Free Rain Village by Carolyn Turgeon

newspaper for Mrs. Olsen,” I said. I ran down, past the file room and through the hall, past Mary’s room with the mattress on the floor and line of skirts hanging from a ceiling pipe. When I came to the box I pushed past the leotards and caps, and dug in to see what other treasures it held.
    I pulled up a pile of circus programs. I grabbed the whole stack of them, spread them across the floor. It was crazy, even liberating and wild, to see photographs of things I had only heard about from Mary. I’d never quite believed her stories were real, and yet there they were: beautiful boys crossing the high wire; a woman hanging from a thin rope by her hair; and then Mary herself in midflight, soaring from the catcher’s hands back to the bar.
    She was so different in the pictures, different than any way I’d ever seen her. Her hair was pulled away from her face and tucked under a red beaded cap, and her skin practically glowed under the light. Even from that far you could see the tilted shape of her eyes, the soft, fluid lines of her arms and legs as they propelled her through the air. She was a bright, magnetic spot suspended amidst the ropes and hooks and metal rings.
    It was rapturous: every single picture spoke of some new wonder, some new way of moving through space. I could barely breathe. With my whole being I wanted that, what I saw in the pictures. Flight.
    I closed the programs and stacked them beside me, and then, pushing past more tissue paper and wrappings, I came upon a metal bar covered over in parts with tape, a line of rope extending from either end. A thick braided rope curled like a snake at the bottom of the box. Various chains and hooks and smaller ropes were scattered among the coils.
    A trapeze, I realized, and rigging, and a web. I wrapped my fingers around the metal, and I swear they
tingled
with the magic of what that bar could do, where it could take me.
    And then I no longer cared about getting into trouble, what Mary would say when she saw I’d been snooping. I grabbed that bar and ran up to meet her as quickly as my legs could carry me.
    I burst into the room. It was one of those bright mornings when the sun slanted across the floor and all the books turned warm on the shelves. Mary stood at the front desk, next to a pile of books.
    “Mary,” I began, breathlessly, “I want you to teach me the trapeze.”
    Her eyes fell on the bar in my hands, and a strange look crossed her face, one I couldn’t place. “Where did you find that?”
    “Downstairs, among the boxes.”
    “You’ve been sneaking around?” she asked, her eyes flashing up at me.
    “I’m sorry,” I said, pleading. “I just came across it. I had to look. I saw the costumes, the programs, you flying—it was all beautiful, Mary, the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”
    “Those things are sealed away for a reason,” she said.
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t help it. Please teach me.
Please.
” I stopped when I saw how angry she was.
    “Tessa,” she said slowly, “I haven’t flown on the trapeze for years now. It’s ancient history. Put that back, and don’t let me see it again.”
    I was close to sobbing. “But Mary, I can feel it in my bones. I
have
to do this.”
    She looked at me, her face reddening, and then stalked away. I knew better than to follow her.
    For the rest of the day we worked in silence. When the evening came, I stormed from the library, slamming the door behind me as hard as I could.
I don’t need her,
I thought, kicking the side of the stairwell, slamming the dangling Mercy Library sign as I ran past. I ran until I reached the town square and the cluster of giant oak trees. I threw off my coat, furiously, and leapt up to one of the branches, started to swing.
    As I swung, letting the air soothe me, the cold rip past my tears and anger, I heard laughter. I stopped, turned my head to see a group of kids clustered under another tree, smoking cigarettes and passing a bottle between