Pictures On a Phone

[mallorys_camera]

PICTURES ON A PHONE

Alvarado, Texas proved the undoing of America’s Foremost Unicycling Family. An ugly sand lot, twenty to the hour on the giant clock of highways circling the greater Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan area.

The Galens’ trailer blew a wheel on the last stretch of I-35 driving in. Once Murray Galen managed to ease the damaged vehicle onto the lot, Buford, the twenty-four hour guy, ambled by to announce the season was ending five days early. Cited the weather, a system of storms blowing down from Canada across the Great Plains with northeast Texas as its target.

But Petra, youngest of the Galens’ three performing daughters, eavesdropping from the trailer galley as she washed coffee cups, knew it was really because they were tired. Tired of the ugly towns they’d been playing, tired of the lousy turnouts. Tired of chasing the Fisher King in his cheap clown suit long after summer was through. Circus was losing money too, of course. But it was more about being tired.

“I don’t even know why we’re botherin’ with tonight,” Buford said to Murray with a note of morbid satisfaction. “Sponsor didn’t sell no more than forty tickets.”

Cups went crashing to the floor.

“Damn, girlfriend,” said Petra’s sister June. “What the hell is the matter with you? You keep breaking shit.”

“They’re fighting. Again!” sang her other sister, Chantal.

The three girls drew closer to the cramped trailer’s kitchen window.

“So, what? Five days without pay? Damn good thing I signed us on to do Kelly Kaspar’s show,” their mother Marianne was telling her husband.

“I don’t like it,” Murray repeated. “He’s a strange guy, Kelly Kaspar.”

“Well, I don’t like living in a fucking trailer. I don’t like not knowing how we’re gonna pay insurance on the fucking trailer. There’s a whole mess of things I don’t like, come to think of it. We’ll leave for Florida tomorrow if you can get that damn spindle fixed.”

Crouching over the broken wheel, Murray Galen smiled pleasantly. “Do you know where I put that lug wrench?”

“Why would I know where you put that lug wrench?”

“I can’t find it –“

“Goddamn, you are so disorganized! Find it! It’s not as though we have money to waste on this shit –“

“I wish he’d hit her,” June said. “Just once. Shut her the fuck up.”

“No!” cried Petra.

“Not hurt her, hit her. Just shut her up, hit her. Or do you like listening to this shit?”

“He loaned the wrench to Chico, I think,” said Chantal.

“No, he didn’t,” June said.

“He did. I think. Anyway, I can go over and ask –“

“God, you are obvious,” June said. “Dreaming of a little trailer of our own, are we? He loaned it to Jeff. Mom knows. Mom always knows. Petra, go over there and get it back.”

Petra looked down at the mess by her feet.

“You broke more dishes? Petey, you have got to be more careful,” said Chantal.

“I didn’t touch them,” Petra protested.

“Right,” said June. “They levitated. You’re magic.”

###

Circus families have pedigrees that rival even the most hemophilia-riddled and pudding-chinned of royal dynasties.

Once upon a time, Murray Galen had been a forest ranger somewhere in Ontario province, married to a fabulously wealthy woman who doted on him. “Anything,” she said. “I’ll give you anything. What would you like?”

“I have everything I want,” he told her.

“I want to give you something that nobody else can! Tell me one thing! Please!”

“Well, there is one thing...”

Turned out Murray wanted to take a year off and join the circus. One summer, a traveling mudshow had set up its tent on the outskirts of the little logging town where he’d been born, and he’d been dazzled. Taught himself how to juggle fire, ride a unicycle, swallow swords while the rest of his teenage cohorts were learning how to work on V-8 engines. Performing had always been his secret passion.

His then-wife screamed, “Anything but that!”

Year later they were divorced, and Murray had met Marianne, an aerialist who was a good fifteen years younger than he was, fabulously beautiful, and daughter to a famous magician, the Great Pierre, to boot. The Great Pierre’s feats of mesmerism and mind reading had never been reduplicated on any stage. Murray and Marianne’s eldest daughter Chantal was promptly conceived.

A year after that Marianne ran off with a Mexican tiger trainer. He knocked her up too – June – but then deserted her. Murray took her back.

First thing anyone ever said when someone was introduced to June after she left the room was, “Murray’s not her real father, you know.”

June had actually been born in the month of May. Petra figured June was the month Murray and Marianne reconciled. Went a long way in explaining the peculiar relationship between the two older sisters: seventeen-year-old Chantal, light-boned and red-haired – the color that in an earlier century had been called chestnut – was the golden girl; sixteen year old June, stocky and dark, was the foundling.

Petra wasn’t exactly sure where she fit into the Galen family cosmology. She’d been born three years after June by which time the early melodrama of love, renunciation and resignation had cooled considerably. Petra didn’t have a name for what had taken its place, but knew it wasn’t love.

###

The girls had grown up performing.

Chantal had inherited her mother’s trapeze act after Marianne’s fall. June, who had an amazing sense of balance despite her weight, did a rolla bolla, balancing on rotating cylinders stacked three-, four—, five—high. It was a crowd favorite particularly when June pretended to fall off and then climbed back on, triumph of fat over gravity.

Petra had no particular talents. So Murray taught her to ride a unicycle.

All three daughters rode unicycles. The Galen Troupe, America’s Foremost Unicycling Family, was the very last act in the first half of the show, right after Medora, the Hound Who Could Guess Your Age. As grand finales go, they weren’t particularly spectacular. In fact they mostly provided a window of opportunity for the Mexican candy butchers to hawk over-salted popcorn, watered down drinks and Medora’s favorite brand of canine biscuits to the restless crowd.

The three sisters, clad in sequined pink Spandex and ostrich feathers, performed basic square dance maneuvers astride standard unicycles, circling their father who rode a giant unicycle eight feet high. Murray weaved this oversized unicycle in and out an obstacle course, between plastic flowers and Christmas lights and over-sized goblets filled with colored water. For a piece de resistance, he juggled flaming wands.

But that last show in Alvarado, Murray’s timing was off. He swerved, collided with one of the goblets, spilled water all over the stage. Bike zigged right, Murray zigged left, loosing his balance, plummeting into the stage.

Buford drove Murray to the emergency room. Turned out he’d fractured his ankle in three places.

Marianne screamed at him most of the night. “What are we supposed to do now, huh?”

“We’ll drive there, the girls can do their acts –“

“Kelly Kaspar’s not going to want those girls –“

“Why not? Chantal can do her trapeze, June is great on the rolla bolla –“

“June weighs close to two hundred pounds. You think Kelly Kaspar wants to see her in a leotard? And what about Chantal’s trapeze rigging?”

Lying in the bed she shared with Chantal, watching the relaxed movement of her oldest sister’s chest moving up and down, listening to June’s tortured snores from the bunk just above, Petra wondered how her sisters managed to sleep. When she closed her eyes, visions of breaking glass, lost objects found, paraded across the underside of her eyelids.

Calamity continued to dog the Galens. Very next morning, only sixteen miles out of Alvardo, their trailer fishtailed, catapulting off the road and into the trees. It landed on its roof. Another thing for Marianne to blame on her husband – true, she’d been the one driving when the accident happened but she wasn’t supposed to be driving, Murray was supposed to be driving, only he had to go ahead and break his damn ankle –

The girls had been riding up front with their parents in the gear truck. No one was hurt. The trailer, though, was totaled.

After the tow truck came and insurance information was duly gathered, highway patrol pointed them to a diner.

“You’ll just go on ahead, meet up with Kelly’s show,” Marianne told the sisters brightly. “The Great Fabrikant and Umbrage Historical Circus! Take the gear truck.”

The sisters looked at their father. He smiled weakly at the crutches leaning up against the table beside Petra.

“Where will we sleep?” asked Petra.

“Oh, for God’s sakes. In the gear truck. In sleeping bags.”

“Who’ll do my rigging?” Chantal asked.

Marianne laughed mirthlessly. “Oh, you’re cute enough to get any number of guys to do your rigging. There’s bound to be someone.”

“I can do your fucking rigging,” June said. She stared at her mother. “Fine. We’ll go.”

“Look, we’ll be there just as soon as we can. It’s still three acts just like we promised him. A paycheck.”

“Little girls going off on a big adventure,” June said. “Well, fuck you –”

“Petey, do you think you can ride the big unicycle?” Murray interrupted, trying to smile at Petra.

“I can try, Daddy,” said Petra. “I can try.”

How the crutches came crashing down then taking out a bus tray, Petra couldn’t say.

The waitress was clearly pissed off even though she pretended she wasn’t, and the restaurant charged them for the broken cups.

###

Seven hundred forty-seven miles. Two and a half days. June drove absently, chain-smoking, dragging the clutch, left hand beating Mexican tiger tamer love songs on the side of the dented truck. Beside her Chantal slept, awakening occasionally to thumb through Vogue and The National Enquirer, rub apricot lotion into her long, muscular legs.

Petra rode shotgun. Sometimes she scowled into the wrinkled pages of an ancient Rand McNally Atlas trying to puzzle out their route. Mostly she stared out the window or looked at pictures on her cell phone.
On Petra’s thirteenth birthday Murray had given her the phone, her initials emblazoned on its side in shiny pink rhinestones. Phone was also a camera. Petra had filled its memory chip with pictures of her parents and her sisters taken on a family vacation. She’d never taken any other pictures – why would she want to? – and she’d never deleted them.

The Galens had gone to San Diego where the sky was blue, the air balmy. They’d visited Sea World, and the famous zoo, and looked for seashells on Del Mar Beach. They’d bought a kite and flown in on a grassy strand near Mission Bay; they’d ridden their unicycles for miles down the nearby boardwalk. They spent their nights in a series of bright motel rooms, free breakfast provided every morning in the cheerful, shabby lobby. One full week doing the things that normal families did. One whole week where her parents didn’t fight, nothing broke. That was normal too, wasn’t it?

Petra touched the display screen gently and furtitively as though it were a talisman. Chantal kissing a dolphin, June surrounded by flamingos, her beautiful mother holding hands with the man who was her father. There was even a picture of the three girls and their father riding their unicycles past the Giant Dipper’s weather-beaten sign – Marianne had taken it. Little static windows into a world where everything had been profoundly okay.

In a gas station just west of Natchez, a woman approached Petra for spare change. Place was deserted except for the woman, a handful of big rigs, and three yellow-haired, pink-cheeked toddler girls tumbling together next to some garbage bins alongside a rusted, beat-up sedan.

“We run outa gas,” the woman told Petra apologetically, leaning into the side of the truck.

She was very young, very blonde, very skinny. When she smiled, Petra could see she was missing some strategic teeth.

Petra slipped her a five-dollar bill, skipped after June towards the coolers in the back of the Quik Stop. The woman followed more slowly, walking to the counter.

“So what do you want?” June asked.

“I don’t care.”

“Pepsi? Coke? Maybe you don’t want something fizzy. Hawaiian Punch?”

“I don’t care.”

“Cheaper if we buy a half gallon,” June sighed. “Will you drink diet Coke?”

“I don’t care.”

“Well, I’m buying some candy. I don’t care what anyone says. I’m driving, I need energy –“

“Gimme a pack of your cheapest smokes,” the woman told the clerk.

Petra scowled at her across the store. Over the woman’s head a wreath of fluorescent tubing exploded.

“Jesus!” said the clerk. “You okay?”

“Reckon not,” said the woman. “Better give me a carton or I’ll have to talk to my lawyer. Make ‘em Camels.”

The two younger sisters got back into the truck. Chantal stirred in her sleep, stretched, opened her eyes. “What did you get for me? Oh, Petey – are those the pictures from San Diego? Gimme! I want to see – “ She snatched the phone from Petra’s hand.” “Ugh! Who’s this, Petra? Why’d you take a picture of some speed freak with all those ugly kids?”

Petra looked down at her phone. The thing that looked back at her was not the familiar face of June happily gobbling down an enormous waffle cone but the face of the woman from the store. She was bleeding.

Her eyes were open, but she looked dead.


###

There was one moment when Texas turned into Louisiana, when Mississippi became Alabama. It never happened precisely at the state line, but it always happened somewhere, that infinitesimal slip when one place was suddenly another place quite different, and Petra was always on the lookout for this shift, as though such vigilance could protect her from more malign agents of change.

Eventually, though, you had to let go. Petra was asleep by the time the gear truck reached its destination. Lake City in northern Florida on the Swanee River. Stephen Foster country. Land of swamps and condos.

###

Kelly Kaspar didn’t look at all the way Petra had imagined him. For one thing, he was tall, very tall, with an oversized head that made him look something like a light-skinned genie in Bermuda shorts. For another, the way light fell on his fine thinning hair made him seem younger than her father. But how could he be?

“I knew your grandfather,” he announced, peering at them over the jumble of posters, route cards, badly mimeographed contracts and mouse turds that cluttered a battered desk in a corner of the concession wagon he used as an office. He gestured at three folding chairs.

“Grandma too?” Chantal asked.

“Oh, yes,” Kelly Kaspar said. “A very beautiful woman. You look just like her.”

Chantal smiled at him.

June narrowed her lips. “Didn’t stop her from killing herself.”

“No,” said Kaspar. “A tragedy.”

He fumbled in a drawer, withdrew an album. Yellowed news clippings, snapshots with serrated white borders, several oversized head shots depicting a man in a velvet jacket and a pencil-thin mustache who stared portentously into the camera lens.

“He found things,” said Kaspar. “It was truly remarkable. He found things people couldn’t even remember losing although once they were found, people couldn’t imagine ever having lived without them. Of course, he lost things too. Important things. But those were his own things.”

Album pages crumbled as Kaspar turned them. “Your grandmother.”

Chantal was smiling even harder.

Photographs spilled from the drawer. There were clowns, animal trainers, midget families, an old-fashioned matinee idol-looking man playing the piano with his toes. Statuesque women, stomachs sucked tight, sporting wonderful sequins and plumes; elderly gentlemen under badly typed captions: Manderly the Magnificent, Grock the Clown.

Kaspar’s curiously elongated index finger lingered across the profile of a stocky man with bulging biceps and thighs. His torso, clad in an old-fashioned black one-pieced bathing suit, was entwined with multiple snakes. “Arkady Nemerov. He did air gymnastics and a whip routine too, but of course he was best known for his poisonous serpent act.”

He snatched up another, a picture of woman in a cowboy hat balancing on the back of a sway-backed pony. “Jane Judkins and her Dawn Horses. Oh, and look, Stoltochiedo, the Clown Nobody Laughs At.”

Then he sighed. Shut the album with a thump, leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes. When he opened them again, his mouth smiled at the girls. “You see the Great Fabrikant and Umbrage Historical Circus is no ordinary circus.”

“What? You’re trying to copy some old-time show?” June scoffed.

Kaspar regarded her leniently over steepled fingers. “The word is homage. So let’s talk money, shall we? I’m afraid what you’re bringing isn’t what I was expecting. Isn’t what I can use.”

“They love the trapeze act,” said June.

“A beautiful girl in a tight bodice on a swing fifteen feet above their heads. They loved it then too.”
June swallowed. “And they go crazy for the rolla bolla –“

Kaspar looked June up and down. “Can you ride a horse?”

“Sure.”

“I’m willing to let you try. But you,” he said turning towards Petra. “I’m afraid there’s nothing for you to do.”

It was the first time Kelly Kaspar had looked at her, and Petra was surprised to feel the little hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

“I can do everything Daddy does,” said Petra.

“Can you?” said Kaspar. “Don’t limit yourself. Maybe you can do more. Perhaps you’ll be our muse.”

He searched through the stack of contracts, pulled one out, frowned. Reached for a fountain pen, crossed off some typeface, quickly amended it. “Six hundred a week for the two acts, trapeze and equine. High as I go. Take it or leave it.”

“But what about Petra?”

“I might be able to train her do something,” Kaspar said absently. “But she’s no good to me now. Six hundred.”

“That’s robbery,” said June.

“That’s business,” Kaspar corrected.

“I have to have somebody to do my rigging,” Chantal said breathlessly. “Till Daddy comes.”

“Oh, I can do your rigging,” Kaspar said.

“Can you?”

“Why not? I used to do your grandmother’s.”

###

The Great Fabrikant and Umbrage Historical Circus traveled slowly south in incremental jumps, ten or twenty miles a day. Again and again Petra tried to call her father. Punched in his number on the pink princess cell phone from every corner of every lot. But she couldn’t get through.

The towns they played were little more than mobile home parks, RV resorts surrounded by fast food joints and fishing camps, blue sky, SPF-30 grade sunshine and purple bougainvillea erupting in mad display over peeling stucco and tar paper roofs.

The Florida air was thick with humidity. Cypress trees rose from the red earth, presiding over swamps dark with tannins. The swamps bred mosquitoes – Petra’s skin was covered with dried splats of blood from smacking them. Flocks of unworldly birds – herons, ibis, egrets, standing on one leg – regarded her from an unbreachable distance.

“I don’t like it here,” she told June.

Her sister shrugged. “Mom and Dad should be here soon.”

“But I can’t get Daddy on the phone.”

“So? They know the route, right? They’ll be here when they get here.”

Her perpetually disgruntled sister June was surprisingly cheerful in this new milieu. She was shedding weight, could manage to stand up on the back of a horse.

“That’s good, but you have to be able to ride the horse,” Petra told her.

“Do I?” June asked with a sly smile.

June and Chantal hardly bickered anymore. When Petra caught her oldest sister sneaking back into the gear truck early one morning, June just laughed. “Closing in on that trailer, huh?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Chantal said primly. “I had to go pee.” But then she smiled. “He showed me this catalog! There’s one trailer with two bathrooms, and one of them has a sunken bathtub. And it’s got this huge kitchen, and it sleeps five – you can stay there too –“

“I don’t want to stay there, said Petra. “I want to stay with Daddy.”

June just raised her eyebrows, shook her head.

June had gotten quite chummy with the other performers. A skinny Russian acrobat named Sergei was working on reduplicating the snake act.

“Was Kelly idea,” Sergei told the girls. “Before I do tumbling and contortion. I think he hire me for that. But when I get here, he say me to do snake. Sure, I say. Why not. Is from other circus – how you say? Used to be circus –“

“The circus he used to have before this one –“

“Yes, yes. The man died but you know – “

“How did he die?” Petra asked.

“The cobra bite him. Center ring. They have medicine now that fixes that. Kelly give me medicine so if the snake bites, is nothing –“

Mika, the lively little clown, had been asked to paint her face like the poster of Stoltochiedo in Kelly Kaspar’s desk.

“It is a little weird,” she agreed when Petra first asked if she minded. “You put so much of your heart into developing your own makeup, your own persona. Using another clown’s feels – well. Like you’re stepping into their skin while they’re still wearing it.”

Three days later Petra repeated the question. “Mind?” asked Mika. “Why should I mind?”

Alberto, the Mexican juggler, was picking out Chopsticks with his toes; Escobar, the Peruvian tight rope walker, was sharing a steel enclosure with four Bengal tigers.

Thing was... none of them were any good at what they were doing. How could they be? It had taken Petra a full year to learn how to balance on a unicycle thirty seconds without falling. Ease was an illusion backed up by years of practice and discipline, and Kaspar’s circus troupe had been doing their new acts for something under two weeks. When June climbed on that horse, she jerked like a marionette with broken strings or a zombie at the crack of dawn –

But the audience never seemed to notice.

“Ah, there you are,” came Kelly Kaspar’s voice and suddenly the man himself materialized in front of her in those strange madras shorts with his huge domed head. “Hiding, are you? From what?”

“I was trying to call home,” Petra said dully.

“Home? What’s home? You’re a circus brat! You’re a gypsy! The road is your home. And you mustn’t be late for the show –“

“I’ve seen the show every day.”

“And you’ll see it again. Infinite variety and design, my dear –“ His fingers gripped her arm. “What’s that?”

“My phone –“

“Those pictures –“

“You can’t see them,” Petra said wildly.

He smiled at her gently. Still holding her arm, he walked with her into the tent.

He kept his hand tightly on her all the way through the show up until the very last act. They sat in the reserved seats close to the ring. There was Serge staggering uncomfortably, obviously terrified by the thick boa constrictor twining up towards his neck while spectators clapped loudly. And when Mika ghastly and motionless in Stoltochiedo’s skeletal black makeup clung to the caging left standing after Escobar had run screaming from the tigers the audience erupted into mad laughter.

Chantal was the only artiste actually doing the act for which she’d been hired. She was the finale.
Abruptly Kaspar let go of Petra’s arm, leaned forward in his seat. Petra rubbed the red marks his fingers had left on her flesh, and watched him.

It was always the same. It was as though he stopped breathing when Chantal shimmied up her web on to the swing, shot a saucy smile at the faces below. The swing was a red velvet affair. Chantal climbed on, pumped a bit to build up momentum, and then twisted and fell backwards so that she was hanging on by her knees. The tinny recorded music reached a crescendo; another twist and Chantal was hanging by her ankles, still smiling.

“Take a picture,” Kaspar said hoarsely.

“No,” said Petra. She didn’t think he had seen the thing she clutched in her lap. Her pictures of San Diego. Chantal holding a spool of cotton candy, head tilted, goofy face for the camera. Remembering the sound of Chantal’s laughter then, Petra could almost hear it.

One of the carbon lamps illuminating the ring dimmed and exploded.

He didn’t ask again. Instead he grabbed the hand that held the camera, bent her fingers to the button, held it down.

The camera flashed. High above their heads, Chantal dangling by her neck from a harness, that same glassy smile still upon her lips, blew him a kiss.

He didn’t come after her when she got up to run. She fled to the parking lot where a woman sat in a car, door open, rocking a disconsolate toddler.

“How far into town?”

“Oh, six, seven miles at least. Lotta swamp in between. Say, are you with the circus? Best show I’ve ever seen! And I went to New York one time and saw Cats. This is way better. But that picture on your camera – is that a real picture? Or one of those Photoshop dealies? It’s scary.”

Petra looked down at the camera she still held in her hand. On the tiny LCD screen was a photograph of a chestnut haired woman dangling from a swing to which she’d been tethered by her neck. Her head was hanging at an unnatural angle. Beneath her in obvious anguish knelt Kelly Kaspar.

###

The highway veered in and out of pinewoods, following the path of a murky stream whose banks were overgrown with spine grass, pigmy trees, knots of poisonous blue morning glory. She scrambled for cover among them whenever she heard the sounds of an automobile, clutching the pink phone next to her heart, but always with the sense that she was looking down at herself from very far away, knowing that if she could see herself then so could he.

How far had she gotten before he caught her? She didn’t know. “Your sisters are so worried about you,” Kelly scolded, forcing her into his Cadillac.

“My sisters!” she gasped. “My sisters don’t even notice me anymore. What have you done to them?”

His blue eyes puffed in his oversized head. “Me? I haven’t done anything. It’s you, my dear, who does things. And I notice you. Doesn’t that matter?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, I think you know. Tell me, were you named after him?”

“What?”

“Your grandfather, dear. The Great Pierre. Whose gifts you share, whose legacy I’m in a perfect position to help you continue.”

“What are you talking about?”

Behind them an enormous trailer sounded its horn. He veered to the right to let it pass.

“I didn’t know he was the real thing until Camille died,” Kaspar continued. “She was a giddy thing, insatiable really. She did it with the working men, she did it with the tiger trainers. But when they found us, she was doing it with me –“

“When who found you?”

“Your grandfather, my dear. Holding your mother by her hand. Marianne was just about your age. Skinny like you, scared like you. Had that same dazed look in her eye like some little animal stunned by the lights. There were lights all around us, Camille liked to make love in public places where somebody might find her. We’d crawled into a corner of the tent. Marianne screamed. And then one by one the lights exploded. Your grandmother looked around startled, saw her daughter staring at her naked body and wept. I’d never seen Camille cry before. And the next day she was dead –“

He reached a hand towards Petra. “Don’t touch me!” she shouted. Whatever malevolence he worked could only happen while he touched her, she knew.

Kelly Kaspar opened and closed his eyes angrily. “I only want to comfort you, dear. It’s your loss too, your grandmother. He killed her, of course. I mean – he didn’t tie the noose but he crawled inside her head. Much more effective.”

“You’re crazy,” Petra whispered. The phone in her hand had begun to pulse the way it did with an incoming call.

“He regretted it afterwards, of course. Your mother had some kind of breakdown, couldn’t remember a thing. But the Great Pierre turned into a messy, mean drunk.”

Petra saw he was blinking back tears. “I loved her, you see. I knew she didn’t love me. I knew she was a slut, worse than a dog in heat. But when I lost her, I lost everything. Only now, see, I can get it back.”

He made another grab towards her. Petra jerked to the far side of the passenger seat. “You’re insane,” she whimpered again.

Kaspar stared at her with hot blue eyes. “Am I? Look at your phone.”

She didn’t want to. But she did.

Sergei beamed back at her with supernatural confidence from the little viewfinder, an albino serpent clamped around his skull. But was it Sergei?

And there was June balancing triumphantly on one foot from the back of a galloping horse. Only it wasn’t June. Nor was that Mika who stared inscrutably up at her from under a thick corpse mask of black paint. These were all players from the Kelly Kaspar scrapbook, now miniaturized prisoners in Petra’s phone.

The photos from the happy week in San Diego? Gone.

“What did you do to my pictures?” she screamed.

His eyes still on her, Kelly Kaspar began to laugh.

Furiously she raised the phone camera to his face and began clicking. Thirty-six ways for Kelly Kaspar to die, all the room in Petra’s memory chip. Click – and he was sitting at that cluttered desk in the corner of the concession wagon, lips turning blue, hands flailing at his chest. Click – and he was pinned beneath the broken axle of a trailer, pelvis shattered, severed femoral spurting on the ground. Impaled on a tent stake. Revolver down his mouth in a sad hotel. Enwebbed in tubing, oxygen mask askew, lying on a gurney in a drafty hospital hallway.

“I’m not trying to hurt you,” Kaspar wheezed. “I just want to borrow your magic. I’m sure your grandfather wished me dead. Wishing me dead isn’t enough.”

“Watch me try,” Petra said, raising the phone one last time.

Kaspar reached to snatch it away; the car swerved across the centerline. He jerked the wheel back, it locked in place. A logging truck rounded a curve, barreling down the highway straight at them. Petra imagined her mother as a girl.

“I can kill you any time I want, Kelly Kaspar,” Petra said softly with a little smile.

He stared at her for a milisecond before grappling with the steering wheel again. It turned.

Petra’s phone was vibrating again. Incoming phone call, this time for real.

“Petey? Petey baby, it’s Daddy? Where are you?”

“Daddy!” said Petra. “Where are you?”

“Well, we’re at the lot, baby. We just got in. Where are you? June said you’d gone for a walk, gotten lost? And that Mr. Kaspar had gone out looking for you?”

“That’s right, Daddy,” Petra said with a sideways glance at Kelly Kaspar. Silent tears trickled down the tall man’s enormous globe-like face.

“Oh, baby, wait till you see your new home! It’s humongous. It’s got two slide-outs! We got a lot of money from the insurance people, enough for the down payment on the new trailer, enough to take care of us while my ankle heals, maybe even enough to take a vacation – “

“Oh, Daddy!” said Petra. “Can we go to Disney World?”

###

Orlando, Florida proved to be the perfect getaway for America’s Foremost Unicycling Family. The sky was blue, the air limpid. One full week. They visited Disney World, Universal Studios, and Discovery Cove where Petra hand-fed the rays and June snorkeled through the vast caverns of a manmade, underwater reef. Marianne and Chantal went to a spa where they both got pedicures. Chantal had her hair dyed too, platinum blonde. Marianne liked the color but wouldn’t let anyone touch her hair – she was pregnant again, it would be bad for the baby. Murray was calling it their fourth love child. At night they stayed in their sparkling new trailer – one slideout had a Dutch door, Chantal was using it already as her hideaway. They were already a normal family, Petra thought, but for one full week they were a normal family on vacation.
Petra took lots of pictures on her pink princess phone.

The day they went to Disney World, Marianne used Petra’s phone to snap a photo of the three girls and their father riding their unicycles up the oleander and impatiens-lined path that led to the ticket gates.

“Shoot,” said Marianne. “That’s the last one, Petey. Unless you want to erase some of these other ones –“

“Now, why would I ever do that?” asked Petra.