d been spending time enthusiastically downloading books. David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Chinua Achebe. Catching up on some of the classics that he’d missed. Also fitness technique and safety manuals. Some business reading. Stored conveniently in one place. Most of the other carnies weren’t so with the times. A lot of his employees barely had smartphones.

One of the strays wandered onto his entrance ramp to feed from the food bowl. “Hey there, big guy.” It was an older, heavier longhair with orange stripes. LaShawn sank into scrolling through a book about conflict management, NLP and sales. The hum of the refrigerator and lights sang him in and out of waking eventually. The feline wandered in through the cracked door and hopped up on the bed, subsequently curling into a furball. The purring lulled, and unconscious, LaShawn pressed the power on/off button on his tablet. Drifting off onto his pillow softly, the man’s fingers came to rest near the title of the manufacturers: Mary Ann Enterprises.

**

LaShawn dreamt that he was in one of those old black-and-white numbers about a crime. Of course, he’d never seen a black actor as the leading guy when he’d seen those as a kid, not until Poitier. He wore a dapper suit and most of the other people in the dream seemed to be in shades of sepia, though he himself was in much sharper colors. But sometimes the lens would pan out and he’d see himself from a distance, and he’d be sepia, too. For some part of the dream they seemed to be near a waterfront, and LaShawn was trying to determine the details of a crime. In another scene, everyone looked as they had before, but had fangs and began snarling at him, their words morphing into cottonball-mouthed gibberish. His hair was in a slicked ponytail, and when he reached up for his fedora, the brim started disintegrating. He reached for his detective’s badge at one point and pulled out a piece of leather with bottlecaps attached to it, as though a child had made it.

Then it became the same dream that would haunt him typically at the beginning of a run. The crowds awful, his employees mutinous. Sacrificing his equality to the others for status. There had been no question in waking life of this but in DreamWorld it was always held up to the light. Scoffs and ignored orders or suggestions from management. Huge-liability accidents. Death. Pandemic disease in camp. Sometimes there were zombies, which he expected to laugh at but which always terrified him in the dream.

He speedwalked down the midway, away from the carnival lights, then began a light trot out of fear that the mob would follow him. Trying not to look panicked. He pulled his coat close around him. For some reason it was the same one he had been wearing in the waterfront scene, but he was wearing moderately-priced athletic shoes. The carnival lights twinkled faintly behind him, getting dimmer and dimmer with each few steps. He was still fearful, but relief began to take hold slowly.

And then he saw her. Long, smoothly formed, gorgeous dreadlocks, peeking out of her headwrap. The lapis cloak, appearing to be fancy sari-style, with the golden hem. Deep chocolate skin and round face, like some of the West Indian grandmothers he had met through his schoolmates. He beheld a cup in her left hand. And slowly, from the folds of her cloak, she drew a sword more blinding than the sun.