Amy Sterling Casil - Chromosome Circus
VIP免费
2024-11-25
0
0
32.66KB
11 页
5.9玖币
侵权投诉
AMY STERLING CASILCHROMOSOME CIRCUSAmy Casil's first professional sale was
"Jonny Punkinhead" in our June 1996issue. Since then, she has sold stories to
Talebones, Zoetrope: All Story Extra,and several Writers of the Future
anthologies and we'll be hearing more from herin the future (that's a
promise). She lives in Southern California, where shehas been working on
several novels, teaching writing, conducting onlineworkshops, and raising her
daughter Meredith. Her new story takes us to thecircus to look a t some of the
outcasts of that same society we firstencountered in "Jonny
Punkinhead."MACADAM'S CIRCUS HAD played out their week in Fontana, forty miles
east of L.A.,when Joshie the Clown found Little Bear. Joshie was packing up
the VR headsetsin the Tokyo Tank trailer when he heard whimpering. He
patrolled the rows ofgummy plastic chairs until he found the source: a boy in
a fuzzy blue sleepsuit,huddled in the next to the last seat in the back. The
hood was pulled tight overthe kid's head. He looked to be about four, and he
stared up at Joshie withstill brown eyes."Hey, don't be scared," Joshie said.
He put on his best clown grin. The boyshrank away and tucked his chin into the
suit.Montego Bay, Macadam's hulking lead carny, came up at that moment.
"Another lostkid," he said. "Better call the cops."Joshie said, "I don't know,
Monty. Look at his clothes."The sleepsuit was smeared with yellow streaks of
dried mustard. Joshie caught awhiff of sour child sweat as he loosened the
knot at the boy's neck which heldthe hood tight. He pushed the soft fabric
away from the boy's forehead to exposeshort, luxuriant golden fur."He's a
freak," Montego said.Amid the fur were two delicate pointed ears. The boy
growled deep in his throatas Joshie touched the tip of his right ear."No point
in calling the cops, is there ?" Joshie put his arm around the boy andlifted
him from the seat. The boy made little hooting noises as he nestled hishead
into Joshie's white and red striped ruff."Wonder if he can talk?" Montego
stepped into the aisle. Montego was a normal,in the sense that his powerful
chest and arms as thick as the average woman'swaist were paid-for
modifications, cosmetic only, as opposed to Joshie, who'dbeen born a clown,
his nose ending in a tip the size and color of a ripeapricot. Joshie's most
embarrassing disability was hidden beneath his red satingloves: he had only
three spatulate fingers and a thumb on each hand."Hootie-hoo! Hootie-hoo,"
said the boy."His parents must be real winners, dumping the kid here," Montego
said.Joshie shook his head. "Where else?"Montego fingered his chin. "You got a
point," he said. Then, his face darkened."You're not thinking about keeping
the kid?"Joshie stroked the soft fur on the boy's head. The small legs
tightened like avice around his chest. "Maybe," he said. "You know what? I
think he's a littlebit like Gyla.""Wrong color." Gyla was the silver wolf girl
and her fur was all over her body.Montego crossed his arms and his bulging
muscles tensed until it looked asthough they'd leap from the skin. "Don't be
stupid. Macadam will be royallypissed if you keep that kid."The boy squirmed
and Joshie got a whiff of the fur on his head. It was silky,but it smelled
dark and oily, or maybe it was only the filthy smoke from theburning tires. "I
know somebody who does child welfare in L.A. County. I'll callher when we get
there."Montego squinted at him. "Yeah? Well, maybe so. You'd better call
her.""Sure, Monty," Joshie said, grinning with his big red mouth. Montego
cracked asmile and waved him off.Joshie left the Tokyo Tank trailer and
started across the lot, his big red shoesflapping and crunching in the
pulverized blacktop. He started toward his owntrailer, then paused a
moment.The boy said, "Hot! Hootie-hoo!""Yeah, I'll take you to see Gyla,"
Joshie told him. His heart skipped a beat atthe thought of her, and he pushed
the feeling away. Gyla could never, ever haveany interest in Joshie other than
friendship. He'd told himself that a milliontimes. Gyla was beautiful, even
though Gyla was, like Joshie and the kid and themajority of the people of
Macadam's Circus, a freak. A vitally produced geneticaccident, sterile, a
sport, a loser. The big man, Macadam, had scales. A fishman. Gyla had silver
fur, a heartshaped face and golden eyes.Joshie crunched his way around the
back of the trailers to Gyla's, which waspink, freshly painted, with a nice
white awning over the door. The kid wasgetting heavy, and he was hooting
loudly in Joshie's ear by the time Joshieknocked on the door.Gyla wore only
her bright blue g-string when she answered. Joshie tried to lookat the
pictures on her wall and not her breasts when he came inside."What's this?"
she asked. She was buffing her silvery fur with a soft brush, thekind they
made for horses. She looked curiously at the boy, who kept his facefirmly
pressed into Joshie's ruff."I found him in the last row in the Tokyo Tanks,"
Joshie said. "Look at hishead."Gyla smiled and petted the boy's head lightly.
"Don't be afraid, little guy,"she said. She gave Joshie one of her sharp,
hundred-watt smiles and his cheeksflamed under his greasepaint. "Hey, you're
just like me. Want to come to AuntieGyla?" She held out her arms, and the boy
hooted harder. Joshie grimaced becausethe kid was hooting right in his ear.
His floppy cauliflower ears were moresensitive than average ears, and even
though his rainbow wig gave someprotection, it didn't make any difference when
someone was making noises thatloud, that close to his eardrum.Then, the boy
started to scramble against Joshie, his little feet digging likeknives into
Joshie's ribs. "Hey, easy," Joshie said, but the kid had alreadyleapt away,
into Gyla's arms. She grabbed him and stumbled."Gyla!" Joshie stepped forward,
but she wasn't upset, she was laughing. She fellback on her blue velour couch
with the boy, who was hooting fiercely and tuggingat her silver fur wherever
he could get a handful of it."Yeah, you are like me, little guy." She looked
up at Joshie amid her wrestlingwith the child. "He's pretty dirty," she said.
"Need to give him a bath."Joshie nodded and sat on the edge of Gyla's dressing
chair. "That's what I camefor."Gyla deftly began to unzip the boy's sleepsuit.
"You'd better calm down now,"she told him. "Auntie Gyla's going to get you
cleaned up." The boy squirmed, joyobvious in every movement of his small,
wriggling body, and tried to buryhimself in Gyla's stomach."Help me out, Clown
Boy," Gyla said. She was laughing.Joshie got up, careful not to flap and break
something with his big, ungainlyfeet, and held the boy around the waist as
Gyla got him out of the suit. Savefor his face, the child was covered
completely in curly, golden fur."He looks like a teddy bear," Joshie said.
Better than a clown, he thought. Evenfish men like Macadam were better than
clowns.They got the boy into Gyla's clean, peach-colored bathroom and Joshie
ran thewater while Gyla poured pink bath crystals in the water. "See, it
makesbubbles," she told the boy. He flapped his thin furry arms and
gurgled.Like a baby, Joshie thought. He wondered if the boy's parents had even
tried totalk to him, or if they'd done as so many had done, treated the little
freak kidlike a pet. He seemed like an animal, but there was intelligence in
his darkbrown eyes. He splashed in the water, and giggled, just like a regular
kid.Gyla leaned over the tub and her perfect round furry breasts looked so
lovelythat Joshie forgot to breathe for a moment. The boy splashed, and where
thewater hit Gyla's fur, she was dark and oily-sleek. Joshie sat on the toilet
seatand bit his lip."Scrub his back, will you?" she asked. Joshie's hand
trembled and he grimaced ashe took off his glove. He didn't want Gyla to see
his ugly hand. He grabbed asoft brush with a wooden handle and worked suds
into the boy's fur.Then, the boy reached over and pulled the glove from
Joshie's other hand."Clown, clown," he said.Gyla gasped. "Hey, he can talk!""I
guess so," Joshie said. He tucked his hand in the pocket of his striped
satinpants.Gyla's delicate face grew serious. "You're going to call someone
about him,aren't you?"Joshie shrugged, then lathered the boy's head, careful
to keep the soap out ofhis eyes."He is like a little teddy bear," Joshie said.
He had a sudden reverie,picturing a little white house with a picket fence, a
mailbox, a revolvingsprinkler in the front yard, watering a perfectly trimmed
green lawn. He,Joshie, sitting in a swing on the front porch, and Gyla next to
him, in ablue-and-white checked housedress and a white apron. White slippers
on her tiny,furry feet. They were swinging, and the boy was wearing checked
bermuda shorts,running through the sprinkler, laughing."You'd better call
someone about him, Joshie," Gyla said, a little more firmlythis time."I know
someone in L.A. who helps kids like this," Joshie said."Well, good," Gyla
said. She got a star-shaped sponge wet and began to dab atthe boy's face.
"He's a nice kid, but how would you take care of him? You don'tknow anything
声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！
分类：外语学习
价格：5.9玖币
属性：11 页
大小：32.66KB
格式：PDF
时间：2024-11-25
作者详情
-
IMU2CLIP MULTIMODAL CONTRASTIVE LEARNING FOR IMU MOTION SENSORS FROM EGOCENTRIC VIDEOS AND TEXT NARRATIONS Seungwhan Moon Andrea Madotto Zhaojiang Lin Alireza Dirafzoon Aparajita Saraf5.9 玖币0人下载
-
Improving Visual-Semantic Embedding with Adaptive Pooling and Optimization Objective Zijian Zhang1 Chang Shu23 Ya Xiao1 Yuan Shen1 Di Zhu1 Jing Xiao25.9 玖币0人下载
渝公网安备50010702506394
