Cirque, an award-winning short story by Dominick Domingo

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Join is for an author reading of Cirque, a whimsically absurd short story about the power of imagination. Cirque placed in the 2020 Writer’s Digest Short Story Competition and has been analyzed in college-level Humanities courses for its form, structure and literary themes.

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To learn more and order Dominick's book Language of the Soul visit www.dominickdomingo.com/theseeker

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Episode Transcript

SPEAKER_00 (00:45):
Cirque.
The orphanage was a dusty placeand dimly lit.
No matter the time of day oryear, beams of speckled sunlight
dared enter only at obliqueangles, illuminating narrow
slivers of buckled, faded woodenfloors.
Arranged haphazardly to concealparticularly unsightly water

(01:06):
stains were great Persian rugswith fantastic designs, also
choked with dust.
As if to compete, the mustyaroma of mildew hung in the air,
a permanent resident ofWanderlodge home for children.
The must and soot were perfectlywarranted.
The orphanage was actually aVictorian cottage predating the

(01:27):
village of Slumber Cove itself.
The building's classification asa cottage was somewhat
misleading.
In truth, it stood austere andgrand, tiny shuttered windows
dwarfed by a colossal moorishspire like the Taj Mahal's.
Some of the other boys and girlsfound the place oppressive,
scary even, especially in therain.

(01:48):
I, on the other hand, saw andsmelled and heard and otherwise
sensed, nothing but magic.
Its nooks and crannies begged tobe explored, laundry chutes and
dumb waiters leading to unknownplaces, pointy gables that had
been converted into box rooms inattic space and then completely
forgotten.

(02:09):
My exhaustive exploration of thegrounds, of course, was done in
secret.
During playtime, I'd steal awayfrom the others and slip into
some dark corner or other.
Though it took an entirechildhood to fully discover the
place, the slow revelation, themagic of it, made all the lonely
waiting worthwhile.

(02:30):
There came a time when I did nothave to seek out magic.
It came to me.
At the age of seven, I wasabducted by a small band of
clowns, but only for a week.
They were your standard issuecircus clowns, joyfully sad,
provocative, creepy but notsinister or stabby, jubilant and

(02:51):
vaguely inappropriate.
They exhibited all the qualitiesone would want from a circus
clown.
Only they did not take me to theBig Top or a carnival.
Instead they took me to strangeexotic places far away from
buttered popcorn, cotton candy,and screaming children.
They took me to places withstrange names that could not be

(03:12):
found on any map, and placeswith no name at all, which I did
not bother looking for on a map.
Far away places where birds swamand fish flew, where lakes
reflected in skies and not theother way round.
I saw upside down sunsets thattickled the stars.
Looking at them I feltjubilantly sublime and sublimely

(03:34):
jubilant.
I felt ecstatic melancholy andsomber whimsy and a number of
other things difficult todescribe.
Later in life I would recallthem only vaguely, as if from a
dream, and yet never fullyforget them, as if from a
nightmare.
Wherever they came from orcontinued to dwell, the poetic

(03:58):
things I saw and felt hinted atwhat lay ahead.
All the horror and beauty lifepromised.
My final night with the clowns,though I did not know it would
be at the time, I saw the birthof a star.
The clowns never spoke a wordthe entire week, but somehow
they told me the star was mine.

(04:18):
That it was more than a ball ofgas.
It was a whole world awakening.
My world.
I was returned home after a weekin one piece.
The staff asked over and overagain where I'd been off to.
But I'd never spoken a wordsince arriving at the orphanage
shortly after birth, so mysilence was received as

(04:39):
customary.
A week later I was adopted outto a middle aged couple with
frosty silver hair.
They quickly became mom and pop,the first I'd ever known.
They came with a brother andsister, a built-in family.
I began speaking and stoppedseeing fish that flew or birds
that swam.

(05:00):
The clowns only visited in mydreams.
Until they didn't any more.
Eventually even my dreams wereclownless.
I studied business and became anentrepreneur.
I married and bought a home inthe suburbs with a white picket
fence and an orange tree in theyard.
My wife Zoe became pregnant ayear into our marriage.

(05:22):
The night Zoe was due to givebirth, or so we thought, her
labor turned out to be a falseone.
The hospital staff sent me homebut kept her for observation
should there be an encoreperformance.
The moon was hanging full andlow when I passed Slumbercove's
only orphanage.
Silvery light frosted thetreetops and the peaked roofs.

(05:44):
The great moorish spire ofWanderlodge home for children
thrust higher than all the rest,silhouetting itself against the
enormous cratered disk.
For some reason I pulled over.
Twenty minutes later I foundmyself still parked, gazing at
the iconic image like a postcardsent to me from childhood.

(06:05):
I'd driven by the landmarkcountless times, but rarely if
ever thought of my childhoodthere.
The long lonely waiting or themagic that made it all bearable.
But tonight, the half of mybrain that was not anxiously
fretting about impendingfatherhood, the responsibility
that came with it, the part ofme that was considering running

(06:25):
away, dwelt in that nostalgicplace known as childhood.
Just beyond the iridescent haloof the harvest moon, a tiny star
was burning brighter than theothers, signaling to me.
I recognized it as my star, theone bestowed on me by clowns.
The one whose birth marked theunfurling of a world.

(06:49):
It suddenly came to me.
When the clowns had appeared toabduct me, they'd not shown up
on foot or arrived in a taxi.
They'd climbed one by one fromthat old rusted trunk in the
orphanage's basement.
It had been off limits, but I'dfound a way to get in through a
crawl space in the backyard.
For some reason I found myselfstealing across the narrow

(07:10):
sidewalk, skirting past thegreat cypress hedge that hugged
the property, slinking past theporch and the kitchen windows,
careful to remain in shadow.
What are you doing?
I asked myself.
You've got a mortgage and mouthsto feed, sanity to preserve.
The crawl space was still there,its louvered hatch askew as it

(07:31):
had always been, partiallyshrouded by overgrown weeds.
I threw it aside as quietly aspossible, eased myself into the
mysterious dark.
The trunk was there, exactlywhere I'd left it, slid up
against a mildewed cement wallbeneath the stairs.
I gazed into the dark recess,wondering what it would take to

(07:53):
pry the thing open, a crowbar, asledgehammer?
And if the clowns were stillavailable, would I have the guts
to steal away with them andleave the life I knew behind?
Half of me wanted it more thananything.
The other half would miss mywife, my unborn son, the
connections I'd made in life.

(08:14):
Why couldn't one have both, Iwondered?
The magic and the connection forwhich it was a surrogate.
I'd learned in college most ofman's endeavors were driven by
fear.
But when we obeyed it or stuffedit away in a trunk, the clowns
went with it the inexplicable,the indefinable, the
inconvenient, the blindingbeauty between the cracks and

(08:38):
life's facade, the possibilitiesof true imagination that make
life worth living.
I decided to return to my carand my life.
But first, I'd slide the trunkaway from that mildewy wall just
a bit, out from under thesplintery stairs and into the
light.
That way, should some kid beadventurous enough to explore

(09:01):
the endless nooks and cranniesof the dusty old manor, he might
stumble upon it, and whatclimbed out of it might just
make all the lonely waitingworthwhile.