by Natalie Wollenweber
It began, more or less, with the advertisements strewn about town. These strange, shifting drawings, pasted to poles and buildings. They depicted human acrobats at one angle and sharp-toothed fish at another. When I pressed a finger to that rough parchment, an ache rose in me. At the time, I thought it was only curiosity. I’m not sure now.
I was in the final years of finishing school, at my parents’ insistence, but had returned home for the spring holiday. The incumbent summer meant little in our town, as we bordered the ocean and were shrouded in fog most days of the year. My family house stood in the center of town, always smelling of fresh paint, swollen with my mother’s favorite roses and silent except for the tinkling of china.
The improper and uncanny had no place here. My father, upon seeing the posters, said, “Don’t you dare visit that traveling freak show, Annalise. They’ll try to rob a young lady six ways to Sunday.”
“Yes, Father,” I said, prim as always. It never mattered how my blood churned or how spite rose in me like gray crags. I kept it all buttoned down under my ribs, invisible. I hadn’t always, but growing up had taught me the consequences of open disobedience. So I waited until they were both fast asleep to slip outside and down to the ocean.
The path down the cliffs was treacherous in the dark, but I’d walked this way all my life, and I made it to the shore without incident. I was greeted by the tantalizing smell of grilled fish and the subtler fragrance of saltwater taffy. The beach was populated with small tents made of odd blue-silver tarp, and though there were fewer visitors than expected, I still recognized some of my neighbors laughing together.
Woven through it all was a thin fog creeping in from the sea. The soft calliope music rolled over me, falling lightly into my ears like the melody of rain.
Giggling with delight at having broken the rules, I went in search of performances. Oddly, the roiling fog made it difficult to tell the difference between performer and guest. Everyone seemed to blur into an amorphous being, many-limbed and laughing.
Eventually, I spotted a juggler by the water, letting the tide roll up over her feet. Her green dress was tattered as if it had survived shipwreck, and she wore a driftwood mask that hid all but pale eyes. It was hard to discern all the objects she juggled: pieces of glass, driftwood, oyster shells, all shifting and growing as they flew.
The juggler laughed. As the objects fell back into her hands, I saw they had become bloated human heads, the flesh warped and eaten away, exposing rotten teeth and bleached bone. And yet, their eyes blinked and locked on me.
Of course, I shrieked and ran. But by the time I reached the tents, I had already half-convinced myself it had been an illusion, nothing more. A trick to frighten guileless girls. Well, I would not let them scare me away that easily.
I wandered through the crowd, encountering a stilt-walker with a pink, featureless form, thin and bending at odd angles. Her veins and lungs shone red through her skin. Nearby were two painted acrobats tumbling and lifting each other, but their limbs moved in impossible ways, curling and stretching. The smaller acrobat lifted his partner in bridal fashion, and then broke his neck in one swift crack. But even as the crowd gasped, the murdered acrobat stood back up, head rolling to the side, and smiled. When he bowed, his head swung to and fro, the snapped bones jutting out of the flesh.
It was all so terribly strange and vibrant. My house was pale and rigid, a place for everything and everything in its place. This circus teemed with color, real as my guts.
I moved on to a food stand and bought some taffy. It was peppermint-striped, and it tasted somehow sweet and bitter at once, filling me with the pure sensation of lying in ice-cold waves, salt all in my mouth. The organ music caught me again, louder and warmer than before, and I spun in time with it, feeling as if the harmony itself had taken my hand. I never danced like this in my normal life.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder.
I jerked around to face a female clown—but one far from the conventional figure of most circuses. She wore a sagging dark gown, made of some unfamiliar fur, and all her exposed skin was painted in silvery scales.
“Good evening,” I said. Politeness was carved into me at this point.
The clown tilted her head and made no reply. Still, she seemed happy to be addressed: she pantomimed delight, gray lips stretching as far as they would go on both sides, and placed both hands in mine. Her flesh had the rough, wet texture of a hooked fish, and up close, I could see that her dress was not fur, but algae.
She tugged my hand, and something compelled me to follow. I’m not sure if it was the charisma of the circus, worming into my stomach, or my reluctance to return home without uncovering every mystery.
Or the knowledge that I was to be sent back to school, and given a path to walk from there, straight and narrow, with none of the old friends I’d tried to cling to. They all ran away from this town long ago, on to better things, and none of them thought to help me escape too.
Looking back on this walk through the dark, with the odd clown at my side, I suppose I could have been more afraid. But my heart thudded more from excitement than fear. I felt like an explorer invited to see how far down the otherworld went.
We strode alongside the incumbent tide. Somewhere along the way, I removed my shoes, and the sand licked my feet like a rough tongue, while the water tried to swallow me up. These waves were different from those I’d known all my life. They seemed to rise and fall in time with the calliope music, and I had the sense of a great mass in their center: a shifting form with no true beginning or end.
A corresponding ache went through my stomach, keener than hunger.
“Where are we going?” I asked my new friend.
She mimed opening a present, pallid eyes widening in exaggerated surprise. We walked to the end of the shore, where sand met jagged rock. I had begun shivering by this point, the fog and glacial water sinking into my bones.
I was led to a lonely booth that seemed built out of the cliff, constructed of shale instead of wood; I wondered how the fragile stone held together so well. Inside the booth was a young woman, moon-pale. A short veil in the shape of a jellyfish neatly hid her eyes. But I could see into her white-painted mouth: she had a throat that seemed to stretch, dark and deep.
She said, “Welcome, dearest.”
I took one step closer, remaining out of reach. Covering my uncertainty with a brash tone, I said, “I suppose you’ll divine my future now?”
“Your present,” she corrected gently. She reached into a hidden compartment, removing a mallet and a small red crab. The crab writhed in her hand, pincers raised as if in supplication. A second later, the mallet came down, crushing its body and scattering broken pieces of shell.
I was repulsed, of course, but the ache in my stomach was a fishing line, tugging me forward. My feet moved, unbidden, and I stared down at the pungent map of crab guts.
“You are choked and wasted in the sunlight,” the fortune-teller said, tracing the lines of broken shell as if reading from a page. “All the passion squeezed from the rind of your chest.”
I made no reply. I knew it was true; I knew how the rules and china cups and pastel gowns were conspiring to press me down into a diamond, small and perfect and unlike myself.
“But there is escape.” She pointed to an intact claw. “If one is bold enough to grasp it.”
“How?” I burst out. “All I know how to do is hide the ache.”
She smiled then, open-mouthed, so I could see the chitinous creatures crawling up her throat, heart-red like tiny moving organs. And she lifted her veil.
Even now, it’s difficult to describe what I saw. At first, her eyes were roiling pits full of seawater. Then monsters lived inside them, calling for me in strange tongues. Then I saw the circus staring out of her skull, the circus of hallowed tides, an entire sacred beast crammed inside every performer. It was her; she was its mouth.
“How?” she repeated after me, voice gone thick as the little crabs skittered on her tongue. “You let us come all the way inside, of course.”
My breath caught, and my heart stuttered. I knew in that instant that it was my choice. That I could still return home, mostly the same girl who had left. I could go to school and say the correct words, hold my spine steady and let the faded wallpaper and old rituals smother me.
The clown placed a gentle arm around me. I wasn’t sure if it was compassion or confinement, but I did not try to run. I waited, as the other performers appeared, one-by-one. The acrobats with their broken necks, the stilt-walker with his white and wormy limbs. The juggler had removed his wooden mask. Beneath it, ghost shrimp swarmed his skull, crawling through the sockets. More people came after him, some with their bodies torn in two and all their organs hanging out, others with sharp teeth or tentacles or squirming skin.
If I ran, my soul would remain my own.
Then again, had it ever been my own? And if it was, would it remain so, through all the schooling and the proposals that would inevitably follow? I knew what had always been expected of me, and I knew that my life would be a series of cold, perfect houses.
I turned to the clown. “What do I have to do?”
She stared at me with something like gratitude. Then she pulled her skin off.
I’m making it seem like a quick thing; it wasn’t. She started at the tip of her head, peeling off the edges of her scalp. Her face came free with little effort, but the rest took longer. Her skin got stuck around the elbows, and she tugged impatiently, like a woman removing satin gloves.
It was this mundane detail that convinced the final part of my brain: there was no carnival illusion. This was really happening to me.
My breath hammered against my teeth. A sense of fatality took over, an immersion in cleansing waters. This is the right choice, I told myself, even as another voice whispered, but you ate their food and absorbed their music. Is this your choice or one they wove for you?
It was almost enough to make me run. But the organ music got into my heart. I could feel it pumping in each chamber, twinning with my blood. And through that music, I felt the heartbeats of every other person there. All irregular and shuddering and gloriously inhuman. Beyond all the ordinary, petty rules.
Finally, the clown got her skin down to her ankles and stepped out, as casual as kicking off slippers. Her naked sinew was wet and pink, and I could see her organs pulsing in her translucent chest. Instead of lungs, two gills heaved in and out.
She handed me her empty skin. I took it. What else could I do?
It was a perfect fit.
Swaddled within, I breathed seashore and brine. My human brain burst, and my soul split into a vast and writhing thing, grander than I ever dreamed to be. Our mistress in the tides filled my skull with all her insistent melodies. They play on without end.
I am one of the circus’s many limbs, churning and grasping, and I am no longer small.
Does my past sound familiar to you? Do you feel the same pressures laced around your ribs, all the petty rules hammered into you since birth? I have become skilled in recognizing those like you, when you wander into my music. Don’t be afraid.
Come, take my hand, and see what new shapes you might stretch into.
© Natalie Wollenweber 2026
Natalie Wollenweber is a writer and lover of gothic and fantastical fiction. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San José State University. In her writing, she likes to explore macabre folklore, witches, and haunted places. Her work has appeared in Red Wheelbarrow, Corvid Queen, Dracula Beyond Stoker, and GigaNotoSaurus.
