Sam Weller - Shadow Show

As MacGregor and Silvie watched the scenes move across her back, the tattooed woman remained engaged by whatever she was writing. MacGregor tried repeatedly to get a glimpse of her notebook, but each time he adjusted his position to see over her shoulder or past her arm, she would shift slightly (deliberately?) and block his view. He was moving along the velvet rope, his eyes on her curved profile, when, without warning, tears began streaming down her cheeks. The hand holding the pen continued to move across the paper as she quietly cried.

MacGregor stepped back a few feet from the rope.

“Poor girl,” he said to Silvie. “It must be exhausting to be in a sideshow.”

“Well, at least she’s got a job,” Silvie said. “I worked with girls like this in Scouts.”

“Girls like what?”

“Girls without a solid upbringing,” Silvie whispered. “A job helps them make sense of their lives, helps ground them.”

MacGregor nodded. After being a Girl Scout herself for years, Silvie had volunteered as a troop leader, and she now sat on the local board of directors. She was a woman who cared about the people around her as much as she cared about the figures in the red and black columns at MacGregor Ball Bearing Inc.

“Let’s go look in the 4-H animal barns,” Silvie said, and moved toward the exit. “I love seeing which chickens and rabbits won the blue ribbons.”

MacGregor looked over his shoulder at the Illuminated Woman one last time and saw the father and son in the canoe again, except that now the canoe was plunging over a waterfall, and the fiberglass canoe was crashing onto the rocks. Half of the canoe bobbed in the frothy water where the limp bodies of the father and son floated. MacGregor didn’t turn away until Silvie took his hand and led him out of the tent.

That night, MacGregor lay alone in his bed, unable to sleep after the excitement of the day. He had tried to persuade Silvie to stay with him, but she’d wanted to go home and call her mother to tell her the good news. When MacGregor closed his eyes, he saw a brief image of Silvie’s face, but then that image wavered and he saw again the colorful visions on the Illuminated Woman’s back, the water flowing more dramatically, more realistically than real water had ever flowed. The sun shone on the river to make it sparkle, to reveal the gleaming fishes below, and the man and boy in the canoe sparkled too as they paddled. He saw once again their broken bodies at the bottom of the falls and felt again the sorrow he had experienced that afternoon, but he had never been afraid of sadness in a story. The last image, the ruined canoe bobbing alongside those bodies, made him think and worry and reflect. He didn’t know why the story of the canoe trip had been interrupted by the story of the train, unless someone from the train was going to see the tragic scene and make a wise observation.

He wondered what stories would play across his body if he had such a tattoo. Maybe the images would play out the history of ball bearings, culminating in his future successful development of new hybrid ceramic ball bearings that operated so smoothly they would last a thousand years without lubrication or replacement. Maybe an image would appear of his crowning achievement: a machine the size of a three-story building that purified polluted air using almost no energy—he and his father had invented the bubbling, humming antipollution machine during one of their jaunts on the river. He imagined cars that flew along the ground and then rose up into the sky effortlessly. He imagined a rocket ship taking off, its destination another galaxy. Then he saw Silvie shimmering in her wedding dress. He saw his mother’s wedding ring gleaming on her finger. He hoped he and Silvie would be as happy as his parents had been, growing closer and more affectionate over the years. He wanted Silvie to gaze upon him with pure delight, as his mother had gazed upon his father, as his father had gazed upon his mother in return.

The following afternoon, Silvie was tied up with an audit and had to stay late at work. MacGregor kissed her goodbye and started to go home but then decided to return to the fair. He walked along the midway with his hands in his pockets. He bought a short string of tickets and handed them over at the entrance to the tent of the Illuminated Woman. There was no one else inside. He approached her with his eyes focused on the grass so as not to get distracted.

“How are you doing that?” he asked from behind the velvet rope, but he got no response. “Pssst. Hey, miss? Please. Is there anything you can tell me?”

“Why are you interrupting me?” the young woman said, and her simple clear voice charmed MacGregor. She spoke with an unfamiliar accent, and he wondered where she was from. This afternoon she was reading a big book called Greek Mythology .

“How are you making your tattoo move?” he asked. “What’s the trick?”

“Can’t you see I’m working?” She barely glanced at him before shaking her head and going back to her reading. MacGregor saw that there was a light shining on the pages of the book. He realized that the light was coming from a tiny bulb she wore on her necklace. He admired it because he liked to read in bed, and something like that would come in handy. Silvie read too, but only for fifteen minutes each night, which was exactly how long it took her to read a chapter of one of her romance novels.

“Do you spend all day in this tent?”

“My aunt and I trade off. Not that it’s any of your business.”

“Don’t you get bored?”

“How could I be bored?” She nodded toward a stack of books and a smaller stack of spiral notebooks on the table next to her. MacGregor kept looking at her, and she finally put down her book, turned to him, and pushed her glasses up along the bridge of her nose. “What do you want?”

“A tattoo like yours. Just a small one.” He saw that her glasses were as thick as his own. His mother had told him he’d ruined his vision by reading in the dark.

“Do you want to be in a sideshow?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

“Heck, no. I’m a company president.”

“You’re too young to be any kind of president.” She glanced over at the entrance, as if to assure herself that nobody else was looking in.

He blushed. “I know. My father died, and I inherited the company. I shouldn’t admit it, but it doesn’t really play to my strengths.” It felt strange to say it out loud. “But I’m trying, because I know he’d want me to.”

“What about what you want?” she asked. “What would you be doing, you know, if you could do anything you wanted?”

“I’d be in space. On my way to Mars.”

“You’d better write to your senator, then. The human space program is in the toilet.” She softened her words with a smile, and he saw she had a blemish, maybe a pimple, on her chin. She unpinned her hair, which was almost as dark as Silvie’s but uneven, with stringy bangs. She combed her fingers through it, pulled it up again, and repinned it with her barrette. After all that, it looked the same as before.

“I have written my senator,” he said. “And my congressman. And the president.”

She continued to smile at him. “Your shirt is buttoned up wrong,” she said.

“Oh.” He unbuttoned and rebuttoned.

“Usually when men undress in my tent, I call security.”

“Oh.” MacGregor realized he should have turned away from her.

“So you think you want a tattoo like mine,” the young woman said. “Well, you’ll have to talk to Madame Needles in the fortune-telling tent. She’s my mom. Tell her you’re a company president. But don’t let her see your socks, because they don’t match.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“But don’t say I didn’t warn you. Madame Needles takes things very seriously. She won’t even pay me unless I take all my vitamins every day. She’s obsessed with vitamins, which means I get to burp up fish oil for the first two hours of every shift.”