Free The Swan Gondola by Timothy Schaffert

fell to the ground, to lead with my shoulder so as not to bust up Oscar, but I was bounced onto my back anyway, hitting my own head hard against the dummy’s wooden one. Though I wasn’t knocked all the way out, my wits had scattered plenty.
    For a brief moment Cecily hovered over me, a glowing shadow, as I squinted into the morning sun behind her head. I was embarrassed to have her help me up, but I leaned into her as she put her arms around my waist, as she cradled me to get me to my feet. My head throbbed so, I couldn’t see straight. And, in a blink, the shadow wasn’t Cecily at all. The woman who held me wore a Salvation Army uniform—a cape and bonnet, and her hair was silver. “God be with you,” she muttered as she righted me, and she ducked her head and slipped away.
    When all the spots in my eyes left, I saw the real Cecily, but only as she disappeared yet again, as she turned a corner to follow her wagon through the service gate. As I ran ahead, a sting in my ankle from a twist, I could tell there was something wrong with Oscar too by the clack of his jaw. The thought of him back there, broken, nagged at me, but I couldn’t stop to look.
    The Fair’s security guards were dressed as English bobbies, billy clubs and all, in domed hats and brass buttons, just for the novelty of it. The guards were checking passes, and that’s when I realized the Salvation Army angel hadn’t been cradling me—she’d frisked me. She’d fingered my counterfeit pass right from the crotch of my pants where I’d hidden it, likely mistaking it for a wallet. A wizened thief myself, I always kept my money in the hollow heel of my left shoe, a heel I could push open on a secret, swiveled hinge a cobbler had tapped into place for me. At that particular moment I would have given away every dollar in my shoe to have that pass in my hands.
    â€œI’m with them,” I said, pointing toward the Silk & Sawdust Players, but the guard ignored me as he checked the pass of the driver of a flower cart. I tried walking past him but only ended up on the ground again, the guard having grabbed me by the neck and shoved.
    â€œGet up and try to get by me again,” the guard said, the tip of his boot nudging at the base of my spine. “I get paid more, the more bones I crack.”
    I rolled away and he left me alone. When I sat up I saw my dummy had suffered worse than I’d thought in the fall from the wagon. Oscar’s jaw had gone unhinged and it hung there, speechless. I pulled a piece of string from a new tear at the seam of my sleeve and knotted it around an exposed screw and a hook, until I’d doctored him the best I could. I nonetheless worried about his innards. I relied on those switches and gears to keep him spunky. I shook him a little, and he gave off a deathly rattle.
    My skeleton felt jangled from all the bullying too, and in my thinking I was a kid again—I’d got the name
Ferret
as a wily boy of a narrow, ferretlike build. I supposed I might never outgrow beatings from every sack of rusty guts who had a pound or two on me. And what would I say to Cecily now? In her eyes,
I
was the bully.
    As I walked back toward the front lot, poor old Oscar under my arm, I didn’t think at all about what I might say to Cecily if I saw her again but of what I should’ve said when I saw her before. I went over and over in my head how it all could have been different, as if there were still time to magically undo the hour if I just fussed and fretted enough. I should have tipped my hat to her, said the right thing—whatever that was—and she would have let me carry her bag and thanked me for it. And she might even have remembered me from the Empress.
Your mustache is gone
, she might have said with a wink.
    But I refused to believe I’d been unlucky. Seeing her again, on the Fair’s very first day, was a kind of miracle—my every misstep had