Free Wonder by Dominique Fortier

father, though spiteful women – one of whom, Jemma, was particularly energetic – claimed that the boy displayed an amazing resemblance to Hector, the wild-animal trainer.
    Alice and Elie left their tent for Baptiste’s trailer which, strangely, seemed bigger to him once the mother and son had moved in. Soon they settled into a routine, punctuated by the circus’s continual moves, the incessant chaos of the tents being pitched and struck, the almost daily performances, the successive crowds of onlookersand the landscapes they never had a chance to explore and that simply formed a changing backdrop.

    They married without delay. Elie served as Baptiste’s best man, standing very erect, nearly paralyzed by the solemnity of the event, and Ilsa as Alice’s maid of honour. The ceremony, presided over by Rochester, was held outside the big top at dawn, before the procession.
    “But Rochester isn’t a priest,” Alice had fretted.
    Baptiste had shrugged: “I’m not crazy about priests anyway.”
    She was pretty in the white dress Ilsa had lent her, which the two had spent the night altering to fit Alice’s narrow shoulders and slender bosom. Elie had braided a crown of daisies for his mother. She had slipped it onto her forehead; now and then it dropped tiny red ants that she squashed between thumb and forefinger. Baptiste donned the black suit he put on every night when it was time to play the Survivor of the Apocalypse, and he couldn’t help feeling a little as if he were doing a performance.
    Before them was gathered a small group of no more than fifteen, Jemma having mounted a genuine cabal against this union of a man black as ebony and a woman white as milk, which she described as “an aberration ofnature” without noticing that all those to whom she was presenting her argument could have been described in the same way.
    The ceremony was brief. There was a document to sign that no one bothered to look at too closely, then champagne to open; but it was not yet noon, the drink was slightly warm and most of the flutes remained half-full after the guests drank the toasts, as they left to get ready for the parade.
    Baptiste, Alice, and Elie were now by themselves, all dressed up, in front of the big top where technicians and stagehands were going in and out while the sun beat down. Baptiste was sweating in his black suit; the daisies on Alice’s brow were starting to wither, giving off a mild acid smell. She took off the wreath, its imprint staying behind on her like an invisible headband, and it immediately came apart in her fingers. She dove to the ground to try making a bouquet with the scattered flowers, but could retrieve only three slightly bent stems that had at their tips just a yellow heart, as round as an eye. The white petals strewn on the ground suggested tiny boats adrift on the blackness of their shadows, which had shrunk and now were little more than small puddles of darkness at their feet.

 
    F OR E LIE ’ S ELEVENTH BIRTHDAY , A LICE HAD planned to make a spice cake as she did every year, but Elie had begged that instead they order from the kitchen of the Palace, where they stayed when the circus was in San Francisco, a cake made by the chef himself, its name on the menu the night before looking deliciously mysterious:
devil’s food cake
.
    The room they’d been assigned was not particularly grand but it was roomier than the trailer they still occupied when they stopped in small towns. A bed with an eiderdown embroidered in burgundy and mustard brown had pride of place in the middle of the room, which contained as well a dressing table with an oval mirror. Baptiste, unaccustomed to looking at his own reflection, always took a moment to recognize himself in it. There was a small sofa and a folding bed for Elie to sleep on, all the furniture sitting on a thick carpet that muffled the slightest sound. Some gilt-framed prints showing Roman ruins bathed in sunlight hung on walls covered with striped