I choose this, Bailey thinks. I want this. I need this. Please. Please let this work.
He wishes it, harder than he has ever wished for anything over birthday candles or on shooting stars. Wishing for himself. For the rêveurs in their red scarves. For a clockmaker he never met. For Celia and Marco and Poppet and Widget and even for Tsukiko, though she claims she does not care.
Bailey closes his eyes.
For a moment, everything is still. Even the light rain suddenly stops.
He feels a pair of hands resting on his shoulders.
A heaviness in his chest.
Something within the twisted iron cauldron begins to spark.
When the flames catch they are bright and crimson.
When they turn to white they are blinding, and the shower of sparks falls like stars.
The force of the heat pushes Bailey
backward, moving through him like a wave, the air burning hot in his lungs. He falls onto ground that is no longer charred and muddy, but firm and dry and patterned in a spiral of black and white.
All around him, lights are popping to life along the tents, flickering like fireflies.
*
MARCO STANDS BENEATH THE WISHING TREE, watching as the candles come alight along the branches.
A moment later, Celia reappears at his side.
“Did it work?” he asks. “Please, tell me that it worked.”
In response, she kisses him the way he once kissed her in the middle of a crowded ballroom.
As though they are the only two people in the world.
Part V
DIVINATION
I find I think of myself not as a writer so much as someone who provides a gateway, a tangential route for readers to reach the circus. To visit the circus again, if only in their minds, when they are unable to attend it physically. I relay it through printed words on crumpled newsprint, words that they can read again and again, returning to the circus whenever they wish, regardless of time of day or physical location. Transporting them at will.
When put that way, it sounds rather like magic, doesn’t it?
—FRIEDRICK THIESSEN, 1898
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,