Fear mask: porcelain, maroon watercolour, human hair.
Check your skin at the door.
That’s where you’ll find me, a mask affixed to my skull.
The people who come to our circus are late-night lurkers: insomniacs in pajamas, goth girls waiting in alleyways to get a glimpse of their favourite bassist, grad students running on caffeine and literary theory.
“Will it hurt?” asks a girl with owl-eyes and a septum piercing. Behind her, another girl smirks at my mask and whispers something into her friend’s hair.
“Just a pinch,” I tell them. It’s the same lie a doctor tells a patient before plunging the hypodermic muscle into a nerve. Peeling your epidermis off hurts a lot. It doesn’t have to, but the pain is part of the experience. It makes it feel real, like they paid to touch death for a midnight. Otherwise, they’d think we were a cheap scam with good special effects.
After I’ve taken their skins, I give them each a ticket. “Don’t lose these,” I tell them, trying to convey seriousness with my tone, but they stare at the silent scream of my mouth and giggle.
They turn toward the velvet curtain, summoned by the scent of gunpowder and decaying roses. The first ring is for tourists, partiers just looking for one more drink, one more smile. The tents are made from animal bones and black orchids and fragments of sharp, glittering seashells. They offer glimpses of acrobatic skeletons and life-size puppets and fire breathers.
To enter the second ring, you must offer the Gatekeeper a gift. It’s different for each person: a button or a sterling silver earring, a single, perfect flower or a suitcase filled with cash. Whatever they can afford, and whatever the Gatekeeper wants. The second ring is where you’ll find the playfully dangerous acts—a carousel that trades memories to let you ride the bones of a chimaera, the fortune teller who drains life energy. The regulars come here, obsessed with their future or their past, crawling towards the grave. They come back with blood under their fingernails and dirt crusted on the insides of their eye sockets. They can’t remember how it happened, and they’ll be back for more the next night.
The third ring requires sacrifice. I’ve never seen it, but the shadows whisper that you can find anything and everything there—a beaded bracelet you lost as a child or the hair of your dead great-aunt; an alchemist who mixes vengeance and nightmares in a thimble; an illusionist who can gift you with horrors and hauntings that scream in your bones for years after you leave us. Rumour has it that few people leave the third ring, and if they do, they’re changed utterly, and we never see them again.
I watch the bones of the girls pass through the curtain. First ringers for sure. The kind to whisper Bloody Mary in front of a mirror and shriek behind martini glasses. I keep their skins near the front of the closet.
They won’t be here for long.
Loathing mask: recycled water bottles, cerulean ink, turkey feathers.
Nobody speaks to me for long—I’m a Hallowe’en prop, a puppet, an object for their entertainment.
But she does.
“Do you like working here? How long have you been dead?” She asks question after question, none of which I can answer.
“May I check your coat?” I say instead.
The boy she’s with rolls his eyes. He has pouty lips and a weak chin, but that won’t matter when he’s a corpse. “It’s just a robot, a gimmick. Don’t talk to it.”
I’m not an it, but he’s the client. “Enjoy the circus!”
He passes through the curtain without waiting, leaving her to struggle with the delicate veins at her wrists and ankles.
“He sucks,” she tells me. “I’m breaking up with him.”
“That’s what they always say.”
“You a therapist, or what?”
I shrug. “You want advice, try the fortune teller.”
“I’d rather talk to you.”
“I’m just the coat check attendant.”
“How many masks do you have?”
“How many do you have?”
She laughs. “Do they train you to say that? Is there, like, a handbook? You know when you call a toll-free number, and the person on the other side has a script to follow? Let me guess, you used to be an actor.”
“Mortician.” Sometimes I say ‘taxidermist;’ whatever I think they want to hear.
“Hot.” She grins, and there’s lipstick smudged across her front teeth. It makes me like her better.
I let her sign my mask in eyeliner the colour of asphalt.
Fury mask: red velvet, glass beads, copper wire.
She’s back again. I have this itch I can’t get rid of—like a bee stinger embedded in skin. I’m only bone, and yet I feel a phantom rash spread across my chest as she walks up to me, like a peeling sunburn or poison ivy.
“Can I try them on?”
She slips into the skin of a middle-aged board member for the third most lucrative weapons manufacturer, and then a well-known starlet with a conspicuous birth mark on her upper left thigh. She keeps quoting lines from the starlet’s most recent vampire comedy at me— “If you bite me I’ll muzzle you like my dog, darling. I bet you’d look lovely in a leather harness.” I have to stop myself from laughing at her bad impressions, and the way the skin doesn’t quite fit her bone structure.
I even let her try on the old, moth-eaten skin of a former politician who never stumbled back to retrieve it after a night that glittered with diamonds and grave dirt. Soon I’ll toss it in the Lost & Found. The costume designer will probably use it for the mimes, unless the puppet master gets there first. They keep trying to bribe me with gold pelvic chains and silk neckties, but I take my vocation seriously. Lost & Found is first come first served, like everything in death.
“Why do I smell like my grandma’s attic?” she asks, studying her receding hairline in the tarnished mirror that dangles on silver wires over the entranceway.
“Dead skin and too much hand cream,” I tell her.
“Gross.”
“You picked it.”
“I thought it would be mummified or pickled or something.”
“Pickled?”
She shrugs, already tugging off the ensemble. She’s torn the right wrist a little bit, but I don’t think anyone will notice.
When she disappears into the circus, it feels like she’s taken something valuable with her.
Joy mask: papier mache, newsprint, cadmium acrylic.
The next night, she brings me a gift: a half-mask of white lace with peacock feathers erupting from the edges like glittering blue and green fireworks.
“I don’t accept bribes,” I say automatically.
She frowns. “It’s not a bribe. Don’t you know what a gift is? I thought you liked masks.” She sounds sad, and I hate that I’m the reason for it. I hate that I’ve memorized the map of veins on the backs of her hands.
“What’s the emotion?” I study the carefully hand-sewn lace, my thumb brushing over the soft spines of a feather.
“Courage,” she says, which doesn’t make any sense, but neither does the way my fingers curl around the scrap of fabric possessively. I already know it’s mine.
Loathing mask: woven willow branches, funeral shroud, matchsticks, blood type AB negative.
“I’m going on ahead.” Her boyfriend sounds excited today, and I wonder what caught his attention—the crows that spell out curses with their wings, or the contortionist.
She calls after him, “I’ll see you at the gate, babe!” Her voice sounds high pitched and fake, sweet as aspartame. His neck and arms are draped in gold.
She stares at me for a long time. I stare back.
“You brought him here on purpose,” I say finally.
She flashes me a grin that’s part guilty, part proud. I feel a sudden, delirious rush of envy that she can twist her features to capture that much nuance. All I have are my bones and my masks. Death never seemed so boring.
She lowers her voice. “I heard you need a sacrifice to enter the third ring.”
I want to tell her, Don’t go there, it will ruin you. I want to tell her, Stay here with me.
I don’t say anything.
She walks through the curtain.
Grief mask: paper, gold sequins, black marker, googly eyes.
On good days, I imagine her riding the carousel in endless circles, immortal and empty as a tomb.
On bad days, I see her bones on display in the curiosity shop.
Every day I check on her skin to make sure it isn’t crusted over with lichen and mold. I keep it clean for her, just in case she ever comes back.
Paranoia mask: clay, graphite oil paint, eggshells.
“Coat, please,” she says, handing me a pair of ticket stubs.
I don’t look at her; I don’t want to know what she’s become. At least she’s back. At least she’s alive (I feel my own undeath like a current dragging me under, like I’m drowning in a gold-black sea).
One of the skins is hers. I know it by now, of course: the curve of her mouth, the glossy shine of her marbled eyes. The other is unfamiliar—old and faded and furred in dust.
“This isn’t your boyfriend’s,” I murmur.
“It’s not,” she says, “It’s yours.”
My spine straightens, and I feel it creak under the weight of my movements. “I don’t have a skin anymore.” I look at her. She has a hairline fracture in her left ulna, and her movements are sharp and erratic—almost twitchy. “You’re hurt! You—”
Her voice is sharp as the scalpel we use on stubborn bodies. “We have to go. Now.”
I put on the skin. It feels hot and sticky. There’s a scar across one knuckle, and I don’t understand how it can be mine.
“Don’t look back,” she tells me.
I follow her through the threshold of the circus and into the stumbling dark of night. Then something strange happens: my heart starts to beat. I press my palm to my chest.
“Drink this,” she says, and shoves a small, glass bottle into my palm. My palm—freckles and scars and soft hairs; fingernails with old dirt under them and calcium flecks on cyanosis.
The liquid is pale as withered rose petals, with the scent of nettle and lemongrass and something else, something pungent and earthy. A single blot clot is suspended in the centre of the wine: a sun in a red-tinted galaxy, haloed by dried leaves, fingernail clippings, and neurons.
I drink it.
The memories come back to me in a rush, a flood of information snapping through my synapses. I feel dizzy. My skin itches. My lips are cracking. Little pains and tremors I haven’t felt in years.
That night, we’d been the girls waiting for a punk band in a dark alleyway. She’d stayed behind, and I’d gone ahead, chasing excitement or maybe oblivion. I’d checked my coat at the door—a different skeleton at the desk, although I can’t remember the shape of their collarbone anymore—walked past the acrobats juggling animal bones, the crows warning me to go back, and gifted the Gatekeeper my ticket stub (after all, who needed a ticket? I knew what my body looked like).
I’d taken so many rides on the carousel I forgot who I was. The performers gave me a new identity, a new purpose.
Coat check girl.
“You found me,” I say softly, salt stinging the corners of my eyes. She’d ventured into the underworld again and again, looking for me, my memories, and my ticket. And she found us.
I’m dirty and unwashed and smell stale and old—almost as bad as the politician’s skin with tears at the wrists and knees. I have a dried scab on my lip that starts oozing when I smile. The pain is sharp and delicious, and the taste of iron on my tongue is sweet as honey. The blood doesn’t stop her from pulling me into her arms and pressing her mouth against mine.
“I found you,” she says.
She ties the lace mask around my head and leads me back to life.
Adan Jerreat Poole is a queer author living in Kitchener, Canada. Their YA fantasy novels, The Girl of Hawthorn and Glass (2020) and The Boi of Feather and Steel (2021) were published with Dundurn Press. Their short fiction has appeared in The New Quarterly, Soliloquies, Space and Time Magazine, and NonBinary Review.
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