Fleeing the Big Top

“Pack your suitcase, Angie.”

“Where we going?”

“A greyhound’ll be at the depot in ten minutes. You and me gotta be on it.”

“I’m in costume.” Angie adjusted her tiara. “We’ve spent half our lives doing this.”

“What’s so great about this?” Jed drop-kicked his star-spangled helmet. “Living out of suitcases. Being shot from a cannon three times a day.”

“Circus life has its ups and downs,” Angie said. “What would we do on the outside?”

“Transferrable skills, baby. We could work for a rental company–nobody can throw up tents as fast as us. Or join the army. Soldiers scale cliffs without a net. Plus, we work for scale.”

“Trading one form of servitude for another?”

“We’ll go to Hollywood then. Stars can’t do stunts. Their contracts won’t allow it.”

“Jed, does any part of me remind you of Sofía Vergara?”

“Sofía who?”

Angie sighed. “I don’t have the thorax to stand in for any of those chippies.”

“Are you kidding? You poured into that sequined leotard makes me want to put the bite on ya right now.”

Angie clutched her red lipstick. “Any second now, Argos will race in here, demanding to know why the dog-and-pony show’s not front and center.”

Applause rippled from the big top.

“Argos is still doing his schtick. We gotta go. The greyhound?” Jed grabbed her lipstick, scrawling something on the mirror:

GOOD-BY, U CUR. WER SIK OF THE CIRKUS.

GIT YORESELF A NU PAIR OF FLEAS.