Work Text:
Rabbit crept up to the ticket counter quietly and watched from the shadows as a couple dressed in black with blood-red roses at their lapels bought tickets and passed through the black velvet drapes, their twittering laughter cut off like a slammed door when the curtain fell closed. She jumped, and then scolded herself. If you get scared before y'even make it inside, you'll never see the circus! she combed the dirt around the ticket booth with her eyes, searching for dropped coins or a shred of ticket she might use to talk her way inside. The night air didn't seem to chill the people in their fancy clothes, but Rabbit fought off a shiver when the breeze lifted her hair from the back of her neck. She tried pulling her sleeves down over her hands, but they hadn't been long enough for that in at least a year.
She decided to watch more closely to try to distract herself, but the silly people at the ticket counter were just so boring, flirting with each other or trying to impress each other. She wondered whether they would even see the circus attractions, with their moony eyes googling at each other.
"psst!" said a voice.
Rabbit looked around, but she didn't see anybody who looked like they were trying to get her attention. The doughy-looking man selling tickets was absorbed in something from the newspaper.
"psst!" said the voice again, and something tugged the sleeve of her dress. She whirled around to try to catch them, but there was nobody there. The only thing near her at all was a piece of white paper edged in black stripes, with an arrow pointing back the way she had come. "Dig," it said.
Dig? She waited until a large party was pestering the ticket seller, and snatched up the paper before creeping in the direction the arrow had pointed.
When she found a decent-sized rock for cover, she stopped to look around for a hole or a fence or someplace somebody had buried something, but the gravel looked only average trampled, and if the ground had been disturbed in the verge, the shadows were too deep for her to see it. She looked at the paper in her hand again, hoping for a clue of where it came from or why. The arrow, which had been pointing away from the ticket booth, was now pointing to her right, across the path toward the deepest shadow she could see from here. Of course, she thought.
It took a good while for her to figure a moment for crossing the path. There was a carriage and a very loud group of gentlemen who all insisted on a place to park it, which required the ticket man to call someone and then several minutes of argument about where and how the carriage could be stowed while its owners enjoyed the circus. Eventually, there were at least three different gentlemen pointing and remonstrating, and she took the plunge, jogging across the path and throwing herself into the shadows, praying she wasn't putting herself in a creek or a rosebush. She landed on soft grass like the kind ladies set their tea on for a picnic, not the kind that usually populated the verges of gravel paths. Still, it was a relief, and she lay still on it until her breathing slowed and her heartbeat became regular as a clock again.
"Psst!" said the voice, but now Rabbit was even more sure nobody could possibly be hissing at her out here. She remembered the arrow on the paper and looked down at it again, only to see it had transformed itself into an X. Next to that were the words, Dig Here, Quick!
She looked around for a rock or a stick but found nothing small enough to use. Sighing, because her auntie would surely scold her for dirty fingernails, she dug into the mound of soft grass and peeled it away from the earth. There, as if placed by a fancy lady with a picnic, was a thick black envelope with silver writing that read, Rebecca Partage. A little shiver went through her at that-- nobody that she could ever remember had used her given name, except the census man when she was five and Auntie had pretended Rabbit was playing at not giving her "real" name.
*
She didn't giggle when the man lifted the black curtain and motioned for her to enter. The tunnel was striped black and white like everything else at the circus, and it made her feel strange like she was at once too small and too large for the tunnel and so might find herself wedged one moment and tumbling from a great height the next. But as soon as she thought she might scream, the second set of black curtains appeared, When she lifted those, she stepped out onto the circus grounds. A strangely still, curly-haired girl tipped a top hat much too large for her head toward Rabbit, winked, and melted into the crowd without appearing to really move.
*
The Wishing tree was the most beautiful thing Rabbit had ever seen, and she watched a dozen people light their candles from others nearby, pause to wish, and place their candles in its branches. She wanted very much to make her own wish, but whenever she approached it, her hand wavered and her mind went blank. She had so many wishes, but among those, the dearest was her wish to see the circus and now she was here! By some wonderful trick, she had made it inside and the wishing part of her mind was still busy with that, so it just couldn't locate any more wishes just yet. Rabbit shrugged, sighed happily, and followed the next batch of wishers away to a conjurer's show.
*
Hours later, after having seen the conjurer turn popcorn kernels into tiny ducklings and make a boy stand in midair, Rabbit decided to look for the curly-haired girl again. She wanted to say thank you for the invitation, at the very least! Instead of following knots of circus visitors, Rabbit began watching people who belonged to the circus. All dressed in black and white, they moved with purpose and knew where everything was. They were polite to the visitors but jolly with one another, and Rabbit felt certain that the top-hat girl was one of them. But try as she might, she couldn't catch a glimpse of her anywhere.
Once, she spotted a girl ahead wearing a tight white cap that could be covering the curly hair, but when she called out, the girl smiled back at her and waved a freckly hand. Not the same person.
*
As the moon set, Rabbit slumped onto a bench and rested her chin in her hands. Her stomach rumbled loudly, and a very tall man stepped up to offer her a cup of hot chocolate. She knew she shouldn't take it, but she was cold and hungry.
"Thank you, sir," she began, "but I don't have a coin to pay for it."
He patted her shoulder, smiled, and passed her the cup. "Welcome to the circus, young lady, what are you looking for?"
She blew across the steaming chocolate, warming her hands. "Do you know a little curly-haired girl with a top hat?"
He looked thoughtful for a moment, and then his eyes twinkled again. "I think I do, but the question is, does she know you?"
Rabbit blushed and covered it by sipping from her chocolate. Of course, she burned her tongue and hissed.
"Oh too bad!" said the man, and rushed away.
Rabbit watched him go, feeling ashamed to have apparently returned his kindness with prying. She shook herself to get rid of the blush creeping down her neck and blew on the chocolate again as she started away. She heard someone exclaim about some moving animals made of paper, and turned to search for the speaker or a sign that would show where to the animals could be seen.
The tall man's hand landed on her arm, and he passed her a little paper sack full of something that smelled of cinnamon and sugar. "These will take away the sting." She took one and chewed, gingerly, her eyes growing wide as the burn on her tongue seemed to vanish. He smiled at her expression and leaned a tiny bit closer, to be heard over a passing group of shrieking girls. "There's one more thing I want you to know about the circus, Rabbit. It hates to send anyone away with their wishes unfulfilled." He winked at her, just as the curly-haired girl had done. "The trick is, you have to know what your wish is."
He stepped away quickly, with a merry chuckle. She sat, nursing her hot chocolate and cinnamon twists, pondering. Should she wish to meet the curly-haired girl? No, that would be over all too quickly to spend a wish on. Not another night at the circus, even if she could sneak away twice in a row, surely that was too much to ask for someone who couldn't even pay for the first one. Maybe she should wish for a pile of money? Then she could pay back Auntie for all the expensive food and clothes and schoolbooks she owed. She could go her own way in a year or two, instead of staying on to keep the house after she turned sixteen. She discarded that idea quickly too-- what kind of greedy person wishes for money? She wanted...her eyes wandered to a small boy across the way whose eyes seemed filled with stars as he stared about at the tents and the vendors and the tigers, the clock and the juggler and the tree, each one making him glow more than before. "I wish to be like that, " the thought overtook her before she could control it, second guess it.
An echoing giggle broke into her thoughts, and she spun, looking for the curly-haired girl whose laugh surely sounded as mysterious as that. She saw a head of curly hair disappear into the crowd around the wishing tree and chased as well as she could without spilling her treats. When she made her way delicately through the crowds of onlookers to the edge of the viewing platform, she could look out over the tree from its first branches straight ahead, down to ground level, and up over her head higher than she would ever dare climb. The faces around her weren't all glowing as the child's had been, but a man here, a lady there, a shop-girl below and to the right--their eyes were also full of stars.
*
Rabbit selected a candle and turned to follow the line of wishers ahead of her. Her mind chattered about getting back before Auntie woke and found her missing, about her feet cold in her too-short skirts and mended stockings, about how silly it was, at her age, to believe in wishes. But below and inside all of that, in a soft whispery place behind her breastbone, it warmed her. The glow, the wide eyes, the way they seemed to have seen past all the ugliness in the world to the things that mattered, that lasted.
I Wish... she thought, as her candlewick met another and she settled her now-burning wish next to the others.
"Wish granted," said the curly-haired girl, stepping out from behind the trunk of the tree and, to Rabbit's astonishment, growing older by the second until she held out a lady's hand, "It's so nice to meet you, Rabbit, welcome home!"