is this your card?
by Caroline Huckeba
The circus smells like popcorn oil and pennies. The air outside the tent hangs heavy with July, the kind of heat that melts your makeup before your act even starts. I paint on my smile anyway. Thick white grease, cherry red lips.
From behind the curtain, I watch him—the magician. Always the magician, never his real name. His cape shines like oil under the lights, his hands slick with sleight. Cards flicker through the air, a fast red-and-black rain. One lands near my shoe, face-up: the Queen of Hearts. I slip it into my pocket, a souvenir. His favorite trick, my secret keepsake. Rabbits wriggle out of his hat, soft as the cotton stuffing inside my gloves. Above him, the trapeze girl swings like a pendulum, her sequins flashing as if time itself blinks.
Then comes the sword. A long, gleaming thing. He tips his head back and swallows slow, slow, slow. The audience gasps, but I hold my breath. In that moment, I think: I will have him.
As though performing a feat of prestidigitation. But what’s the trick? I wonder, as his tongue disappears into my mouth. Poof. We’re in bed. It really happens that fast. I’m not sure how we got there. The tent folds itself away, the sawdust floor turns to sheets. One moment he’s inside me, the next—gone. Just gone. In his place, an indentation on the pillow, a sour mildew smell, a faint heartbeat pulsing in my head like applause after a failed trick.
Maybe now he’s the bunny, and I’m the hat. Maybe, with a little abracadabra, I can pull him out whenever I please.
But magic fades fast out here. The circus closes that fall, no crowds, no coins, no curtain calls. I pack up my greasepaint and stay in town, where people wear jeans instead of sequins.
That’s where I meet the geek. He bites the heads off chicken wings at the bar, not live ones anymore, but it’s close enough. He’s not exciting like the magician, but there’s something steady in him. Something human. I find magic in the way he washes dishes, hums to the radio, calls me Annie like I’m someone real.
Soon I like the bricklayer enough to consider loving him. When he asks me to move in, I don’t say yes, exactly—but I kiss him long enough that it feels like a contract. We undress like shedding skin: a t-shirt in the living room, a lace bra in the hallway, boxer-briefs at the foot of the bed.
Under the covers, he studies me, kissing each inch like a stamp of approval. When he moves between my legs, I wait for that particular kind of pleasure—the one I thought only the magician could conjure. But it doesn’t come. He doesn’t move at all.
“You okay down there?” I ask.
Silence. Then a rustle. He pulls something from between my thighs.
A playing card. The queen of hearts.
Photo of Caroline Huckeba
BIO: Caroline Huckeba is a writer, registered behavioral therapist, dancer, and filmmaker based in Dallas, Texas. She holds a B.S. in Psychology with a Creative Writing minor from the University of Texas at Dallas, where she studied narrative, mental health, and the spaces where psychology and storytelling overlap. She is currently a psychology graduate student and has prose reading, editing, and staff writing experience. Her fiction work has been published in Verusmy Magazine and Rappahannock Review.