Bigtop part 2

     "Thelma's unhappy."
     "She loves you, Slim."
     Angel and slim were married in June. They'd borrowed the camp pick-up outside Spokane, and found a preacher with papers. Few attended, none they knew. A stranger with half a beard and possibly fleas, gave Angel away. The town hall featured lime-green wainscoting that had been roughly trundled across a coffee-stained brown wall with the chuckling pattern of coffee cup stains mysteriously imprinted upon its surface. The motto on the far wall was painted by hand in a similar brown: "near nature, near perfect" all in lower case. This made Angel smile, but she didn't know why.
     It didn't take long after that.
     Thelma.
     A broken hearted bearded lady: Three-hundred and sixty five pounds of coarse-haired blubbering blubber. It doesn't sell.  Bad draw spreads from tent to tent. Drindle The Vampire Boy gets stuck in his coffin.  Soon the barker is too pointy, threatening. The mid-way chief is picking pockets, and the lion tamer has secretly sacrifices  his left hand to Jangles, the ferocious Bengal tiger, on a two a.m. binge over the loss of his secret love (Slim again).
      Meanwhile, angel flew high and far and caught the stars in her hair at midnight while Slim grew stronger and more daring by the day. His sixteen-sword act defied plausibility; all that sharp steel swirling, a vortex of razor-sharp defiance swallowing the laws of physics inches from Slim's keen grin - five times a night!
    "Newton's third law,"
    Slim was saying to Angel across the old picnic table behind the commissary, drunk on dry vermouth, sweet love and dusty-shelled peanuts.
    "Pertaining to motion; for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And of course, what is all life and all of existence really, but a complex series of motions on this stage," he wriggled about which made. Angel snort loudly, "this time-space ballet! This..," he searched for the word, found it, smiled slyly, "Circus!"
   Angel laughed so hard she fell off the picnic table.

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