Read Mechanique for Free Online Page B

cartwheel, the tails fly out and up, and the tumblers look like little flames.
    The jugglers wear green and grey and red and blue in parti-color, so their arms are a blur of color as they throw and catch. These costumes are easy to maintain. You can make them with scraps; you can make them up for anyone out of whatever you find.
    The girls on the trapeze wear blue—grey-blue for Elena, ice-blue for Nayah to set off her dark skin, navy for Ying (“You look young enough without wearing a girl’s blue,” said Elena). Each girl has made her own, fighting for the personality the greasepaint takes away. Sometimes they wear white stockings, the feet cut off for movement; when times are lean, they powder their legs white instead.
    Bird wears a dove-grey tunic laced tighter than a mummy, and cast-off stockings from the girls on the trapeze. (“It doesn’t matter about the tears,” said Boss when she handed them over, before Bird could protest. “They won’t clap no matter what you wear, so we might as well save the money.”)
    Sometimes in the summer she ties strips of canvas to her feet, so Stenos can hold her without slipping.
    Stenos wears plain black, head to toe. Against the pale floor he stands out more than she does; he tosses and catches her in sharp silhouette, and she hovers above him like a ghost.
    Alec wore plain canvas pants; not that anyone ever noticed them.

18.
    I’ll never understand how there could have been a fall for Alec.
    He had wings.
    He came in at the grand finale. He swooped from the rigging where no one was watching, hovered in place for as long as the applause lasted. Every night, Alec flew from the ceiling. Every time I saw it—every time I even heard it from the yard, his feathers singing inside the tent—I stopped breathing.
    When he fell, I saw it.
    I had fought for a space in the front of the crowd, and even as I watched him plummeting I couldn’t believe it. I waited for him to open his wings long after he had been flattened.
    The girls were up on the bars when it happened. In those days they crawled up Big Tom and Big George at the end of their act, and each girl threw one arm out to frame his descent for the big finish, and they were all poised with their flourishes when he slid off the bar, wings closed, and dropped.
    Elena saw it happening a moment earlier than anyone else—she twisted and jumped for him in a single motion. She didn’t reach him in time, and if Big Tom hadn’t caught her feet with his feet there would have been two corpses.
    (Why she helped him, I didn’t know. She’d never moved a toe for any of the rest of us.)
    Ying scrambled down the rigging so fast that it looked to me like she and Alec hit the ground at the same time. Ayar was already running inside from the yard; the crowd, realizing something was wrong, was already on its feet, trying to get a better look at who had died. A few screams floated through the tent like in a bad dream.
    Now, everyone says it must have been loud—“A panic,” Ayar would say later, shaking his head, and if the aerialists ever talk about it they say the noise was deafening.
    That’s not what I remember, though I don’t know if it’s just because time has made some sounds fade and some sounds clearer. Who knows what it was really like. People can remember anything.
    I only remember the notes his wings made as the feathers scraped against one another when he crashed, as they sliced through the dust and pierced the ground.
    Ayar carried him out of the tent, and Ying and I ran out with him, past the dancing girls and out into the yard where Boss was already waiting.
    Jonah was still near the flatbed truck, and he opened the back gate so Ayar could lay Alec’s body out.
    We crowded the back of the truck. By then Elena was outside also, her face flickering into view from between people’s elbows as she cut through the crowd and hoisted herself up onto the truck bed fence with one hand. Someone had unhooked Big George from his