World's Smallest Circus
The desk arrived with a knock.
Two knocks.
It was heavier than expected and came inside of a large crate. The ad made special mention of “As Is,” and after bribing the neighbor’s kid to help him get it into the den Jack discovered what that meant.
It wan an antique roll-top desk; his wife had always wanted one. They reminded her of the mystery shows that use to broadcast over the radio. She had bought a box of taped shows to listen to in her car on the way to work, but ever since the miscarriage she had taken to listening to them all the time. She had even bought a Walkman, and Jack had grown accustomed to seeing her with the headphones on.
“So, that’s ‘As Is’.” Jack said; after he and his wife pried open the crate. His wife silently took in the desk’s dirty smell and Jack could almost make out the muffled sounds of a heartbeat, but it was just the clicking of her cassette.
The desk was full of miscellanea. Every time they opened a drawer, or reached into a dark hole, they grasped some new mystery: wax lips, papers inked with the scribble of Chinese characters, miniature music boxes that played songs Jack had never heard before, and even marionettes in lingerie. His wife made a time of it and spread the items out on the floor, but Jack took the opportunity to peel off a tiny piece of sailboat-blue wallpaper he had missed while turning the room back into a den; he did this before she could notice.
And then there was the skeleton. It was tucked in the back of a pigeonhole and could fit in the entirety of her hand.
The skeleton was wrapped in a handkerchief and Jack’s first impression deemed it the remnants of a rat. His wife, more fascinated, began playing with the dried remains. She stretched out the bones on their kitchen table and handled the fragments with care. She brushed each joint with one of her tiny make-up brushes. During the reconstruction she noticed that—what ever it was—it appeared to have an unusually long neck. “I THINK IT’S A GIRAFFE,” she said rather loudly; she was listening to her tapes.
Jack stood in the doorway as she repeated herself in a harnessed tone.
“I think it’s a tiny giraffe.”
She was looking at him now with a diminutive light in her eyes that Jack had not seen in sometime. He did not want to extinguish it with his belief about how ridiculous that sounded, so he approached and leaned over her shoulder.
“Let me get my glasses,” Jack said and then went in search of them.
A giraffe. Jack thought. A giraffe? If that were the case, it would have to be the world’s smallest giraffe. Absurd.
Jack forgot about his glasses and went for the measuring tape.
He would have to contact the seller of the desk and get to the bottom of this “As Is” business. But what would they have to say for themselves, “The desk was left to us by some great uncle, some friend of the family.” Would they point him in another direction? Would his wife come along? A road trip, maybe? A full tank of gas, truck stop coffee, powdered donuts, makeshift crosses on the side of highways, that tree—out there, somewhere—that Jack once read about, the one people decorated with their shoes? They could listen to her tapes together.
He abandoned the measuring tape and went for his coat.
What else awaited them: crowded public libraries, hours of Dewey decimal, the sun’s light dropping past branches and falling onto crumbling documents, the click and drag of microphage? This could be their very own mystery. Jack could almost hear the narrator: “The World’s Smallest Circus could—in its entirety—fit into a medium sized suitcase complete with compartments, breathing holes, and opened to reveal a tent.”
He stopped caring about his coat and went for his keys.
Would they learn that the ringmaster was nothing more than a thief, who had come upon the suitcase by accident? Who had simply stolen it from a man who had died in a train station? Had the circus ended up in different hands ever since? And what about before all of that, what about the beginning?
Jack had forgotten what he was looking for.
Would there be an end to this ever-deepening pigeonhole, or would it stretch on, always a little farther than his best reach? Perhaps not, perhaps it is only hand deep, and any anxious plunge would only snap his wrist.
Jack returned to the kitchen; the headphones were dangling around her neck.
“Whatever you do, don’t name it,” he told her, but it was too late; he could see clearly that she already had.
*First Appeared in The Ante Review