Circus I
FF Age Gap.
The train whistle cuts through the dry afternoon like a blade through canvas, and I stop walking right there on the dirt road, my boots kicking up red dust that settles on my stockings. I am nineteen, and I have lived in this Queensland rail town my whole life, watched the same faces pass the same windows, heard the same stories told the same way at the same pub every Friday since I was old enough to notice.
But today the air tastes different—charged, alive with diesel smoke and promises, something that makes my throat tighten and my palms damp inside my cotton gloves.
I am meant to be walking to Mrs Henderson's to collect mending. That is what I told my mother. That is what hangs in my basket over my arm, the empty space where finished work will sit.
But the whistle pulls me, and I follow it past the siding where the wheat trucks idle, past the corrugated-iron shed that serves as our station, to the long curve of track where the circus train has stopped.
They are already unloading. Men in singlets that cling to their backs with sweat, muscles shifting under skin browned by sun and travel. I have never seen so many strangers in one place. The carriages are painted in colours I do not have names for—crimson deeper than our war memorial poppies, gold that catches the harsh light and throws it back at the sky. I stand at the edge of the gravel, my shadow small against the bulk of the train, and I watch.
The elephants come first. I have read about elephants, seen pictures in the illustrated papers my uncle sends from Brisbane, but nothing prepares me for the smell of them—rich, ancient, like wet earth and something sweeter, almost rotten.
They move in a chain, trunk to tail, led by a man with a hook who speaks to them in a language I do not understand. Their eyes are small and knowing. One turns its head as it passes, and I swear it looks at me, really looks, sees something I have not yet named in myself.
I follow the procession. Everyone does—the whole town materialises from verandas and back sheds, children running ahead, women in aprons wiping flour from their hands, men leaving half-finished repairs to gawk. We are a river flowing toward the empty paddock beyond the grain silos, the only space flat enough and large enough for what they are building.
The Big Top rises like a birth. I watch the centre pole hauled upright by ropes and pulleys, men straining against the weight, their bodies arching backward, tendons standing in their necks. The canvas billows, catches air, fills with shape and purpose. It is obscene, almost, how quickly the empty field becomes something else—a temple, a womb, a promise. I find myself pressed against the rope barrier with the other onlookers, my chest tight, my breath coming shallow through my open mouth.
Inside, later, when the gates finally open and the shillings are collected, I move through the chaos of the midway in a daze. The Strong Man pounds a spike through a wooden block with his bare fist, the sound cracking through the tent like a shotgun blast. His arms are thick as my thighs, veined and glistening with oil that smells of eucalyptus and something muskier. He catches my eye as I pass—deliberately, I think—and flexes, the muscle rising like dough under his skin. I look away, but not before I feel heat climb my neck and spread beneath my collar.
The clowns frighten me. Their paint is cracked in the heat, white flaking to reveal pink underneath, and their laughter is too loud, too knowing. One grabs at my skirt as I pass, and I jump, my heart hammering against my ribs, but it is only a gesture, a mockery of something I do not understand. I push through the crowd, past the trapeze girls in their sequined costumes that catch the light and throw it back in shards. They are stretching on a platform above, legs split wide in ways that make me look away, then look back, then away again. Their bodies are maps I cannot read, territories I have never been brave enough to explore.
The Ring Master passes so close I smell his cologne—something European, expensive, wasted on this dust. He tips his hat to me, a gesture that feels practised, automatic, yet his eyes linger half a second too long. I am nobody. I am the girl who mends torn seams and serves tea to my mother's friends. But here, in this temporary city of canvas and sawdust, I am someone who might be looked at.
I do not plan to enter the fortune teller's tent. I am not superstitious. My father taught me to trust what I can see and touch, the wheat that grows or fails, the prices at the grain exchange, the hard arithmetic of survival. But the tent draws me anyway—deep purple, almost black in the fading light, with gold stars painted around the entrance that have already begun to flake.
The sign reads MADAME ZORA in letters that curl like smoke.
KNOW YOUR FATE.
I have two shillings in my pocket, saved from mending money, meant for material for a new dress.
I spend them both.
The tent is smaller inside than it appears from without, and darker, the air thick with incense that catches in my throat and makes my eyes water. I blink, adjusting, and make out shapes—draped fabrics, a table, a figure seated behind it.
Then she strikes a match, and I see her.
Madame Zora is older than my mother, older than any woman I know who still moves with purpose. Her hair is white, pinned in elaborate coils that must take an hour to arrange, and her face is a landscape of lines I want to read like palmistry—creases at the corners of her eyes that speak of laughter or squinting against sun, a furrow between her brows that suggests concentration, disapproval, or both.
She wears a shawl of peacock feathers that rustle when she breathes, and rings on every finger, gold and silver catching the candlelight.
"Sit," she says, and it is not a request.
I lower myself onto the wooden stool across from her. It is too low, or she is too high—she looks down at me, and I feel suddenly younger than my nineteen years, a girl caught somewhere she should not be. My knees press together. My hands find each other in my lap, fingers twisting the fabric of my skirt.
"You are not here for your fortune," Madame Zora says.
Her voice is rough, accented with something Eastern European that I cannot place, thickened by years of smoke and travel.
"You are here for permission."
I open my mouth to deny it, to ask what she means, but no sound comes. She is already reaching across the table, her hand closing around my wrist with surprising strength. Her skin is dry and warm, the rings cold against my pulse point.
"Give me your palm."
I extend my hand, and she turns it palm-up, her thumb tracing the lines there with a deliberation that makes my breath hitch. She does not look at my hand. She looks at my face, my throat, the place where my collar opens to show the hollow above my breastbone.
"You have never been touched," she says, and it is not a question.
"Not truly. You have been kissed behind the church, perhaps, by a boy who tasted of sheep dip and desperation. You have let hands wander where they should not, and you have stopped them, always stopped them, because you feared what wanting might make you."
My face burns. I try to pull my hand back, but her grip tightens.
"Do not run," she says, and something in her tone—command layered with something almost tender—roots me to the stool.
"I am not shaming you. I am naming you. There is power in naming."
She releases my hand and reaches for a deck of cards, worn at the edges, the gilt pattern almost worn away. She shuffles with practised efficiency, the cards whispering against each other, and deals them in a pattern I do not recognise.
The Hanged Man. The Moon. The Lovers, reversed.
"You will leave this place," she says, tapping a card with a fingernail painted the same purple as her tent. "Not today. Not this year. But you will go, and you will not return. You will find what you seek in cities, in the arms of women and men both, in the dark spaces between what is permitted and what is possible."
I stare at the cards, at her face, at the candle flame that wavers when she breathes.
No one has ever spoken to me this way—directly, without the polite scaffolding of small talk, without the safety of pretence.
It is terrifying. It is intoxicating.
"You want to know if you are wicked," Madame Zora continues, and now she is smiling, a slow unfolding that shows teeth stained by tea or tobacco.
"You want to know if these thoughts you have—of the trapeze girls, of their strong thighs, of the way the Strong Man's sweat runs down his spine—if these thoughts damn you. I tell you now: they do not. They make you alive. They make you mine, for this hour, this moment."
She stands, and the movement is fluid despite her age, despite the weight of her shawl and jewellery. She moves around the table, and I turn on my stool to follow her, my neck craning, my heart hammering a rhythm I feel in my wrists, my throat, between my legs.
"Stand," she commands, and I do, my legs unsteady, my hands finding the table's edge for balance.
She is close now, close enough that I smell her perfume—patchouli and something darker, musk and age and the particular scent of a body that has travelled far and slept little.
She reaches out and touches my face, her thumb brushing my lower lip with a gentleness that undoes something in my chest.
"You are so afraid," she murmurs, and her breath is warm against my cheek, spiced with aniseed. "So afraid of your own hunger. But hunger is not sin, little one. Starvation is sin. To deny yourself what you need—that is the true transgression."
Her hand moves from my face to my throat, her fingers spreading to cup the column of my neck, her thumb resting on my pulse. I am trembling. I cannot stop.
She feels it, I know she feels it, the rabbit-fast beating under her palm.
"I could teach you," she says, and her voice has dropped to something almost a whisper, intimate as confession.
"I could show you what your body is for. Not babies. Not duty. Pleasure. Sensation. The holy profanity of wanting and being wanted."
I should run. I know I should run. My mother's voice is in my head, warning of gypsies and fallen women, of reputations ruined by a moment's weakness.
But my body has its own will, its own gravity, and it pulls me toward her, toward the heat of her, the certainty.
"Yes," I whisper, and the word costs me everything and nothing, a door opening that cannot be closed.
She smiles again, fully now, and it transforms her face from severity to something almost beautiful, the beauty of experience, of knowledge earned rather than given.
She takes my hand and leads me through a gap in the draped fabric, to a smaller space behind the reading area, furnished only with a narrow cot and a trunk that serves as a table. The air is closer here, warmer, scented with her presence and something else, something that makes my mouth water and my stomach clench with anticipation.
"Remove your dress," she says, and she sits on the edge of the cot, arranging her shawl around her shoulders with the care of a queen arranging her robes. "Slowly. I want to watch you learn to be seen."
My fingers find the buttons at my collar. They shake, these traitor hands, but they obey. One button, then another, the fabric parting to show my camisole, the ribbon tie, the skin beneath that has never known sun. I shrug out of the sleeves, let the dress pool at my waist, step out of it and stand in my underthings while she watches with an attention that feels like touch.
"Your corset," she prompts, and I reach behind me, fumbling with the hooks, my breath coming faster as I expose myself further. The corset loosens, and I pull it away, and then I am standing in my drawers and camisole, my arms crossed over my chest without meaning to, the instinct to hide too strong to fully overcome.
"Drop your arms," Madame Zora says, and there is steel in it now, the command that brooks no disobedience.
"You are lovely. You should know this. You should feel it."
I let my arms fall. My nipples are hard against the thin cotton, visible, undeniable. She sees them, and her gaze lingers, and I feel the response in my own body, a pulse that beats between my legs, a wetness that I have only ever known in shameful solitude.
"Come here."
I walk to her, three steps that feel like miles, and stop before her knees. She reaches out and hooks her fingers in the ribbon of my camisole, pulls it loose with a single sharp tug, and the fabric gapes open.
Her hands slide inside, cupping my breasts with a familiarity that makes me gasp, her palms warm and slightly rough, her thumbs finding my nipples and circling them with a pressure that sends sparks down my spine.
"You are so sensitive," she observes, as if commenting on the weather, and she pinches, lightly, then harder, and I cry out, a sound I have never made before, high and broken.
"Aahh! Ahh!"
"Yes. Like that. I want to hear you."
She pulls me closer, and I stumble, fall to my knees between her spread thighs, and she guides my head to her breast, presses my face against the peacock feathers and the flesh beneath. I breathe her in, patchouli and sweat and something uniquely female, and her hand is in my hair, tightening, directing.
"Use your mouth," she instructs, and I do; I open my mouth against the fabric of her dress, find the shape of her nipple beneath, suckle through the material like a child, like a supplicant.
She groans, a sound that vibrates through her chest into my mouth, and her hips lift slightly, pressing against my stomach.
"Good girl," she breathes, and the praise undoes something in me, sends heat flooding through my body, makes me suck harder, more desperately.
"Such a good girl. You have wanted this, haven't you? Wanted to be told what to do, how to please, how to be pleased."
I nod against her, my hands finding her thighs, the heavy muscles beneath her skirts, and she laughs, a rich sound, and pushes me back gently.
"Stand again. Remove the rest. I want to see what I am working with."
I rise on unsteady legs and push my drawers down, step out of them, and then I am naked, truly naked, in front of a stranger, in a circus tent in the middle of the afternoon, while outside the sounds of the midway continue—music and laughter and the roar of a lion in a cage.
I should feel exposed, vulnerable, but instead I feel powerful, seen, claimed by her gaze.
She stands and circles me, her hand trailing across my shoulder, my waist, the curve of my hip. She pauses at my backside, squeezes, and I flinch, then press back into her touch.
"Eager," she notes. "I thought so. The shy ones always are, once they are given permission."
She returns to stand before me, and her eyes travel down my body with frank appreciation.
"Lie on the cot. On your back. Let me see you open."
The cot is narrow, the sheets worn soft by countless travellers. I arrange myself on it, my knees pressed together, my hands at my sides, and she stands over me, looking down with an expression I cannot read—possession, perhaps, or satisfaction, or something deeper, something that looks almost like memory.
"Open your legs," she says, and I do, slowly, the air cool against my wetness, my shame and my desire indistinguishable now.
She sits on the edge of the cot, her hip against my thigh, and her hand finds me, her fingers parting my folds with a delicacy that makes me whimper.
"Oohh! My! Oohh yes! Mmm, mmm!"
"So wet," she murmurs, almost to herself, and she circles my entrance with one finger, not entering, just teasing, until I am arching my hips, seeking more.
"Patience. I will teach you patience, too."
She brings her finger to her mouth, tastes me, and her eyes close briefly in something like reverence.
"You taste of youth," she says. "Of possibility. Of everything I have left behind and everything I still want."
Then she is touching me again, her fingers finding the small bud of my pleasure, rubbing in slow, deliberate circles that make my breath catch and my hands clutch at the sheets.
I have touched myself before, in the dark, in haste, in shame. This is different—this is worship, instruction, a language being written on my body that I will never forget. Her fingers through my slick like touching velvet.
"Look at me," she commands, and I force my eyes open, meet her gaze as she works me, her expression intent, focused, as if she is reading another kind of fortune, divining my future in the responses of my flesh.
"You are going to come for me, Matilda. Not yet. When I say. You will learn to wait, to build, to let the pleasure grow until it cannot be contained."
She dredges my slick from my internal private well of jus. Spreading it over, under and around my nub of sweet delight.
Fuck me, she is polishing my girly dome.
My bead shines. My bead gives spikes of delight.
"Mmm, mmm," I moan.
I nod, my jaw tight with the effort of holding back, and she smiles, increases the pressure, slides two fingers inside me without warning, filling me in a way I have never been filled, stretching me with a burn that quickly becomes something else, something necessary.
"Ah," I breathe, the sound escaping without my permission, and she laughs, low and warm.
"There. That is the sound of you becoming. Again. Louder."
She pumps her fingers, curling them to find a spot inside me that makes her peacocks blur and my back arch off the cot.
I cry out, unable to stop, and she rewards me with her other hand on my breast, pinching my nipple in rhythm with her thrusts, building a symphony of sensation that threatens to overwhelm me entirely.
"Orrghh! Aagghh!"
I gasp, the sounds torn from me.
"You can," she insists, her voice steady, certain. "You will. For me. Because I want to feel you break apart, want to watch your face when you learn what your body can do."
She leans down then, her mouth finding my breast, her tongue hot and wet against my nipple, and the combination—her fingers inside me, her mouth on me, her command wrapping around me like chains—sends me over the edge.
I come with a cry that feels like it tears something loose in my throat, my body convulsing around her fingers, my hands finding her hair and pulling, desperate for anchor, for presence, for proof that this is real.
"Hngggh! "
She rides it out with me, her movements slowing as mine peak, her mouth gentling, her fingers stilling inside me but not withdrawing, keeping me full, connected.
When I finally collapse back against the cot, gasping, sweating, she withdraws slowly, brings her fingers to her mouth again, licks them clean with a deliberation that makes my spent body twitch with renewed interest.
"That," she says, "was only the beginning."
She stands, and I watch through heavy-lidded eyes as she removes her shawl, her dress, her underthings, revealing a body marked by time and travel—breasts that sag slightly with weight and wisdom, a belly soft with years, thighs strong from walking, from holding power.
She is strangely magnificent. She is terrifying. She is everything I did not know I needed.
"Now," she says, climbing onto the narrow cot with me, arranging herself above my face, her knees on either side of my head, her most secret flesh hovering inches from my mouth, "you will learn to give as well as receive. You will learn what a woman tastes like, what she sounds like when she loses control. You will learn that pleasure is not a gift but a debt, paid forward, paid back, paid in full."
She lowers herself onto my mouth, and I open for her, taste her for the first time—salty, complex, unmistakably female—and her weight settles on my face, her thighs gripping my head, and I cannot breathe except in the rhythm she sets, cannot think except of her, her pleasure, her command.
"Use your tongue," she instructs, her voice strained now, the composure cracking to show the woman beneath, hungry and human.
"Find the spot. Yes. There. Stay there. Do not stop unless I tell you."
I obey. I lick, I suck, I learn the landscape of her feminine folds with the desperation of a student, a convert, a disciple.
Her taste fills my mouth, her scent my nostrils, and I am drowning in her, in this, in the absolute rightness of serving her pleasure.
She moves above me, grinding down, using my face with a roughness that makes me moan against her, the vibration making her gasp.
"Good," she pants, "good girl, such a good—" and then she is coming, her body seizing, her thighs clamping around my head so tight.
Her cry is wordless and raw, primal, transcendent.
"Ughh!"
She stays there, trembling, for long moments, then lifts herself, turns, collapses beside me on the narrow cot.
We are pressed together, flesh to skin, her breath hot against my neck, my hand finding her breast without thought, cupping it, claiming it.
"Your future," she murmurs, her voice thick with satisfaction, "is not fixed. I told you true—you will leave this place, you will find your way to cities, to arms that welcome you, to nights like this and better. But know this, my little one: you will carry this hour with you. You will remember what it is to be seen, to be chosen, to be taught. And you will seek it again, and again, until you become the teacher yourself. Still, first there is much to learn from a circus."
Outside, the circus continues, indifferent to our transformation. The sun moves across the sky, shadows lengthening in the tent, and I lie in her arms, my body singing with new knowledge, my mind quiet for the first time in years. I am not the girl who walked to Mrs Henderson's this morning.
I am someone else, someone I am only beginning to meet.
When I finally dress, when I smooth my skirt and pin my hair and step back into the afternoon, sex with Madame Zora holds as a learning memory.
I do not look back at the purple tent.
My hand finds in my pocket a card—the Lovers—and on the back, in her spidery hand, a single word: Soon.