"Avita, my kitten,” my father would say, twirling a licorice root in that damned bone-white smile of his, “any girl can be beautiful. But it takes a special girl to be as ugly as you.”
On sold-out nights he waxed magnanimous, the heat from hundreds of mouth-breathing patrons making his head swell beyond its usual juglike proportions. Despite its size, there was room for little in those meaty swirls of brain — my mama was allotted a tiny corner, as were my siblings and I, though we all knew our father’s love for us ran only as deep as puddles. Compared to his beloved circus, we were inconsequential.
So when he pried his gaze away from the lusty white lights of the midway to look at my face and purr, “Yes, my angel, what a monster you are!” I swilled his words, drunk on his rare attention.
Every time he said this, it was like hearing it for the first time . . .
I was only a winkling, three or four years old. The sons of our grunts, the migrant workers my father paid in pennies and bitch beer, paraded a group of local kids through our village of parked wagons and took turns boosting one another up to peek through my window.
“Monster,” they whispered, terrified, delighted.
“I saw her eat a live piglet once,” one of the sons curated, the red Texan dirt smeared across his cheeks like a burn. “Held it by the tail and dangled it over her mouth, then chomped its head clean off.”
When I glanced up, they shrieked and ran, laughing and rolling in the yucca.
My father insisted he punished the boys, yelled at the grunts to keep a tighter leash on their little bastards, but that’s cow pie.
He saw the way those boys gawked at me, and a thrill shot through his stomach.
An opportunity.
Alone in the wagon, I climbed onto my sister’s vanity and stared at the girl in the mirror. I lit a lamp, I looked, and I saw —
I saw the freckles of blood, dried into blackened scabs where barbed feathers grew from my shoulders and back. Mama plucked them out of me on Sundays like I was roast chicken dinner. A fresh garden of feathers had already started nosing up through my skin, which meant that tonight when I curled up in bed, my skin would itch like I had the scabies.
I saw the teeth that burst from my oddly formed mouth — two rows of black triangular razors, fragile as glass. A bearded lizard’s smile.
I saw a pair of eyes that blinked when I blinked — no pupils, no color, not even when the sunshine hit them. Just holes, deep and dark as abandoned gold mines, hauntingly empty, like you might trip and fall into them if you stared too long.
I saw my beak.
Home was the Family Fortuna, traveling circus and midway, the pinnacle of tented spectacle in the southwestern states of the land of the free. And my father was Papa Fortuna, owner, ringmaster, and asshole extraordinaire.
Being raised in a circus was a very particular kind of life. By the time I could toddle, I’d seen stranger things than most adults could fathom.
Our needle man, for instance, who pushed wires and nails into his pasty, spongy flesh as though he were a pincushion. He was Uncle Myron to us even though we did not share blood. Papa expected his offspring to embrace all our fellow comrades in exhibition as family, nothing less.
Or the woman we hired in South Bend who grew snarls of hair on her face, her chest, and the tops of her knuckles — we called her La Loba and took money from customers who wanted to hear her howl and scratch for her long-dead lover.
Or Graciela, our adored grotesque, seven feet tall and heavy as a train car, who let her audiences watch while she ate a cake large enough to bury a pharaoh inside, then swirled around to a Strauss waltz, wiggling her cloudlike backside.
There were many other sights both dazzling and disturbing, sights that would make a priest’s skin crawl.
But nothing was as unsettling as that little girl in the mirror. I’d glanced at my own reflection plenty of times with a toddler’s fascination, but I had never truly looked until that day.
I looked not with my own peepers but through the eyes of those boys who had ogled me. I looked, and I saw a monster.
It would be weeks before I had a nightmare about anything but myself.
Later that same evening, the screams and cackles of the boys still percussing in my ears, my father squatted on the porch steps of our wagon and pulled me onto his knee. He tucked a dahlia behind my ear the way I’d seen him do to his dancing girls from the kootchie tent.
“Gorgeous women make the world go ’round, my sweet,” he said. “People will pay good money to see a pair of pretty ankles, pretty thighs, a flash of tit . . . anything a girl is willing to show for a buck. But you, Avita — in our line of work, you’re worth a thousand whores.”
And so my father spoiled me with presents and drowned me in compliments. He flattered my glossy black hair, my porcelain hands, my quiet nature, my non-hideous features, all to make me forget that my ugliness was his profit.
Copyright © 2023 by Lindsay Eagar. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
