Folktale Week 2021: Moon//Swan
“Without warning, I was heartbroken. I’d lost sight of a white suitcase carrying spirit that seconds earlier I had no knowledge of. ”
Day One of Folktale week is Moon. For this prompt, I was inspired by animal transformations that are found in many forms in Folklore particularly the Selkie and the Swan Maiden. The origins of these stories involve either one or a group of female seals or swans, that are able to remove their sealskin or feathers and transform into beautiful, naked, women. Selkies are said to dance naked in the moonlight, whilst unbeknownst to them, a man takes one of the woman’s sealskins forcing them to remain in human form, marry them and have their children. In these stories, there is an ever-present ‘risk’ of the selkie or swan maiden finding their sealskin or feathers, and returning to their wild self. My take on an animal transformation story is inspired by Swan maidens, which I have taken into a modern context and switched the female and male genders. In my opinion, the original tales are written from a place of male gaze, desire for the naked female form and the ability to ‘domesticate’ them but in my character’s desire, the mystery is the key.
"Can't we just, update the name a little bit..? I don’t know if I feel comfortable playing the part of a –“
He cuts me off out of a sideways mouth, his eyes lazily fixed on the girl working the candy floss booth.
"Look I get it, Joan."
Leon, the circus manager, replies as he pats me on the shoulder. My skin underneath my heavy jacket sizzles with recoil.
"But, 'Of No Fixed Abode' clown hardly rolls off the tongue, does it babe?"
"But, 'Tramp’ clown? I mean...can't we use ‘homeless’? ‘House...less’?"
This was the end of my first week at the circus, in my new role as the ‘Tramp’ Clown. ‘Tramp’ clowns, sometimes ‘hobo’ or ‘bum’ clowns, are a subsection of the clown community (ironically, very serious people) that were inspired by homeless people in America. Traditionally, they wear tattered clothing, a warped hat and have many holes in their shoes with sock covered toes poking out comically. My face was painted in line with the Circus handbook’s version of ‘Tramp’. A black soot beard applied with greasepaint, a thick and crude outline of white around my mouth and eyes and of course, a hokey red nose. Too boot (and they were big boots), to really bring home the idea that I was down on my luck, it was essential I frowned constantly. ‘Be very sad. Do not break character on stage, backstage, or when walking around the site’, the handbook had directed.
"Joanie Joanie Joanie..." He sucks air into his mouth and it makes a cluck sound. "You know about Otto Greibling Jr right?"
Candy floss girl casually swirls her finger in the machine and jumps, immediately pulling it out. My sister got her hair caught in one of those once and said the inner metal of the machine was red-hot. 'The earth's core', she had said to me, seriously.
"Who?"
"Who, what?"
Leon, distracted by the same spectacle but unable to simultaneously communicate, and lust.
"Greisling?.."
"Oh Joan."
He pinches the bridge of his nose, and clenches his eyes shut.
"Otto Greibling. He was a famous tramp clown. His son OG Jr popped in one night, like 10 years ago? My old man was over the moon about it."
Candy floss girl puts her finger in her mouth to soothe the burn, and frowns like a little mole.
"What did he say then? Otto junior or whatever?"
"Huh?"
"The Tramp clown’s son. Did he speak to your dad or...?"
"Oh, no Joanie, no."
He sniggers, disparagingly.
"He's bloody royalty in this biz babe, as if he'd stop for a chat with my old man. Ha ha!"
He seems perturbed by the fact my face hasn’t erupted into laughter, or shown, really, any recognition of anything at all.
"So, what are you saying?"
"How can't you..? Look give it a couple of years babe and you'll get it. Otto Greibling freaking Jr!"
Years? I’d rather… He interrupts my internal monologue by sucking in a bit of saliva that has gathered in the corner of his mouth. He glances at the candy floss girl one more time before she disappears out of her booth, clutching her finger.
"The Tramp clown is an integral part of this unit, okay? In-teg-ral".
He drags out the 'teg', which I would forgive if he was someone I liked. But as he wasn't, it was upsetting.
"Okay."
This is futile, and I have other things on my mind. As I turn to walk away, I sense him watching my arse despite it being housed in baggy and tattered hessian-style trousers. On leaving, candy floss girl has metaphorically passed Bilbo’s ring onto me, Leon’s eye being Sauron. I turn my head back towards him, sharply, and ping something in my neck. It takes everything not to wince and shatter my icy glare. He exhales a short breath and then retorts saying,
"You couldn't be a happy clown anyway, could you Joanie?"
I could bite back, but I don't and continue walking back to my container. Retreating is less trouble, and to be honest, as a vegan I hardly joined the circus for its principles.
I'm here because of the shapeshifting swan.
* * *
“Yes, mum. The Circus.”
“But, why Joan? What happened to the art gallery? Carol said you were starting to show promise.”
I paused, unwilling to respond to such a blatant lie. Carol hated me, I despised Carol.
“Hey mum - sorry, it’s pretty hard to hear you in here.’
I lie, as I lie inside the shipping container I share with three other performers; a juggler, a fire eater, and a fire breather (two very different things apparently). Under my sleeping bag I try to dampen the sound of raindrops on the ridged metal roof. Mum will only worry. Inside the box we call home, our ‘areas’ are separated by sheets of plywood which somehow stand up without being attached to anything. We each have a hard and musty smelling futon to sleep on, placed on top of two wooden pallets. The floor is laid with oddly sized pieces of vinyl, all different patterns and textures. I have a traditional black and white diamond pattern, and envy the beige faux wood under the juggler’s corner.
“I’ll catch you up with things when I’m down in September. The show finishes up then, okay?”
It was the first day of August, wet and humid, that I was forced by some extraneous and irrational drive to abandon logic and pursue a stranger. I left my job as gallery assistant (aka living voodoo doll to a middle-aged witch) the morning after walking home through the park. Tramping home alone in the silent disco of my headphones, I’d seen the daisy chain of large metal sheets that enclosed the Circus. In a gap where two sheets connected, I’d seen something remarkable. Supernatural.
“Hard to hear me in where? Where are you?”
Through this crack, this portal to the uncanny, I’d noticed a white figure walking against the grain of circus goers, performers, seemingly - everybody. They were walking hurriedly, carrying an old white suitcase in front of them. I imagined tiny cups filled with hot tea, steaming inside, as they held the suitcase steady and level and unwavering. Bewitched, my hungry eyes hunted the white figure, my brain whirling with hypotheticals. Why are they all in white? What is in that suitcase? What is that ethereal quality to their stride? How can I get closer to them? When? The crowds of people obstructed my tiny window and I manically weaved and bobbed, left and right, up and down to regain sight of the white figure. My myth. I knew something incredible was happening, and I was missing it.
“Food shop, gets pretty crap signal at the back of the aisles.”
Without warning, I was heartbroken. I’d lost sight of a white suitcase carrying spirit that seconds earlier I had no knowledge of. I was told to move on by a gruff security man who I would later know as Len, my stand-in Circus dad. I’d weave his long greasy fine hair into fishtail plaits, and he’d sigh but he’d let me. I returned home to a haunted flat, an entirely full-to-the-brim person compared to the husk that had left that morning. Obsession is a strange, intrusive and sudden thing. In the minute fraction of time I’d laid eyes on the white stranger, I was already too late. Obsession had nicked my keys, hurried home before me and broken in. Obsession had permeated every part of my living space. Spirited steam haunted the kettle, phantasmal curtains wafted in the breeze. The white duvet on my bed, steady and level but with something hot oscillating inside.
“Oh, okay love.”
She was always happy knowing I was eating.
“Please don’t say crap in public though, will you? And phone me later.”
“Bye mum.”
I wouldn’t ring her later, I would be too busy acting sad.
* * *
I didn’t have to act sad the day I met my shapeshifting swan. Sadness had enveloped me.
I’d joined the Circus on second of August and the process was worryingly easier than anticipated. The position of ‘Tramp Clown’, the bum of the joke (sorry), had remained unfilled since the opening night and in my infatuated state I’d said yes to the job. Yes to everything. Yes to sleeping in the smallest quarter, yes to a hose for a shower, yes to the misogyny, yes to forgetting my former self, yes to Obsession. Yes, yes, yes. On my first day, after reluctantly reading the Circus handbook on various highly important issues; cleaning the animals (grab the hose), fire safety (grab the hose), violence and aggression training (you guessed it), I sprang into action. While my eyes scanned the circus grounds, I badgered everyone I met about a person in white.
“Oh you mean the living statue? Yeah I know him.”
“Quiet bloke. Has his own container somewhere, at the back of the park I think.”
“Fucking weirdo if you ask me mate. Apparently he shits white.”
“Gay feather boy? Couldn’t tell you what he looked like outside of the outfit.”
Living Statue. Him. Quiet. Weirdo. Feather boy. Perfect.
No one knew his name, except for Leon who had been sworn to privacy.
“But why don’t they want to be named?” Badger, badger, badger.
“I dunno, but I promised I’d keep it shtum so leave it, will you Joanie? I’m right in the middle of something here.” He huffed, leaning his body back around to the two young female circus goers, in pursuit of the toilets.
“Ladies, please. One of you take this arm.”
He bent his arm, placing his knuckles on his waist and stood there, a proud and pathetic teacup. The fair-haired girl nervously looked at her friend, palpably uncomfortable, and linked his arm. I could hear her sounds of hate, shame, and fear in each girly giggle. Leon was of course deaf to a women’s secret language.
“And you, lovely lady, please take my other.”
The ginger-haired friend, similarly awkward and red with embarrassment, cringed as she linked his other arm.
“Onward!”
He charged off to the toilets, like a little boy with two ragdolls under his arms, oblivious to every ounce of gross he carried within him.
I spent the rest of the day acting sad.
Four days later, I’d caught sad.
And within 2 weeks, with no sighting of my white spirit, I have been all consumed by sad.
Away from the crowds, I find a tree stump to wallow next to. What the hell was I doing here? What was I thinking? Had I imagined the magic of the whole thing? Had I said yes to going MAD? Why am I 31 years old and the owner of a fucking grease beard?
A runaway child approaches me, sees my face, and instantly bursts into tears.
“Thank you”
I say to the screaming child, as they become the catalyst for my own tears. As their rightly terrified mother runs over and pulls them away, I close my big white eyes and seven big sobs burst their way out of my mouth. I rub my eyes open, the makeup creating a white mist in my vision. But as the mist clears, a white shape forms in my sight.
A tissue?
A tissue, in a white gloved hand.
A tissue - in his white gloved hand.
Below his hand I see his legs, dressed in stiff trousers. It takes me a moment to gather that the trousers are painted. They are covered in at least 5mm thick paint, so that the creases are permanent. They look uncomfortable, crunchy. Below his trousers I see socks, painted white. But his shoes aren't white, instead they are generic skate shoes. On closer inspection, two entirely different shoes. His outstretched tissue-cupping hand is also painted white but its texture is like dried liquid chalk, or clay. His hands are sculpted, the bone at the base of this thumbs protruding almost at 45 degrees. Strong angles, with soft rounded edges. My eyes continue upwards of those hands, and circling his wrists begins the white feathers that make up his jacket, coat, skin? Hundreds and hundreds of feathers, half of them stiff, thick, providing structure but in between those, thousands of little soft feathers. They are somehow weaved in, though they appear floating. It occurs to me in that moment that the combination of these two types of feathers are essential to the garments tactility. The feathers breath, gently, despite their owner remaining perfectly still. The garment, impossible to label according to my own vocabulary, holds, cradles, cocoons his body beneath. Like a soft cast suspended over his skin, my judgement of his shape is skewed. A seam split from the feathered casing under the neck to just below the waist, but somehow, it’s fastened together. In milliseconds, I'm looking for buttons, a hidden zip, velcro? All options too crude for such an organic item. My eyes return to below the neck, a private V of a chest exposed under the feathers. The skin underneath painted thick with white too, but a small circle is smudged and barely there. The circle has been rubbed by the key on the fine chain around his neck. If I reach out, I could rub it once more and see skin. I could keep a bit of him on my finger.
I believe honesty is found in the neck and his tells me this; I am strength and I am fragility; I am flood and I am drought; I could and I won’t. The edges of his lips are undefined, soft white elongated swells. A kinky nose, with a history. Under his right eye there is an indent in the white paint on his cheekbone. The dent is another V shape, elongated this time, like the silhouette of a bird in flight. I blink in a fraction of this slow time and my eyes jump upwards to his hair. It is thick and wild, crusted with white paint and powder. My eyes jump here to evade his eyes, the portals to the uncanny. I knew they would be too much.
From hair, back to tissue. I take it, with my own semi-disguised hands in fingerless gloves. My fingertips, like his V's, a chink in my armour. Only not armour, but clay. And not a chink, but a pressed dimple with a fingerprint trace.
“Thank you.”
But he doesn’t hear me. Like a whirling white-water wash of a rapid he has flown through me, and is already downstream. Without my permission my body follows him, sucked in by his current. My eyes are glued to his movements as I bob and weave after him, determined to see what I missed the first time. He glides through the crowds as if they are the water below him, but the suitcase in front of him remains level, strong, unwavering. Making his way to a clearing in the crowd, he places the suitcase on the ground and taking off the key, unlocks it to reveal two perfectly white shoes. Of course, it was his shoes. I swell with irrational desire over his attention to detail, making sure the final pieces of his puzzle aren’t muddied by the Circus grounds. He places the white shoes on the suitcase, leaving space for him to stand atop too. Delicately he slips out of his old shoes, and joins his gleaming slippers on top of the suitcase. Before he puts them on, he takes one of the shoes, the left, and rubs the sole of it firmly onto the bottom of his left sock, on his left foot. He puts left foot, in left sock, into left shoe. He repeats this ritual on the right foot, but before he puts the shoe on he pauses to inspect the base of his right sock. I look up at his face, an edge of sternness in his brows and his mouth is moving. Is he reading something off the bottom of his sock? A mantra? A prayer? Whatever it was it’s over quickly and he puts the shoe on, delicately placing his foot back onto the suitcase. He rolls his shoulders once forward, once back and after a second delay, the feathers do the same. By the time the feathers have stopped moving, he has gone. Petrified. His body is a statue.
I blink for the first time since I rubbed my eyes and I’m breathless. I feel like my nerves have bubbled to the top of my skin, the boiling water within me evaporating them upwards.
Like a teacup in a suitcase.
Like the earth’s core.
