Circus Mirandus Read online

  Ephraim wrote a lot of letters because during the war there were a lot of days.

  Ephraim was at the beach when the wind changed. It was midmorning, and he had spent a pleasant hour scraping together moss from the rocks and some frail twigs in order to build a small, mossy soldier with a thin, twiggy gun. He was thinking he might dry this little soldier out and mail him to his father for luck, when it happened.

  One moment, the wind was coming from the land, whipping Ephraim’s hair around his temples and chilling his ankles where the pants he’d outgrown no longer met his boots. Then it stopped.

  For an instant, everything was impossibly still.

  Ephraim had just enough time to realize something unusual was going on, just enough time to blink, before the wind started blowing again in a new direction. It blew in from the ocean, and it blew harder than any wind he’d ever felt before, so hard that he stumbled backward toward the dunes. He leaned against the wind until he was certain he wouldn’t fall, then he squinted his eyes and looked around.

  The long grass of the dunes tossed its brown seed heads. The smallest pebbles, the ones that were almost sand, skittered across the beach. But the surface of the sea was flat, as though the great wind were God’s iron, smoothing every ripple and crease from the fabric of the ocean. The gray water was so smooth that it looked, for all the world, like a sheet of the finest window glass. Ephraim picked up a pebble and tossed it toward the water, and it disappeared without a splash.

  It’s important, when you first see magic, to recognize it. You don’t often get a second chance. Ephraim knew that what he was seeing was magic straightaway, but he misunderstood its purpose.

  I must surely be able to walk, he thought, across a sea so very flat. I must be able to walk all the way to Europe and to the war and to my father.

  He promptly set about trying, and he was just as promptly disappointed. When he pushed his way to the edge of the beach, Ephraim’s feet sank into the water, which was as wet and cold as it ever had been. And while he was trying to free himself from the sucking ocean floor, he got soaked all the way up to his armpits.

  He also got a fish stuck in his left boot.

  The boot had always fit loosely, and as it filled up with seawater, a tiny silver fish, smaller than Ephraim’s pinkie finger, decided to take up residence next to his ankle.

  It was a ticklish and embarrassing situation, but before he could do anything to remedy it, Ephraim heard the music. Not classical music, not choir music, not even the dire wails of a hurdy-gurdy. The music that calls a person to magic is always the same.

  Pipes and drums.

  From somewhere beyond the dunes, the pipes skirled and the drums thrummed, and Ephraim followed them. He followed them as countless children before him had followed, as some few lucky ones still do.

  Even when your whole world was off balance, you still woke up in the morning to find there were a hundred perfectly ordinary things to do. For example, Micah’s grandfather was very ill and Micah had just been told that magic was real, but he still had to get dressed and brush his teeth. He still had to choke down a bowl full of Aunt Gertrudis’s favorite fiber cereal for breakfast. And, because his great-aunt was not nearly as distracted as Ephraim’s mother had been during that terrible war, Micah had to go to school.

  He stood in the front hall, the toes of his sneakers just touching the edge of the living room carpet. Aunt Gertrudis sat on the sofa with her back turned toward him, staring at the television. The local weatherman was talking about what a pleasant April the town of Peal was having that year.

  “Not a drop of rain last week,” he said. “The Recreation Department couldn’t have asked for a better grand opening of the new downtown facility.”

  “You locked Grandpa Ephraim’s door.”

  “I know.”

  “Can I at least go talk to him?” Micah asked. “I want to say good-bye.”

  Aunt Gertrudis didn’t look away from the television. “Brush your hair, Micah. You’ll be late for the bus.”

  Micah’s hair never tangled. He didn’t even own a hairbrush, but Aunt Gertrudis refused to believe that. “Please! I just want to make sure he’s all right.”

  She finally turned around. “He’s resting. I called Doctor Simon and we’ve agreed to increase the dosage on some of his medicines now that he doesn’t have much time left. That will make him sleep more.”

  “Doesn’t have much time left.” The words didn’t sound right coming out of Micah’s mouth. They were muffled and flat, like he was trying to talk with a pillow shoved against his face.

  “Yes.” Her lips puckered to one side. “You knew this was going to happen. I won’t have you bothering him in his final days.”

  Micah didn’t repeat “final days.” He couldn’t take a deep enough breath because of the invisible pillow.

  His aunt turned back to the television. “And I won’t have him destroying what little sense you have with that ridiculous story. I saw those scraps of paper all over the room. Ephraim can’t let that old joke go.

  “A magical circus,” she huffed. “I hope you know he’s making fun of you.”

  Micah shook his head, then realized she couldn’t see him with her face turned toward the weatherman. “No,” he said quietly. “You’re wrong.”

  “What’s that?” Aunt Gertrudis asked, but Micah knew from the sharpness in her voice that she had heard him.

  A few minutes later, Micah stood by himself at the school bus stop. She’s wrong, wrong, wrong, he thought. The Lightbender would come, very soon Micah hoped, and he would fix Grandpa Ephraim. Everything would go back to the way it was supposed to be.

  But what if something went wrong? Micah had hardly slept last night, imagining all of the terrible things that might happen.

  The Lightbender might not come in time. If he did come in time, Aunt Gertrudis might not let him in the house. Or maybe he would send his parrot messenger back and tell Grandpa Ephraim that he had to come to Bolivia to get the miracle. But after yesterday, Micah was sure his grandfather was too sick to get out of bed. What would Micah do then?

  I would go to Bolivia for Grandpa Ephraim and explain everything to the Lightbender, he thought. I would make him come back with me.

  He didn’t know how he would do this, but he thought it enough times so that when Florence Greeber showed up to wait for the bus, Micah was half convinced that going to Bolivia would be a lot like taking a trip to the other side of the city. Only it would take longer, and you would have to change airplanes instead of buses.

  He was feeling almost calm and even a little happy until he saw what Florence was carrying. Florence was the only other fifth grader at Peal Elementary School who rode the bus with Micah, and when she staggered up to the stop, her red curls were barely visible behind the enormous model of an Egyptian pyramid that she was holding in both of her arms.

  “Hey.” Florence’s voice came from behind the pyramid.

  The model was fantastic. Florence had even made statues out of clay to guard the pyramid’s entrance.

  “My partner’s bringing paint so that we can do hieroglyphics today during group work, and then it will be done,” she said. “What do you think?”

  Micah thought he should probably run away from the bus stop as fast as possible.

  He’d completely forgotten he was supposed to be bringing an Incan artifact to school today. He’d left his quipu string in his grandfather’s room, which might as well have been the moon with the way his aunt was behaving.

  Maybe Mrs. Stark would think he’d gotten sick over the weekend. Jenny Mendoza was the smartest girl in class; she could probably finish the whole project by herself. She could probably do a better job without Micah’s help.

  “It’s good, isn’t it?” said Florence.

  “It’s great,” Micah squeaked.

  Florence stretched
her head up over the tip of the pyramid. She squinted at his backpack, like she was trying to figure out if he had somehow stuffed an amazing project in it.

  What was he going to tell Jenny? They were supposed to be finishing their artifact today so that they could give their presentation tomorrow. She might tell Mrs. Stark that Micah hadn’t done his part, and then Mrs. Stark would call Aunt Gertrudis.

  That would be . . . not good at all.

  When the bus came, Florence kicked Micah in the leg to get his attention. “What’s wrong with you today? Help me get this thing on the bus.”

  She yelped when he tried to take the pyramid out of her hands, so he dragged her bag up the bus steps for her instead.

  Florence tottered to the back, and Micah waited while she set the model up in its own seat and brushed a speck of lint off one of her miniature statues. “I figure everyone else is going to do something small,” she told Micah. “Mine’s going to be the best. Don’t you think so?”

  Normally, Micah wouldn’t have thought so. On any other day, he would have thought that Jenny Mendoza and her partner would have the best project. But since he was Jenny’s partner, he nodded at Florence and wished that the driver would forget the way to Peal Elementary.

  The first thing Micah did when he got to school was check the arts and crafts closet in the back of the classroom for something, anything, that he might be able to use for his project. After some digging, he found a ball of yarn that nobody had ever used because it was an awful snotty color. He took it back to his desk and set to work.

  Or at least he tried to.

  He found the picture of the quipu in his book. The caption said the long string of knots was an ancient method of record keeping. The knots represented numbers and maybe even words, so that an Incan could tell all kinds of things just by looking at them, like how many llamas had been sold last year. Micah thought this was a fascinating idea. Unfortunately, it wasn’t exactly easy to re-create while he was hiding his hands under his desk so that Mrs. Stark wouldn’t see.

  He decided he would tie twenty-four different knots, one for each student in the class. Mrs. Stark might think that was a nice thing to do.

  Jenny caught Micah’s eye from across the room during the Pledge of Allegiance. She bounced on the balls of her feet and waved at him. He tried to smile back, but it was hard to make his lips move in the right direction.

  She didn’t seem to notice. She grinned even wider and pointed toward a thick stack of papers on the corner of her desk.

  “The report,” she mouthed.

  A couple of the girls in the row behind Jenny giggled into their hands, and one of them waved exaggeratedly at Micah and then rolled her eyes.

  Did they always make fun of Jenny? She was the newest student in their class. Micah knew she was smart, but he hadn’t paid much attention to her otherwise. He had just assumed that she had a lot of friends because it seemed like everyone else did. It would be awful if people were cruel to her because Micah ruined their project. He started tying as soon as he sat back down.

  It should have been easy. Grandpa Ephraim liked to say that Tuttles and knots went together like toast and cheese, and Micah had always been proud of how easily knot tying came to him. But for some reason, his fingers wouldn’t work the way he wanted them to today.

  He tried to tie a knot to represent Nathan Borgle, who sat at the desk in front of him. Nathan was tall and he had a chipped tooth. He was always in trouble for something. A Nathan Borgle knot would be big and sturdy and not too good-looking. Micah knew hundreds of knots, but when he tried to tie Nathan into the snot-colored yarn, all he got was a tangle.

  Come on, come on, he thought.

  If Mrs. Stark called Aunt Gertrudis and told her Micah wasn’t doing his work . . . well, what if she did something that kept him from helping his grandfather? He yanked on the yarn, looped it, pinched it, and finally, after what seemed like ages, he had a knot.

  A knot that was not anything like Nathan Borgle.

  Micah waited until nobody was looking in his direction, and then he stared down at his hands. The knot was soft and smooth. It was almost as big as Micah’s thumbnail. And though it felt warm against his fingers, the edges of it were beginning to fray.

  Micah swallowed hard. This was a knot unlike any other, but it wasn’t what he’d been trying to make. When he closed his hand around it, it didn’t feel like any of the regular knots he knew. It didn’t feel like an ancient artifact. Somehow, it felt like a person, and not one of Micah’s classmates.

  It felt like Grandpa Ephraim. Warm and wonderful and coughing and wheezing and slowly, oh so slowly, coming undone.

  Micah stared up at the board. It swam in front of his eyes while he held the knot that was somehow just like his grandfather close to his stomach.

  He picked up the yarn and tried again. And again. He tied a dozen knots that were supposed to represent his classmates while Mrs. Stark wrote math problems on the board.

  He tied his grandfather a dozen times.

  Just before lunchtime, everyone swapped desks so that they would be sitting next to their partners.

  Micah sank in his seat and tried not to see the different artifacts appearing from backpacks and cubbies, but they were impossible to ignore. Florence’s model was obviously the best. Nathan had brought a boomerang. Several other students had made papier-mâché masks. Some of the projects were kind of weird-looking, and Giles Darby had obviously sat on his miniature cardboard chariot. But every pair had something.

  Jenny trotted over with her stack of paper in hand. “Hi!” she said. “I’ve got everything we need.”

  She turned an empty desk to face Micah and plopped down. He had just enough time to see that every page of her report had been color-coded with markers before she said, “Stop me if I say anything you don’t agree with,” and launched into the speech she’d written for them.

  Micah should have interrupted her right away. The longer Jenny talked, the more he wanted to crawl under the desk and vanish. Jenny had come up with discussion questions and made lists of fun facts to share with the class. It was going to be the best presentation in the whole fifth grade, definitely, except for the fact that Micah hadn’t done his part.

  “So that’s that,” Jenny finished breathlessly. She beamed at him. “I can add in anything you want about our artifact.”

  Then she looked across the tops of the desks between them. She blinked. “Our artifact,” she said. “What did you bring?”

  For one wild moment, Micah imagined running over to Florence Greeber and stealing her pyramid and giving it to Jenny. But he was pretty sure Florence would smash him. She and her partner were bending over it with tiny paintbrushes in their hands.

  “I’m really sorry, Jenny,” he said.

  “What for?”

  Micah gulped. He saw realization steal the smile from her face. Her brown eyes got wide, her lips pursed like she wanted to spit but couldn’t because her manners were too good for that.

  “I don’t . . . I don’t understand,” she said. She started twisting one of her two black braids around her fingers nervously. “We discussed this together on Friday. You agreed that you would make the model if I did the report!”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t understand!” she said again. Micah could tell by the shrillness in her voice that she really didn’t. “It’s due tomorrow.”

  Micah didn’t know what to say. Jenny was yanking on her braid now. He took a deep breath and pulled his handful of knotted yarn out of the desk where he’d stuffed it. He pushed it toward her without looking at it.

  “Oh,” said Jenny. “It’s a quipu. Sort of.”

  He was surprised that she could tell. Someone who had had this desk before Micah had gouged a sharp letter V into the corner of it. He had never noticed it before, but now he stared at it so that he wouldn’t h
ave to face Jenny or the knots.

  “It’s not a bad idea. Only the one in the book was, you know, a lot bigger.” She sounded like she was trying very hard to be positive. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her pick at one of the knots with her bitten fingernails. “And there were different colored strings,” she said. “And, well, these knots are all . . .”

  “Grandpa Ephraim,” he whispered.

  “. . . the same.” Jenny dug another fingernail into the knot, as though she were going to pry it apart.

  Micah flung out his arm and snatched the string of knots from her hands so quickly that Jenny yelped.

  “Hey!” She rubbed her hands together.

  Micah’s face felt hot. “I’m sorry, okay?” he muttered. “I’ll fix it tonight. I’ll make it better.”

  “You can’t make me do all the work,” said Jenny. “It’s not fair.”

  “I’ll fix it. I promise.” He tucked the yarn carefully into the front pocket of his backpack.

  “I hope so,” she said. “It doesn’t look much like an artifact right now. There’s something funny about those knots.”

  Micah felt like she’d punched him on the nose. “It’s not funny.”

  Her brows drew together. “Are you all right?”

  Micah wasn’t. He was shaking, and he felt hot all over now. “It’s not funny,” he said. “He’s dying.”

  Jenny’s eyes widened.

  “I mean he’s . . .” Micah choked. What was wrong with him? Why had he said that? “I mean he’s sick. He’s very sick.”

  “Oh,” Jenny said quietly. She leaned toward him.

  He leaned away. “It’s fine, okay. I’m sorry about the project. I didn’t mean to say he was . . . he’s just been sick. I can finish the quipu tonight.” He couldn’t stop babbling.

  “Micah?” Jenny sounded worried.

  He shook his head at her. He didn’t want to hear whatever she was going to say. “I’m fine. Completely fine.”

  But his throat was tight, and his eyes stung, and he couldn’t do this. Not here. Not in front of everybody.