The Lyra by Georgia Smith

Circus performer Isabel has a relationship with Arturo that threatens to distract from her performance.

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After nearly a decade, the magic of the tent had been lost on me. Some nights, I still felt its whimsy, its sense of erasing time. It could be a portal to a new world, or a two-hundred-year-old one. But most of the time, I felt stuck, trapped in a massive plastic bag sweltering with noise, thick air, fog, exhaustion. This was one of those evenings, the suffocating ones. Call me jaded, but it can be difficult to feel much enchantment after spending two hours crying behind the costume rack.

The fight after rehearsal had been particularly nasty. I started yelling first, but Arturo yelled louder. And in the unforgiving white light of the afternoon, it occurred to me how ridiculous he looked in his lavender costume, with his sharp, manly face furrowed in rage. No matter how handsome, a man wearing pastel spandex with rhinestones lining the crotch can be difficult to take seriously. You see, I had never felt that way about Arturo before, but I allowed myself to be turned off by him. It made the feelings less painful.

Sometimes I feared that all he loved about me was my hair. I'd been told many times that my hair was what made my performances special. Not my technique or my athleticism or even my beauty, but my long, loosely curly shining orange hair. The day Arturo and I met, at rehearsals for a silks show in Tampa, he'd complimented me on it. I usually wore it in a tight ponytail, as I was a bit paranoid that it would block my vision when I was in the air, but he convinced me to wear it down. "It will accentuate your lines," he said.

I found him very attractive from the start, but I'd trained myself to assume that men in the industry are gay until they make it very clear that isn't the case. One night, after a performance in Miami, we all went out to a nearby dive bar with the clear intent to get very drunk. We had spent an ungodly amount of hours in rehearsals the three weeks prior and finally had a few days off in a row.

Arturo bought us all a round of lemon drop shots and invited me to dance with him. No one else was dancing, but something about his confidence made it feel easy. We were performers, after all, and I had overcome my teenage shyness by then. We danced to the corny pop music they played, and with each song, he inched closer and closer to me, his hands sliding from my waist to my hips.

"A rare beauty, you are," he whispered in my ear. Everyone from the troupe was watching us, but we didn't care. Most of them were sleeping with each other anyway.

We made each other better artists. He pushed me hard, talked me into trying new skills, no matter how daunting. I mastered the man on the moon, the planche, even a one-arm hang that I thought I wasn't strong enough for. He convinced me to learn a trapeze routine, stood below me the entire time I rehearsed, clapping and yelling words of encouragement, trying not to make me laugh too hard. I choreographed our partnered lyra routine, which became our signature wherever we went. Set to "Sweet Dreams" by Beyoncé, it showcased our individual strengths -my long, graceful lines, and Arturo's boldness and stamina. When we performed it together, I had no choice but to match his fearlessness. In the face of blinding lights, muddled sound cues, shaky rigging, I could look over at him, see him smiling at me, or perhaps deep in concentration, but calm, determined all the same. His strength never wobbled a bit.

Eight months later, after a show, when we were both sweaty and exhausted and ready to collapse into bed, he presented me with a ring. "Our own little lyra," he said. He never actually asked me if I would marry him, but I didn't feel he needed to. I understood completely.

I had had a picture of what I wanted for my life, and it began to change quite drastically in the years after he gave me the ring. Things that had previously terrified me - going to bed early on weekends, gaining a bit of weight, forgetting to stretch for a day, going weeks without drinking, planning out our dinners for the week - began to sound reasonable, even pleasant.

I never asked him, but I assumed that Arturo might have felt the same way. We were in our late twenties, and we both knew a career in the circus didn't last a lifetime. I had been to Paris, Los Angeles, Berlin, New York, Boston, London, Las Vegas, Mexico City; I had seen the beaches of Mykonos, the Grand Canyon, climbed the Cliffs of Moher and looked down at the churning rocky seas below. I had experienced so much noise and color and movement, and I was ready to pick one song, one color palette, one place. So when I found out about the baby - it was a surprise to me, too - I thought he might be happy.

He pretended to be, for a moment. But he was a terrible actor. He went quiet for days, hardly looked at me. For the next few weeks, it was like I was no longer the Isabel he knew. He left me alone in our tent while he went out with the rest of the troupe, came home at three and flopped onto the bed with his shoes still on.

We usually didn't travel to Phoenix in the summer because of the heat. But we went where the money went, and the East Coast seemed to be tired of us. It was while I was alone in Phoenix, in the bed we shared, sewing purple sequins that had fallen off my skirt, when I noticed them: tiny bits of gold glitter on his pillow. Neither I nor Arturo wore gold at any point in the show; the only person who did was Paola, the Cyr wheel performer. Paola was relatively new to the troupe, and generally kept to herself. She was more disciplined than any of us, waking up at seven most mornings to practice her routines before it got too hot. She had thick black hair and a sad, downturned mouth. Men in the audience who had been slumped in boredom sat up straighter when she walked onstage in her shimmery skirt and bra.

Paola's number was just before ours. Despite our crude AC system being on full blast, it was disgustingly hot. The stage was already slick with sweat and condensation, but Paola was fearless. I stood in the wings watching her turn on her wheel, a steady rhythm at first and then faster and faster, and so fast she was nothing but a bright golden blur. The audience tried to clap along to the beat, but the music accelerated so quickly that all they could do was applaud. She finished her number and disappeared into the black.

We were up. I felt bloated in my unitard. Arturo looked at me like we still desired each other, like nothing had changed. We each took hold of the lyra on opposite sides, facing each other, and it began to ascend. I pulled myself in a split, my legs forming a perfect line that pierced the circle of the lyra. As it spun and I looked at the top of Arturo's head, I imagined each rotation representing a day we had spent together, a vertical timeline moving upward - soon enough, we caught up to the present, so high in the air we were at eye level with the lighting rigs. Arturo moved to the bottom of the lyra and flipped onto his back so he was curved over it, his body a perfect crescent moon. We took hold of each other's hands, and I dropped below the lyra, found stability on his legs, one foot gently hooked under my neck and the other between my thighs. I spread my arms out like wings and the audience applauded. At the next cue, I climbed back up to the top of the lyra and maneuvered into an upside-down position, my legs spread out on each side of the hoop. It was slippery, and my hands wanted to slide down it, but I fought for control and held myself up tightly, the muscles in my belly burning. Arturo was in an upside-down arabesque, hanging off the bottom of the lyra with one arm and one leg looped inside of it. The music grew louder. "Sweet Dreams" had begun to sound like nothing to me. I had probably heard it over a thousand times. Next was the climax of our number, where we would both tuck into the hoop, our arms gripping the top and forming an X, our bodies huddled over one another, allowing it to spin faster, so fast that to the audience, we would become just one spinning figure, no beginning or end to me or him. I caught a glimpse of Paola's gold costume lurking in the wings. She was facing towards the exit, not even watching. What could she have been looking at? I realized my music cue had passed seconds after I was supposed to, just seconds after Arturo unhooked his legs from the hoop and stuck his hand out for me to grab and help pull him back to the lyra. His sweaty hand reached up and nothing reached back, and the closest thing to his grasp was my long, dangling hair. He tried to grab it, but it slid through his fingers, and I caught the terror in his face before he fell in one swift motion, and I screamed his name and the lyra kept turning.