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themselves, and now laughing and holding to each other, the two women alone in the night wildly clutching, grasping, trying to see, almost sure that they  did  see, the three things ricocheting off and away, the two shadows rushing, one fat,, one thin, and the piano blundering after, discordant and mindless, until they reached the street, where, instantly, the one overhead streetlamp died as if struck, and the shadows floundered on, pursued by the musical beast.
    And the two women, abandoned, looked down, exhausted with laughing until they wept and weeping until they laughed, until suddenly Zelda got a terrible look on her face as if shot.
    "My God!" she shouted in panic, reaching out. "Wait. We didn't mean, we don't want-don't go  forever!  Sure, go. so the neighbors here sleep. But once a year, you  hear?  Once
    a year, one night a year from tonight, and every year after that, come back. It shouldn't bother anyone so much. But we got to tell you all over again, huh? Come back and bring the box with you, and we'll be here waiting, won't we, Bella?"
    "Waiting, yes."
    There was a long silence from the steps leading down into an old black-and-white, silent Los Angeles.
    "You think they heard?"
    They listened.
    And from somewhere far off and down, there was the faintest explosion like the engine of an old jalopy knocking itself to life, and then the merest whisper of a lunatic music from a dark theater when they were very young. It faded.
    After a long while they climbed back up the steps, dabbing at their eyes with wet Kleenex. Then they turned for a final time to stare down into the night.
    "You know something?" said Zelda. "I think they  heard."

THE ELECTROCUTION
    She let him tie the black silk over her eyes and he knotted
    it and jerked it so tight that she gasped and said, "Loosen
    it, damn you, Johnny, loosen it, or I won't go on!'?
    "Sure," he said easily, and she smelled his sharp breath;
    while beyond; the crowd rustled against the rope barrier and
    the carnival tent flapped in the night wind, and off, there
    was a drift of calliope music and the rattle of a trap drum.
    Dimly, through the black silk, she could see the men, the boys, the few women, a good crowd, paying out dimes to
    see her strapped in this electric chair,  the electrodes on her
    wrists and neck, waiting.
    "There." Johnny's voice whispered through the blindfold. "That better?"
    She said nothing, but her hands gripped the ends of the
    wooden chair. She felt her pulse beating in her arms and
    neck.. Outside the pitchman yelled through his small cardboard
    megaphone and slapped his cane across the banner
    where Electra's portrait shivered in the wind: yellow hair,
    hard blue eyes, sharp chin, seated in her death-chair like
    Someone come for tea.
    With the black silk blinding her, it was easier to let her mind run back to wherever it wanted to go . . .
    The carnival was either setting up in a new town or letting go; its brown tents inhaling by day, exhaling its stale air by night as the canvases slid rustling down along the dark poles. And then?
    Last Monday night this young man with the long arms and the eager pink face bought three tickets to the sideshow and stood watching Electra three times as the electricity burned through her like blue fire while this young man strained at the rope barrier, and memorized her every move as she sat high up there on the platform, all fire and pale flesh.
    He came four nights in a row.
    "You got an audience, Ellie," said Johnny on the third night.
    "So I see," she said.
    "Don't pay no attention," said Johnny.
    "I won't," she said. "Why should I? Don't worry."
    After all, she'd done the act for years. Johnny slammed on the power, and it filled her from ankle to elbows to ears as he handed her the bright sword and she thrust it out blindly over the audience, smiling under her half mask, to let them tap shoulders and brows as the blue sparks crackled and spat. On the fourth night she shoved the sword far out toward