Regular People

by Amber Nelson

The two flying girls on the trapeze watched from under their umbrella the many screaming bodies under the big red tent and hoped that when they fell, and not to their doom, the tent poles would slip and the people would gasp into silence and stare and then go running to leave them to their own fates and the carnival would fail and the man in the big hat with the cane would weep and they could fly off into the sunset, but when they fell the people did not scream or sigh or go silent and the man in the big hat did not weep and the tent poles did not fall so they shot through the fabric ceiling, all of that red collapsing behind them, and flew off, a ways into the distance and watched the chaos, the churning red mass, like birth.

They held hands, like regular people, and waited for the dust to settle.