The circus was coming to Chattanooga, just an hour’s drive away, and Bonnie decided to go. She saw the ad on Facebook while her husband John was in their backyard working on a shed he never quite made progress on. Bonnie scrolled through images of scripture set against cottony white clouds, of women in her Bible study making oatmeal playdough with their grandchildren, and videos of her and John’s forty-two-year-old daughter, Mallory, alongside her girlfriend in an elevator, at a bar in Chicago, on the crest of a volcano in Greece. Bonnie stopped scrolling and the ad came alive—Hello! A clown with bulging yellow lips pointed his gloved finger directly at her—You!—and pulled back digital red curtains to reveal a stage of jugglers, elephants, and a plumed woman being shot from a cannon.
Bonnie stood from her spot on the couch; she had not moved since breakfast. She gained her legs and hobble-horsed into the kitchen to her husband’s wallet which kept the credit card they shared. She peeked John outside in the backyard, his broad back to the house, little islands of damp darkening the cotton duck jacket he wore when the weather dropped cold. He’d been like this, unapproachable, ever since their daughter informed them that she would be driving down from Chicago Friday evening with some big news. The past few days John had spent every free hour out in the backyard doing what Bonnie’s own mother had called yonder-looking, just offering his stares to the far-off, sometimes getting down on a knee to examine one of his projects, hunting for problems where none existed.
The circus would help him take his mind off things, she thought. He’d call her impulsive, but she didn’t care. They each had their role to play in this mess, anyway: John, the stubborn father; Mallory, the lesbian daughter; and Bonnie, the mother caught right in the middle, both the taffy and the pull.
To Bonnie’s surprise, John got over their daughter being gay rather quickly—said he wasn’t happy about it, but he’d allow it. Four years ago Mallory told them. She had just turned thirty-eight and taken a new job as a pediatrician at Northwestern. Bonnie and John drove up to Chicago a few months after to help her and her girlfriend Susan move into a new apartment off the lake in Edgewater. The trip was overwhelming for both John and Bonnie, but they had survived it together. John preoccupied himself by checking appliances and installing dimmer switches in the new space, and Bonnie learned that Susan was finishing up her third year at Chicago Law. She watched how freely her daughter placed a pinky finger inside the front pocket of Susan’s jeans, a gesture that struck Bonnie as both childlike and deeply intimate.
The trouble now was this: Mallory and Susan wanted a child, and John was being an old cuss about it. Even though Mallory and Susan had talked them both through the process over the phone—the daily shots, the costs, the disappointing odds of creating human life—John had made it clear that no baby born of a turkey-baster would ever be called his grandchild. That had been a little over a year ago. Since then John refused to speak to Mallory, not even on her birthday, which was coming again soon, and Bonnie wasn’t sure just yet what life would look like if the big news didn’t go well. She bought the tickets and returned to the couch to play mah-jongg on her iPad.
Minutes passed, maybe an hour. Bonnie heard John stomp his boots on the kitchen linoleum to shake off the wet, then the crisp wrinkling of wax paper as he searched the cabinets for a snack. When he appeared in the doorway, his cheeks were still flushed white from the cold, which was abnormal this time of year.
“Have you been on the couch like that all day?” he asked.
“You know I move around, John,” she said. “I was up earlier buying tickets to the circus tomorrow.”
John closed his eyes and lowered his head. Bonnie still found him endearingly attractive, even in his early seventies. His pants cradled a little watermelon of a stomach paunch. His frame was long and slender, his face still youthful in some parts, knotted from age and worry in others.
“Why the hell would we go to the circus, Bonnie?”
“I thought it would be nice,” she said, sitting up.
“Did you take your pills today?”
“Not yet,” Bonnie replied. “And it’s just one, thank you. Not plural.”
“Well, take it,” he said. “We need to stop by the hardware store on the way to church tonight, so start getting ready.”
John walked into the bedroom to change his clothes and Bonnie wrinkled her nose in his direction. Did she take her pills? Did she take her pills? As if when she took them—Poof!—everything was back to normal and Bonnie could just carry on with her day, high-stepping with her elbows up to her ears. And why was it always we need to go to the hardware store? Bonnie never needed anything at the hardware store. She always ended up just sitting in the parking lot with the window cracked open like a puppy waiting for its owner.
Of course, she’d be the first to admit how strange it was to be taking pills while the rest of their town was dying from them. You’d never know from how happy people looked or from the honey yellow glow of hickory trees that theirs had just become the sixth-worst county in the fourth-worst state for opioid deaths, and wasn’t that just something? It was on the news every night like a fog that never lifted. Bonnie blamed the drug companies and politicians, and John blamed the druggies. Weak-willed good-for-nothings he called them.
A few months back, in the heat of July, John had answered a call at a double-wide off 11-W, the old highway before I-75 pushed everything west. John’s business was fixing air conditioners, often in the most rural parts of the county, which was nearly every part of the county. He was retired but still answered calls for odd jobs here and there for the extra cash.
He had knocked on the trailer door and when no one answered he let himself in to find an entire family stripped down to their underwear, hardly moving. Threadbare sheets covered the windows and even with three fans running, the faces of the mother and father and one of the oldest sons gave off an empty sheen, like oil on ditch water. A baby in a heavy diaper sat cross-legged watching cartoons just inches from the television screen and they were all sweating and it smelled, John said, like moldy apples after rain. If John had to guess, he said, he’d guess heroin or fentanyl, but at least the children didn’t have any bruises on them.
My soul, Bonnie had said when he returned home that evening. She offered to call child services, but what good would that even do? John drove them two towns over to the Wal-Mart, and they picked up cans of tomatoes and tuna, pasta, fresh diapers, and the like. It was nighttime by then. John turned the truck off a little ways down the road, and they each made two trips, carrying plastic bags to the trailer’s broken wooden steps.
In moments like that she thanked God how John provided for her, how hard he worked. Despite operating like a light switch with an emotional range of off or on, he really was a good man.
John appeared dressed in the pair of slacks that Bonnie thought made his legs look strong and sturdy. “Snap out of it, Bonnie!” he said. “You haven’t moved. Let’s go.” He went to get his shoes, and Bonnie walked to her vanity. She tilted a little white pill into her cupped palm and swallowed it dry. For a moment, at least, she felt good. She stuck out her tongue at John’s back before grabbing a long-sleeved blouse and throwing it over her shoulders.
◆
The hardware store was on the way to church, and they drove backroads to get there. Bonnie’s stomach fought back against the curves, and she cracked the truck’s window a few inches to allow the crisp outside air to unspool the tension in her belly. John wouldn’t admit to it, but Bonnie could sometimes feel the world changing just a little too quickly for them to keep up with. Cars drove faster, milk stayed longer, and her life wasn’t nearly how she imagined it would be. In an act of defiance, Mallory had her tubes tied right out of med school, saying the world was just too awful a place to raise children and there was all this talk, talk, talk about what could be done, but nothing would ever truly change. When Bonnie told John what Mallory had done to her body, he just grumbled and shrugged his shoulders with a level of apathy reserved for papercuts, and for a time there Bonnie hadn’t allowed herself to put much stock in the future. But, when Mallory and Susan called about trying for a baby—well.
“I know you don’t want to talk about Mallory,” Bonnie said in the truck, “but she’s coming, and you have a choice to make—you can be a part of our lives, or you can keep being the grouch that you are.”
“Nothing has changed,” said John.
“Can you even imagine us as grandparents?”
“There’s no use trying to imagine it, Bonnie, because Mallory can’t get pregnant.” He stopped at a red light in front of the hardware store. “I don’t want you bringing this up at church, either. I don’t need everyone knowing our business.”
He pulled into the parking lot and a blur of green caught Bonnie’s eye. A man in flip-flops and tin-colored pants twirled inside the white lines of an empty parking spot about ten removed from the store’s entrance. A green, threadbare blanket spun behind him and it made Bonnie think of trash eddying in a gutter.
“Oh, God,” John said. “That guy is back. Watch out for Mr. McSpinny over there while I’m gone.” He opened his door and stepped one foot out before looking back over his shoulder to Bonnie. “If that’s not a sign of the end times, I don’t know what is.”
Bonnie shook her head in agreement. She lifted her phone, snapped a photo of the man, and texted it to Mallory. Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow. Let us know when you’re on your way. Also, can you believe this! She eyed her screen for a minute, maybe a couple of minutes. John had disappeared into the store’s entrance. Mr. McSpinny danced near an empty shopping cart. Be nice, mom, Mallory wrote back. It’s not kind to take photos like that. Have you talked to dad yet? Bonnie didn’t understand why she couldn’t take a photo of a man twirling stupidly right out in the open of a parking lot, or why everything had to be written down on a phone, but she wasn’t about to explain on this tiny screen how complicated everything had gotten. Just come! she replied.
What Mallory didn’t know was that, back when she and John had stopped speaking, Bonnie had asked John if he might be willing to help her research medications for depression. The next day he walked into the living room while she was playing mah-jongg on the couch saying he’d booked her an appointment for a therapist in Knoxville, and to be ready to go within the hour.
The therapist had little succulents in horse-shaped ceramic pots and photos of her family a little too aggressively displayed for Bonnie’s tastes, but she felt blessed that John had done this for her. She let him drive her there once a week. Bonnie talked through most everything with the therapist, but made it clear she thought it was silly because there were people in the world far worse off than her. Her therapist replied, “Just because it isn’t heavy, Bonnie, doesn’t mean you aren’t carrying it.” They worked on Bonnie recognizing what she could and could not change. She added can sentences to her daily routines: I can make decisions for myself; I can fill my time with meaningful things; I can look past the present to a future I will create. But when the therapist asked what that future might look like, Bonnie felt a rumbling of squirrels in her belly.
She had made a vow before God to stay with John for the rest of her life, but Bonnie loved her daughter with a fierceness that often caught her by surprise. Even though Mallory had lived hundreds of miles away for more than a decade, Bonnie still lay in bed some nights with a murmur in her chest—the same tickling sensation she had when Mallory was young, orbiting around her, always just a little too exposed for Bonnie’s comfort. And how was she supposed to explain a murmur to John? He’d catch wind that the conversation was about emotions and all of sudden a door would need fixing, a shelf hung, a leak in the upstairs bathroom might actually be in the walls, and is that the future God wanted for her, she wondered—because Bonnie knew this need to protect her daughter would never go away; a few nights a year, still, it woke her up, breathless.
The therapist put down her tea cup with a little plastic koala bear hanging off the side and asked if Bonnie felt she could ever be truly happy without her daughter in her life. When Bonnie said no, the therapist tsked and asked her to rephrase it as a can sentence, and Bonnie thought for a moment of a life where Mallory was even further removed, where the murmur matured into a ceaseless, connatural hammering.
“No,” she replied, “I don’t think I can.”
That night, Bonnie walked right in on John watching This Old House reruns and said, “I know you haven’t quite yet figured out how God feels about lesbian test-tube babies, but Christ, John, that child will be a part of our lives, and there is nothing you can do about it.”
He didn’t even bother to turn down the television—just looked up with an air of annoyance while a man on TV bore holes into drywall.
“So help me, Bonnie,” he said, “I will never allow that child in this home.”
John knew he’d gone too far because the next day there were pink orchids on the table from Petals Palace, which meant he had driven the forty-five miles to Ooltewah and back before she even got up. After that Bonnie’s therapist agreed that medication was an appropriate next step given Bonnie’s—and her therapist used this exact word—condition.
Maybe something like that also happened to Mr. McSpinny, Bonnie thought? Maybe he had a family somewhere in a nice house who just didn’t have the space right now for his condition, and it was with that thought that the Lord touched Bonnie’s heart, and she decided to give the man a dollar. She dropped her shoulders down and raised her chin up to the open crack in the window and let out a little, “Yoohoo!” to catch Mr. McSpinny’s attention.
The green blanket lost the wind and hung down over the man’s gaunt frame. He turned toward her, eyes wide, with a grin. Already one step in her direction and Bonnie realized she had been impulsive again, stupid really. Stupid, Bonnie, she thought. He took another step, then a hop, then a knees-forward waddle until he was right up on the other side of the window with yellow teeth and a breath that frosted the glass.
“I’m going to give you a dollar,” said Bonnie, lifting up her purse and plunging her hand inside. “A dollar!”
“Have you been washed in the blood of the Lamb, Miss?”
“Yes, actually, I have,” Bonnie replied. She felt for the little side pocket inside her purse that kept her mints and nail clippers and thank God, thank God, a dollar. “Here,” she said, raising the bill through the little crack in the window.
“Good,” said the man, rolling his face closer to the glass. “Because the end, the end, the end, the end, the end is already upon us, and—”
“Hey!” Bonnie heard John’s voice, yelling. “You! Get away from her!”
Bonnie watched as John came around the front of the truck waving a two-by-four he had bought for a neighbor’s patio. Mr. McSpinny flinched, snatched the dollar, and stepped away from the window. Bonnie half expected the man to hiss and crouch like a vampire exposed to light, but Mr. McSpinny just smiled, lifted his face to the sky, and waved the dollar at the sun.
Back inside the truck, John shook his head, started the engine, and rolled up the window with some of Bonnie’s hair caught inside. “Ouch!” she said, pulling until John noticed and rolled the window down enough to free her. “What was all that horsing around for? He wasn’t doing anything.”
“Christ, Bonnie,” John said. “You’d trust a pit bull with a room full of bacon.”
◆
Their church was set off from the road by a gravel lot canopied by hemlocks. Bonnie walked behind John through the crowded church cemetery, stepping over weathered grave markers and small plastic American flags trembling in the evening chill. It was an old church, but that’s why Bonnie loved it. Inside, the rooms were small, the walkways narrow and dark, the soiled carpet packed down from years of hand-me-down dress shoes and children spilling Vacation Bible School lemonade. Bonnie could walk through its halls blindfolded and still find her way. When they entered the basement room where their Bible study met, they were welcomed by the quiet settling of the sanctuary above their heads and folding chairs already arranged in a half-circle so that, if they hadn’t shown up, at least someone would miss them.
For the past sixteen weeks, their Bible study had been watching and discussing a DVD course on the second coming of Christ. They arrived just as the lights were dimming. Bonnie smiled and offered quick, waist-level waves to others in the group as she passed by, grateful not to have to explain why the right side of her hair looked like a wild turkey had gotten into it.
She couldn’t see or hear all of what was being said on the television, but she didn’t care. Bonnie didn’t understand a lick about the Book of Revelation, and that was just fine by her. John had sat her down early on and explained that it wasn’t to be taken literally, but as an allegory, and how all the scary stuff like the plagues and fires and earthquakes of the tribulation would happen after they were gone anyway. As if that made one hill of difference. What Bonnie didn’t understand, and what no one in the Bible study seemed willing or able to answer her, was why God had to make it all so complicated in the first place? There were trumpets and horsemen and thrones and lions and candlesticks and white robes and calves and flying creatures with faces of men and seals, which made Bonnie laugh until John told her it wasn’t the waa-waa flubbery kind, but the unveiling the covenantal fury of God kind. And if God chose to lay out the entire distorted fate of Heaven and Earth like some TV Guide battle royal, so be it. Who was Bonnie to say otherwise?
When the lesson was over and the lights returned, they tried their best as a group to stick to the relevant things they had just learned, but within a lamb’s shake they were all back again to the Rapture itself: how it would happen and what their options might be. For instance, would they just—Whoosh!—be gone, or would their bodies float up for the whole world to see, rising into the blessed unknown like chicken feathers blown from below?
Bonnie found this chatter useless. Besides, what kept her up most nights was not the Rapture itself, but a far worse outcome: what if Mallory wasn’t raptured? What if God did not appreciate how Mallory had lived her life, how she had tied tubes together that He specifically created untied? And, she was a lesbian!
Some scholars, Bonnie had learned from the DVDs, thought that once the Rapture happened—Blamo!—Heaven was all full up and those left behind should go ahead and splurge on that houseboat they’ve always wanted before all the lakes and oceans boiled over. Others pointed to a bit of a loophole, one that would be unleashed upon the world with the unwrapping of the fifth seal: it gave a one-way ticket to all those martyred for their faith during the tribulation, and just like that—Presto!—Heaven could squeak in a few more souls.
Now, martyr was not a pleasant word to Bonnie, but maybe, she thought, after Mallory saw all those bodies floating up to the sky, after she felt the wind pick up and the ground shake and whichever river somewhere turned to blood, she’d take a moment to really think about her own salvation. Maybe there was still hope that her only daughter would arrive in Heaven a little later than she and John. Either way, Bonnie firmly believed that she would one day be face to face with the living God, and wouldn’t that just be something? What she couldn’t stomach, though, what she couldn’t quite bring herself to put into words during the Bible study, was the agonizing possibility of being separated from her daughter forever, and why wasn’t anyone in this basement talking about that?
Bonnie was pulled from her thinking when she heard John’s voice speaking to the room.
“I believe,” he said next to her, “in my heart of hearts that I will see the second coming of the Lord. That it will be very soon. Any moment now, really, and I’m just standing by.”
Then came prayer requests.
“I have one,” said Bonnie. “As many of you know, our daughter Mallory is in a relationship with a woman. She’s driving home from Chicago tomorrow evening, and I don’t usually ask for prayers, but I’d like you all to consider praying that God would open John’s heart, here.” She reached over to pat him on the knee. “He’s really had the hardest time with it all.” The group said amen and they nodded and waved and hugged their way back outside into the cemetery. John grabbed Bonnie by the arm.
“I told you not to bring up our personal business,” he said. He got back in the truck, and as they drove home Bonnie said, “I forgot, John. You know these pills make my mind wander sometimes.” When he didn’t answer, but before they hit the backroads, she made sure he heard her say, “And you hurt my arm, John. You really hurt my arm back there.”
◆
The next day the orchids were yellow and white. John was already out helping a neighbor pour a foundation in his side yard by the time Bonnie got out of bed around noon. When he returned she was dressed in a floral cowl neck sweater over black tights. John asked where she was going, and she replied, “I told you we’re going to the circus. Now get ready, or we’ll be late.”
“Seriously?” John asked, but when he saw that Bonnie wasn’t moving, he agreed. “Give me a few minutes.”
They picked up hamburgers and sweet tea on the way to I-75 because they were pressed for time. They remained silent while they ate. Light, powdery flakes began to fall against the windshield. When Bonnie saw that they were just five miles out from the arena, she pulled out her phone and began typing on the screen.
“I’m just going to check in with Mallory real quick. See where she is.”
John heard the ringing through speakers and realized she had connected to the truck’s Bluetooth. He kept one hand on the wheel and swiped at Bonnie’s arms with the other. “Don’t you dare do that!” he said, but she jerked the phone away from him and soon Mallory’s tinny voice filled the truck’s cab.
“You’re on squawk box, honey,” Bonnie said. “Where are you?”
“Is dad there?” Mallory replied. “Can he hear me?”
“He’s driving right now, hon. We’re on the way to the circus. Say something, John.”
John’s face was brushed with mauve from the setting sun. “I have nothing to say other than what I’ve already said to you both,” he replied. “Any child of Susan and some random man will never be my grandchild.”
“Quit that,” Bonnie said. “Sweetheart, he doesn’t mean that. We just wanted to call to tell you it’s beginning to spit snow here, so drive slow and just pull over if you get tired, OK?”
The silence in the cab lasted a beat longer than Bonnie anticipated, and she knew that Mallory had already decided her next move. John kept his eyes on the road while Bonnie’s heart grew as flat as an envelope.
“I’m only a few hours out from the city,” Mallory said. “If I turn around now, I can still get back before midnight, so how about we just try another time?”
“Your dad was only kidding, hon—” said Bonnie.
“—and it’s two grandchildren, Dad,” said Mallory. “Susan is having twins.”
The line clicked off, and Bonnie felt as though she had been hit with a sack of hammers in a pillow fight. The sun had fully set behind the smooth mountains in the near distance, and the sky was a thick, milky black. John signaled and drifted the truck to the approaching exit, and Bonnie put her phone away.
“You really are a monster, sometimes,” said Bonnie. “A big, dumb monster.”
“And you really should hear yourself, Bonnie. You know that?”
“A big dumb-dumb monster who can’t—”
“—You just do things without thinking, and half my time these days is spent responding to your impulsive—”
“—Even see how much he’s hurting his family.”
“You ambushed me, Bonnie.”
“Ambushed! Listen to you. Now you’re just being ridiculous.”
“Did you take your pills today?”
“Don’t you dare make this about me, John. Your only daughter—”
“—Just an observation was all,” John said, shrugging his shoulders and lifting his hands for a moment from the wheel.
“Did I take my pills? Did I take my pills?” Bonnie reached forward in the dark of the cab and lifted her purse from the floorboard. She pulled the bottle out and shook it in his face. “Yes, I took one, John. And you know what, I’m going to take another one. Just for you. Here. My John pill.”
Bonnie jiggled the bottle over her cupped palm and tossed her hand toward her mouth, followed by a washing of tea. She drew her elbows to her waist, lifted her chin, and her tongue counted more than one pill—five exactly, maybe six—all floating around inside her lip-grinning smile. She panicked for a moment, but swallowed her tea anyway because—Poof!—she deserved some happiness. Bonnie opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue at her husband, their faces in stop-motion from the pulsing of the passing street lights.
They arrived at the arena late and bothered. Trucks and SUVs sat in the parking lot like excess cargo containers waiting for shipment. John exited the truck and Bonnie had to navigate herself quickly to catch up with him. Inside, with John a step ahead, they walked the concrete pedestrian ring, checking their tickets against the faded blue letters and numbers on the grey walls. Every fifty steps or so, they caught snippets of cheers from the circus already in progress. Bonnie watched a man as thin as a toothpick in sequined white leggings fly through the air and disappear behind a concrete wall as she walked. When they arrived at their section, the arena floor was covered in orange and red lights. A lion with a mane of wet spaghetti noodles was being led into a cage with a woman wearing a robe sewn with raw chicken thighs.
“Remember,” John said into her ear. “This was your idea,” and she would have smacked his jaw clean off his face if she wasn’t so wobbly.
The tickets looked like fuzzy dominoes in her hand. John pointed out they still had another level of stairs to go—that Bonnie, in her haste, had purchased the cheap seats—and when they finally sat down she used the arm of the plastic chair to steady herself. The air smelled of peanuts and oily butter, and all around little boys waved clear plastic swords and little girls wore clear plastic tiaras. When did swords and tiaras happen to a circus, Bonnie thought?
John sat beside her with his arms crossed and watched as jugglers hurled sticks of fire through the air. Bonnie tried to enjoy herself even though the extra pills made all the edges around her sizzle. Down on the arena floor, five men in frilly-blue leotards wobbled on each other’s shoulders, while her mind was feverishly charting a new path forward. And—Wowza!—these pills, because her first thought was to tie John up in his sleep and cart him up to Chicago herself. Bonnie giggled at the thought of John all bundled up in rope, sitting square in the front of the cab, having to ask her for a drink through a sippy straw.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
The fizzy auras around the performers began to pulsate, and Bonnie allowed her head to drop forward. “I think I’m a little dizzy from being all the way up here,” she said, and John told her to sit tight while he went to get someone.
A minute passed, maybe five. Without John around she reassured herself that, despite all signs to the contrary, she had this under control. I can make it through this evening. I can check in with Mallory in the morning. I can look past the present to a future I will create.
John returned with a boy dressed in jeans and a neon-yellow polo shirt. A small flashlight dangled from his neck. “Ma’am” said the boy, “we can offer you a seat down on the arena floor if that would help.” The air stank for a moment of dung, then—Hurray!—here came the elephants. And then she was in a wheelchair right down on the arena floor where everything burned a little brighter, and wasn’t that just something?
Bonnie watched as three motorcycles rode up a ramp into a see-through iron sphere. The roaring vrrr of engines climbed tendrils up her legs, and the audience chanted in staccato cadence: Globe. Of. Death. Globe. Of. Death. Globe. Of. Death. A flash of fire and the motorcycles were whizzing around the walls, circling that same woman from before, except now she was wearing a camouflage tank top and shorts. My god, thought Bonnie, at the circus?
The arena plunged into darkness. The thrum of engines persisted, even though she could not see them in the blackness, and Bonnie looped her arm around John’s to pull him close as her eyes adjusted. White orbs dotted the void. Here and there, they created themselves out of nothing, like lightning bugs, and it was those silly swords, Bonnie realized, all lit up alongside the glowing, bobbling heads of hundreds of tiaraed little girls. Suddenly, she wanted the glowing toys for her own grandchildren, and she held out her arms to the little flecks of brightness because some felt so near she could touch them. John clenched his elbow onto hers. “What the hell, Bonnie? Stop that.”
The lights came back on and—Tada!—the motorcycles had vanished and the woman was now on top of the whole contraption wearing an American flag bikini. The applause hit Bonnie like a tsunami. Hundreds of clowns with yellow lips spilled out onto the floor—or maybe it was a handful, Bonnie couldn’t tell—but one ran right up and handed her a little plastic sword, another plopped a tiara on her head, and a third twirled her wheelchair around and rolled her backwards onto the arena floor.
Columns of fire shot up around her followed by an explosion of red, white, and blue confetti. The crowds’ faces blurred into little horizontal beads, like cotton candy, as the clown wheeled her around, and when the spinning slowed Bonnie tried to steady herself against the arm of the wheelchair. A man with trees for legs zoomed past, followed by a purple bear, and Bonnie thought she heard millions of blankets whipping in the wind, but it was just the swooshing snap of fiery hoops surrounding her.
A clown approached, crouched low to the ground, and soon Bonnie felt a force under her arms lifting her from the wheelchair. The sword she held in her lap fell to a ground that bubbled and cracked under her feet. She attempted a small step forward, but slipped in the sawdust, and could have sworn she left her body for a moment had her face not struck the ground. Bonnie watched from the arena floor as a golden bird with the head of a woman soared above her, arms outstretched, through the gauzy smoke, and right then she accepted that the edges of this world had, at long last, melted away.
The murmur in her chest returned, this time a battering ram pounding deep within—kerPLOW! kerPLOW! kerPLOW!—demanding from her a decision. Bonnie was about to give herself to the pull when the little plastic tiara slipped down on her brow. She thought of Mallory, of Susan and her future grandbabies, and even if it meant fighting her way out of this arena while John floated off alone into the sky, so be it. She would take her chances. For God had made all the mothers in the world, Bonnie realized, but He had never been one. She rose to one knee, grabbed the little plastic hilt sticking up from the sawdust, pulled her shoulder back to steady herself against the buzzing wildness, and raised her sword to the light.