Horror In Dreamland

“Dreamland is dying. Burlesque performances and sideshows aren’t what they used to be,” Amelie said to the wide-eyed troupe of discarded souls. “We have to keep our show on top. It’s 1941, after all. We’re in a new era, boys!” She slammed her hands down on the thick oak table erected in the center of the performer’s cabin. Dreamland had been a burlesque, sideshow hybrid in the Louisiana Bayou for going on thirty years. Amelie wasn’t about to let it die off now.

“Folks used to come from as far as Shreveport to see us perform, Amelie. Filled up the stands every night,” said a gauntly frail man from the corner of the tent. Salvatore was the sideshow headliner, a fire-eating extravaganza. He always went on before the Burlesque portion to get the crowd’s energy up, though you’d never expect it unless you saw him in a performance. Thick wool gloves covered his hands even on the hottest Louisiana day, never one to expose his hands to anything but fire. “Folks don’t come to Thibodaux anymore. We’re lucky to get a handful in the audience on a Saturday show, Amelie. It doesn't matter how much we do; they ain’t comin’ anymore.”

Sal isn’t wrong, she thought. The Audience was getting thinner and thinner every week. Amelie got a sudden burst of encouragement and turned to the group of misfits. “Then we find something new, fellas. Let’s put our heads together and think up somethin’ that will get everyone in Thibodaux out here and keep them coming.” She slapped the table once more and jumped up, her sheer caftan jumping up mere seconds after her, flowing behind as she paced in front of the group. Amelie had been in charge of Dreamland longer than anyone had before her.

She walked into the tent at a mere sixteen years old in search of an escape from her life in Ramseur, Mississippi. Her father was an abusive man, and her momma couldn’t take it. When Amelie was just eight years old, her mother ate a medicine cabinet’s worth of pills and died with a whiskey bottle in her hand. Amelie spent her days alone and her nights hiding from her drunk father in one of the many hiding places Amelie had found worked best. She made due until she couldn’t take it anymore than her mother could’ve, but Amelie wasn’t going to follow in her mother’s footsteps. She wanted out, but she wanted to live her life, experience love, lust, and everything worth living for. Amelie waited until a night that her father came home with just a few too many sheets to the wind. It happened once in a while, between the nights that he came home in the mood to take out his anger on her. On the nights where he could barely make it through the thin particle board door of the trailer home they inhabited, Amelie could take solace in his inability to function.

He would crawl to the broken sofa bed in the corner of the living room and pass out, and this night was no different. This night was different for Amelie, though. She waited to see her father’s breath hasten until he was in a sleep too deep to know what was coming his way. She waited around the corner with one of the decorative pillows her mother left behind. She saw her moment come around and took it. She jumped onto her father, heaving all of her body weight onto his torso and the pillow over his face. It took a few minutes of him bucking her like a bull fighting for its life, but eventually, the movements stopped along with her father’s breathing. Amelie removed the pillow from his face and took one final look at a man that had caused her and her mother so much pain. She slapped his lifeless, blue-hued face as hard as she could and tossed the pillow back into the closet where she found it.

Her father was on the thinner side of the men she had seen, and Amelie knew she could get him to the old barn out back of the house without any problem. Since her mother died, the barn on the property had gone unused. What once held two bright white horses that Evelyn adored riding into the field, and a pig named Rusty that Amelie found, was now an empty memory, falling down around itself. Amelie resented her father. Not just for the abuse, she endured every day but also for taking her mother’s spark and everything she loved away from her. The barn behind the trailer used to remind Amelie of her mother in the months after she passed, but when her father took out the shotgun from the shed in a drunken stupor and dropped both of the horses in cold blood, Amelie couldn’t bring herself to look at it again. She hated her father; despised him, even. She was finally ready to make things right for her mother and for herself.

Amelie grabbed her father’s lifeless ankles and pulled him along behind her, sure to smack his skull against every object in the way. She pushed the trailer’s screen door open and tugged with everything she had until her father’s head was bouncing down the stairs. What she had done made her no better than her father, but Amelie didn’t care. “Nobody will find out or care if they do,” she said aloud to herself. Her father had no brothers, and his parents, Amelie’s estranged grandparents that she didn’t care for in the slightest, had died years ago.

Nobody will come looking for a dead, worthless man.

She knew nobody would care about him if they found him, but she was going to be sure there wouldn’t be anything left of him to find. Amelie got her father’s frame across the backyard and to the crumbling barn doors. It took one heave of Amelie’s meager frame to get the door to fall in front of her. She dragged her father over the wooden planks and dropped him nearest the pair of horse skulls on the ground. It seemed all too fitting that her father never cared enough to bury the animals as any decent human would. His skull would make a nice addition to the pile if there were anything left of it.

Amelie dropped her father’s useless legs with a vengeance and reached for the supplies she had placed just outside the door to the barn earlier in the day. A dented pint bucket of paint thinner her father kept under the kitchen cabinet and a book of matches from Nadene’s Diner in town. She pried the can with a rusted nail she found lying on the barn’s floor until the right side of the lid lifted. She took a final look at her father’s corpse. He had caused her so much pain and her mother so much more. She had hoped her mother was looking down from Heaven right now to see this. Amelie took the can of paint thinner and poured it over the dead man’s body. The liquid splashed down into his eyes and mouth, and for a second, Amelie wished he were alive to feel the stinging pain. As the contents poured out of the can, Amelie couldn’t help but smile. She’d done it. She’d finally have justice for her mother, Evelyn. Amelie threw down the can and wiped her hands on the lap of her skirt. She grabbed the packet of matches from Nadine’s, thinking back to the times her mother would take her there to escape. They’d laugh together, feeling a moment of relief over a slice of pie and a cup of coffee. Amelie shook herself back to reality and struck the match on the back of the matchbook.

A flame rose between her fingertips, lighting the grin on her face. Amelie turned her back on her father’s body and took two steps in her worn leather boots before tossing the lit match over her back. She didn’t look back to see the flames. She thought she’d never look back on this moment as long as she lived. Amelie walked toward the trailer to grab the back she’d had packed for the last week. “One last thing,” she thought to herself. Amelie opened the drawer of the stand next to her bed and grabbed her mother’s picture, framed in gold. “You’re comin’ with me. We’re finally free, Momma.”

Amelie walked toward the county road about a mile south of the trailer. She didn’t look back at the old barn enveloped in flames. She knew her mother would have felt guilty, sad, or regretful, but Amelie was a strong girl. She’d feel pride and justice for the both of them. She grabbed her father’s wallet that she’d snatched off of the kitchen counter before leaving, emptied the bills and change into her hand, and tossed what remained into the creek that ran next to the road. She headed toward the Ramseur bus terminal to catch the first bus to Louisiana.

After a day’s worth of wandering through New Orleans and enough Beignets to take out a grown man, Amelie hitched a ride to Thibodaux. She’d heard of a show in town that she thought would be a good time. She hopped from the back of a farmer’s truck, waving him goodbye, and headed into the swampland of lower Louisiana. She heard the commotion before she saw the red and white striped tent in the fields. Amelie’s eyes widened, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood tall as she was greeted at the gates of Dreamland. “This,” she thought. “This is where girls like us belong.” She squeezed her mother’s photo between her fingers and entered swiftly into Dreamland.