Circus Excite by Nikki Magennis

had bones missing. Her joints could turn in ways thatlooked utterly wrong – curving her legs backward over herself to rest her feet on her shoulders like a scorpion’s tail; rolling forward and coming into the splits; lifting her legs to gracefully frame her face as she hooked her knees behind her head. While she did all this, Sylvie made it seem totally effortless – in fact she moved as though she loved it, twisting her body with an expression of immense pleasure, as though she possessed an unnatural control over herself.
    As she went through her sequence of slow, strange positions, Julia was to dance as though bringing the idol to life with her devotions. She used moves that suggested the dances of ecstasy of Sufis, throwing her body forward and pulsing back and forth as though heaving with huge breaths, brushing her fingertips along the stone, rolling along the altar and reaching up to stroke Sylvie’s legs. Around the foot of the altar, the temple guards were starting to roll and tumble in acrobatic sequences, framing the tableau of the two women under the spotlight with dynamic flourishes.
    Julia moved with a rhythmic sensuality, aware all the time of her costume constantly slipping from her shoulder and the danger that her breasts would fall from the loose confines of the dress. When they’d rehearsed the moves, Julia had felt breezily confident that she could dance like this easily. Now, onstage before the critical presence of Robert and the other workers, she felt uneasily as though her moves were faked, as though she were putting on an act that was transparently contrived. Julia ran her white hands over the lines of Sylvie’s body, trying to tease her to move further, aware that her hands were shaking. She had a feeling that she was pleading with Sylvie to move faster, to get the act over with so she could run back to her caravan and curl up in bed. She wanted to hide herself, painfully aware that with every move she was showingher nakedness to strangers who had treated her with rough indifference. Desperately, she kept circling Sylvie, trying to remember her moves from rehearsal but aware that she was missing cues. When she met Sylvie’s eyes the harsh fury in them gave her a lurch in her stomach that she knew meant she’d fucked up. To someone as obsessively, proudly professional as Sylvie, failure would be unforgivable. She gritted her teeth and continued to dance, going through the moves mechanically and as well as she could manage while feelings of shame washed over her.
    The music grew in volume as they approached the finale. To Julia, the loud drumbeat was ominous and forbidding. She positioned the glasses as they’d practised, aware of the cold hostility emanating from Sylvie, who nevertheless continued to move flawlessly through her routine. Her hand shook as she placed a glass on Sylvie’s breast, and she heard a sharp grunt of anger from the woman’s throat, making her even more recklessly despairing. As the chanting in the background became faster and more intense, Julia lifted the clay bottle of wine she was to pour over Sylvie, knowing that in a few moments she would have to try to kiss this woman, who probably wanted to kill her and might actually do so after the show. They’d practised the moves several times, and Julia had secretly enjoyed the feel of Sylvie’s soft skin under her hands, the heat of her mouth and the lingering kiss that they finished the act on. She wasn’t prudish about being intimate with a woman and found the whole routine quite surprisingly tender, liking the feel of Sylvie’s breast in her hand and the thought of the audience getting horny.
    Now, though, it had all gone wrong and Julia knew leaning down and kissing Sylvie was going to be a terrifying experience. She swung the bottle hopelessly towards Sylvie and watched, horrified, as she caught herarm against a glass and it tumbled to the ground, crashing sharply on