The Provenance of Monsters Read online

  Chapter 4 – Hope and Mockery…

  Greg Timmerman and Kyle Thurston possessed everything, and so they mocked the little things others considered treasures.

  The young teenage boys had thrown darts at balloons; and when they had failed to win any kind of a prize at that game, they had threatened legal action against the carnie who took their dollars. They had risen to the Ferris wheel’s peak, and they had thrown wads of bubble gum into the hair of girls and boys who trafficked the carnival grounds below them. They had snickered and accused the tattooed man operating the Tilt-Master of having only an elementary school education, confident that the frowning man could say or do nothing in defense that wouldn’t jeopardize his silly job operating ride machines. The week when the carnival camped outside of their town provided Greg and Kyle the opportunity to leave the comfort of their air-conditioned homes to see how the sweaty and dusty people lived, and Greg and Kyle took great pleasure in laughing amid the smell.

  “Tell me again, how much is it going to cost us to look upon the unicorn you say is kept inside your tent?”

  Kyle managed to keep from laughing as he asked the ugly, wrinkled girl standing behind the counter at the lime-green tent, where a cardboard sign adorned with clumsy lettering offered the sight of a unicorn. Neither of the boys believed that claim. Unicorns existed only in the imaginations of little children. But Greg and Kyle believed themselves to be special kinds of crusaders, that they were young men born to protect those who earned and owned from all the schemes and ploys hatched by the unscrupulous and the idle – and a unicorn seemed to them just one more carnival trick.

  The girl smiled. Greg wondered how she found the courage, or the audacity, to look at them with such an ugly face. Greg wondered why she didn’t just hide inside some wagon of oddities, showing her face to scare young children who ran through tight chambers filled with distorting mirrors.

  “A peek at the unicorn costs ten ride tickets, or five dollars,” responded the girl.

  Greg rolled his eyes. “That unicorn must really be something special.”

  “More special than you know,” the girl answered, “and it’s the most incredible thing in the carnival.”

  “Well, there you have it,” winked Kyle. “A real-life unicorn has travelled all these miles to our small town. Aren’t we lucky?”

  Greg sensed mischief brewing in his friend. “Five dollars might not be so expensive, not when you think how rare the sight of a unicorn must be.”

  Greg and Kyle lived in brick homes attached to three-door garages. They slept on soft beds and nestled into warm comforters, while the roofs above their heads never leaked during summer thunderstorms. Their stomachs rarely growled, and they never went to bed hungry at the end of their long days, for their stainless steel refrigerators were forever stocked cheese sticks and chocolate puddings. Greg and Kyle had the world at their fingertips. When they felt bored and when their days felt tedious, they owned a catalog of video games to play on their giant televisions, or they toyed with the action figures that spilled from their bedrooms. They owned all the equipment needed to field a game of baseball, and their families’ memberships to the town recreational center gave them access to open basketball courts and swimming pools.

  It all seemed so commonplace to Greg and Kyle. How could they imagine that in darker parts of the world children attempted to sleep while bombs dropped upon their neighbors and friends? How could Greg and Kyle know that children in some parts of the planet wielded machine guns instead of video game controllers? Greg and Kyle never suspected that so much of the world didn’t drink filtered water, held in plastic bottles so casually tossed into the trash. Though they were so fond of watching gory horror movies late on Saturday night, Greg and Kyle had no feeling for the true terror that fell upon families when the soldiers battered down the door to murder them with their dogs and guns.

  Fortune afforded Greg and Kyle carefree lives. Girls might reject them. They might not receive admission to their first choice of universities. They might not survive the cut to make the varsity football team. Greg and Kyle wouldn’t forget such tragedies, for those shortcomings would be the hardships they would know. They would inherit their fathers’ professions, and they would build brick homes with four-door garages very slightly tailored to their tastes. They would complain that their property taxes were always too high, and they would lament how their hard work was so disrespected in a country of freeloaders that victimized Greg Timmerman and Kyle Thurston.

  Greg and Kyle would have more than either of them could truly count, understand and know, and so they had no need to discover the slightest sliver of magic.

  Kyle pushed a crisp, twenty-dollar bill towards the girl. “Can you break it?”

  “Of course.”

  Greg cleared his throat. “Aren’t you even going to check that twenty in the light?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “To make sure it isn’t counterfeit,” Greg laughed. “You never know when someone might try to push something fake on you. I thought every carnie would know something like that.”

  The girl frowned. Her wince didn’t last for very long, but it lasted long enough for those boys to see that their barbs would dig beneath her wrinkled skin. Kyle chucked. Greg winked. The world turned to amuse them. All the lights blinked for their merriment, and the organ played solely for their pleasure.

  The girl returned the needed change and opened the counter door. “Please, just follow me.”

  If Greg or Kyle had come to that lime-green tent alone, then perhaps one of the boys may have felt a little empathy for the painful way that girl moved forward upon her crutches. Perhaps one of them might’ve offered a supportive hand after seeing how that girl winced to swing her leg braces forward with each step. Perhaps, Greg or Kyle might’ve even respected that girl for bearing the pain she suffered as she escorted those boys into the heart of that tent. One of them might have found the girl courageous. Or just maybe, one might’ve thought something must’ve truly been special about the creature within to inspire that girl to smile through the hurt of her steps.

  But they hadn’t come alone. Greg and Kyle were together, and that gave miracle little chance to spark.

  “That’s the unicorn?” Greg laughed.

  The girl grinned. “Isn’t it incredible?”

  “It’s hardly even a horse,” chuckled Kyle.

  Kyle and Greg felt affronted. How could the carnival claim that the small horse that timidly looked to them was any kind of magical creature? Kyle thought the moles that tunneled beneath his family’s backyard were more exotic. Gregg was better impressed with his younger sister’s mutt-mixture of a dog that kept pooping on their father’s shoes. The carnival took them for the worst kind of fools. The small, fragile horse the girl showed them wasn’t worth the price of that tent’s admission.

  The horse barely reached the girl’s shoulders, and its flanks were an ashen color of gray, a hue very far from the pure kind of white that unicorns displayed in every picture of the mythical beast Greg or Kyle had ever seen. It’s eyes looked dull and clouded, and Kyle thought of the cataracts that blinded his grandmother’s vision. And it looked malnourished, with ribs so easily counted beneath the skin that made Greg wonder if the carnival fed the animal at all. The girl attempted to disguise these shortcomings by dotting the animal with watercolor sunbursts and flowers. She tied cheap, plastic beads into the horse’s mane, no doubt hoping that costume jewelry might bring some kind of splendor to a horse that didn’t look capable of doing much more than standing on its own legs.

  “It doesn’t even have a horn,” giggled Kyle.

  The girl’s bottom lip trembled. “But it will. It will have a lovely horn. The unicorn only needs a little more time. You can see where the horn is starting to grow if you look real close.”

  Greg shrugged. “I think that bump between its eyes looks more like a wart.”

  “Maybe you’re not looking at it properly,” Kyle offered. “Maybe
we can’t just use our eyes.”

  “How the hell else are we supposed to see it?”

  “I think I know how these things work,” Kyle continued. “What that girl is going to tell us the moment we demand a refund is that we only need to have a bit of faith to see that horse for the unicorn it really is. She’s probably going to tell us that we only have to believe.”

  “I believe I’ve wasted five dollars.”

  The small horse exhaled a long breath and then turned its gaze away from the boys to stare at the far side of the tent. Its muzzle dropped. Marcia tugged at the horse’s sequined reigns, but her unicorn refused to turn around and look at the laughing boys. The horse’s ashen flanks turned another shade darker. Marcia threw her arms around her pet. She pressed her face against the horse’s muzzle, and she prayed that her unicorn would pay those mocking boys no attention. Marcia’s eyes blurred with tears as she felt the unicorn shrink in her embrace.

  Kyle shook his head. “I suppose it’s my own fault. I should’ve asked for papers. There has to be some kind of certification involved when deciding if a horse is, or is not, a unicorn. I should’ve demanded some evidence before I foolishly spent my money. I should’ve been more responsible. I walked right into the trick. I should’ve demanded to see some kind of provenance.”

  “What’s that?” Greg asked.

  “It’s a kind of proof, or evidence,” Kyle answered. “A provenance shows the background of a thing, the story of how something came to be. I would think a unicorn’s provenance might include a breeding chart. If you want to charge people five bucks to look at the sick little horse you call a unicorn, I think a little provenance is the least you might supply.”

  Greg laughed. “Who would sign those kinds of papers?”

  “Maybe some wizards in pointy hats?” Kyle smiled.

  “Well, I don’t care,” Greg spoke a little louder when the girl started to cry. “We’ve been robbed. Does she think we’re going to just take her word that her sick horse is a unicorn? Does she believe she can fool us?”

  “She’s already played us for suckers, Greg.”

  “And how do I know that a hundred other carnivals aren’t at this moment playing this same trick on other honest folks like ourselves?”

  “I agree, Greg. It’s a carnival conspiracy.”

  Greg’s ire grew hotter as the girl more loudly cried. “I think we should call the police. We were set up in the worst kind of scam. We’re at least entitled to receive all our money back. I think we’re entitled to a lot more. People can’t be allowed to steal money from one another by claiming they keep unicorns in bright, green tents.”

  Marcia clutched more tightly to her unicorn and cried. Why couldn’t they believe? If they couldn’t have faith, why did they need to mock and belittle? Why did they have to taunt her delicate unicorn? Why did they keep laughing when doing so drained that poor horse of its magic? Why couldn’t the world help that creature grow into the splendid unicorn it deserved to be?

  “Go.” Marcia sobbed. “Just leave.”

  But Greg shook his head and took a menacing step forward. “We’re not going anywhere until you make it all right.”