Acrobat
/Joe Baumann
Everything my brother Moss does makes him grow. When he picks up a glass of water, his biceps bulge. Standing up from the couch, his quads pulse. Placing groceries on the high shelves of the pantry activates all three heads of his deltoids. Actual physical exercise—pushups, jumping jacks, dips—makes his body swell, monstrous and powerful. He’s the size of a linebacker. If he’s not careful, soon he won’t fit through doors.
I can’t fall. I dance along the back of the couch, leap up onto the banister along the basement stairs, tumble across the porch railing. I don’t even have to check my balance. My toes are sure. My hands are nimble. My mother still flinches when I leap from one tree branch to another in the density of the silver maple in the front yard, but I barely buoy.
This all started after Daddy died standing in front of a row of fryers where frozen filets of cod and catfish roiled. He was working the fish fry and his heart gave out. No one could really say why; he was in his thirties, healthy. He’d just won a 5k. I blamed church, even though technically he was standing outside the grade school, squashed between the entrance to the cafeteria and the dumpster bay, in a little brick alcove where the men fried everything that would go on plates: fish; French fries; hush puppies; even greens. Mom only took us up there to avoid having to do the cooking herself on those nights when Daddy volunteered. We were sitting in the gymnasium, surrounded by pitchers of lemonade, water, and empty single-serve tubes of tartar sauce, when he collapsed. I’d just chosen my dessert—a chocolate cupcake—when a woman came running in, right past me, to our table. She bent over, as if the quick jog from the kitchen had winded her. I watched from a few feet away. I couldn’t hear what she said because a live band was playing Irish music on the gym stage, but I saw my mother’s heartbreak. At that moment, I felt something in my feet: instead of the world swaying away from me like it should have, I was the most assured I’d ever been. I watched Moss grab up his tray of food, half eaten. His forearms flexed and grew right there, in the middle of tragedy.
*
Daddy wanted to be a Michelin chef; he had dreams of living in France, mastering the mother sauces, learning to flambe and poach from great chefs with impossible-to-pronounce names. When Mom got pregnant with Moss when they were just finishing high school, he turned to a business degree instead and became the marketing manager for a community college that wanted to improve its image with suburban white people whose kids were smart enough for four-year universities but didn’t have the money to pay the ever-growing tuition and fees. He was good at what he ended up doing but, according to Mom, the itch for the kitchen never quite left, even when I was born halfway through both of their degrees and really sent those dreams sailing away. Daddy was part of a big Catholic family that rallied around he and my mother’s mortal sin of premarital sex, and they made sure that both of them were still able to finish college while Moss and I were growing up. It took a long time: Mom didn’t finish her biology degree until Moss was already in first grade. She’d always wanted to be a botanist, growing up in a tiny bungalow surrounded by houseplants: croton and lemon lime dracaena, pothos and snake plants and peace lilies and ponytail palms. Her mother had an obsession, was always coming back from errands with another pot in her hands instead of whatever she’d gone out to buy, lining the kitchen and living room windows with Boston ferns and succulents and Chinese evergreens. I spent my early days surrounded by those plants and the smell of freshly-wetted soil, my grandmother serving as my care provider while my mom pursued her studies. Instead of traveling the world discovering new plants, she took a job at the public high school across the street from our house teaching sleepy fifteen-year-olds cell division and overseeing dissections of fetal pigs.
After Daddy dies, Moss starts going to the gym. No one asks if he’s eighteen; he’s too big not to be. He brings me along and I marvel at the way the other meatheads stare at him, my brother loading weights onto bars and heaving them up with ease. Moss doesn’t even grunt, not the way the other titans do with hundreds of pounds draped over their backs at the squat racks, the metal cages rattling when they dump the weights down. Where many of them wear disemboweled t-shirts, strings of fabric barely covering their swollen torsos, my brother dons hoodies and long-sleeves, as though he’s ashamed of his bulk. Sometimes, when he does too many reps, the fabric tears in the middle of his sets, veins and muscles bursting into public view. I bask in my brother’s glow, but then feel sheepish when strangers’ eyes land on me, so much smaller, normal, the weights I struggle to hoist up so light and unimpressive.
In grade school, the other boys liked to pick on me, giving me little shoves to see how far I would tumble, cuffing my noodly arms and laughing at my thinness. They made fun of my name, Mise, after mise en place; after my mom got to name my brother after her passion, Daddy insisted when I came around. Boys called me Mice, or said my name with too much French, nasally and dismissive. They ruffled my hair, gave me wedgies, tried to steal my clothes if I didn’t scramble into the locker room fast enough at the end of gym. Most of that stopped in high school, though every now and then as I walked through the crowded halls I’d feel a hand press against my back and give me a little push and I’d clatter into the wall or the person walking in front of me.
But after Daddy dies, no one can push me down. I start leaping up onto the metal handrail outside the front steps, backpack heavy on my shoulders. I hop on one foot, up and down, up and down. The administrative secretary from the front office starts watching, joining the scrum of staring students. Then so does the principal. One day he publicly scolds me but privately extols my skills and asks me not to sue if I fall. I tell him I can’t. To prove the point, I leap onto his desk, balanced perfectly on just the toes of my tennis shoes. He doesn’t yell at me again, but I earn some credit the next time I cavort out front, a rebel who doesn’t listen to the school’s highest person of authority, and so brazenly.
My only friends at school are a trio of boys who play video games at each other’s houses. They all live next door to one another at the end of a sad-looking cul-de-sac of slouching ranches with weedy front yards and speckly windows. One owns a Nintendo Wii, another a Playstation 3, and the other an X-box, and they take turns hosting. Their parents are the type who hole themselves up in their bedrooms after dinner, watching old episodic tv shows like Law & Order or CSI. We are all in the same freshman history class and one of them invites me to join them after we get our first test back; we’d been set together as a team when we reviewed, and I recalled enough facts about the Roman Empire for us to win, which meant five extra credit points, which vaulted all three of them from Cs on the test to Bs.
Seth, the boy who invites me, is the tallest of the three, and the one with whom I fall in love. He has a deep voice and broad shoulders and even, despite being only fourteen, a tattoo on his upper left arm: a simple band of black that wraps around what turns out to be a more muscular bicep and triceps than one would expect from a video game kid. Seth is placid as a lake, barely moving his controller as he plays. Where the other two boys rock their bodies back and forth, yelp, raise their controllers and yank them every which way, Seth is still and calm, his eyes hooded like he is being put to sleep by the on-screen hijinks.
After Daddy dies, Seth starts inviting me over without the others. Instead of playing video games, we sit on his back porch that overlooks a steep hill of a yard. Well, he sits. I leap up onto the railing and stand with the tiniest slice of my foot holding me up. He throws things at me, a softball, a Frisbee, a dinner plate, and I reach out, leap up, squat down and catch them without a wobble. As long as some part of me is latched onto the cedar rail, I don’t fall.
“Wicked,” he says. Seth has buzzed his dark hair down to a quarter-inch thicket over his scalp. Sunshine glimmers through the black. He smiles, his lips lazy in his grin. I want to lick them, eat them. Have all of him. “You should, like, go on television. One of those talent shows.”
I nod and leap down, then sit in the chair across from him, on the other side of the glass-topped table where a pair of Coke cans are sweating. Seth doesn’t say anything. Part of his appeal is that although I show off for him he never complains or demands I continue when I’m finished. I can share my talents on my own terms.
“You really think so?” I say, lifting the can to my lips. The sugar pops against my nostrils. My mom doesn’t like soda, says all that refined garbage is bad for you, but she’s stopped dictating much of anything since Daddy died. She doesn’t want to seem like a bad guy, as if there isn’t any room left in our lives for villains.
“Hell yes. I mean, you could, like, find the tiniest thing and balance on it. I bet you could work in Vegas.”
“Vegas?”
“And I could come visit. Hit the casinos.”
“I think you have to be twenty-one for that.” I drain the can and belch. Seth laughs.
What I don’t tell him is that my brother and I have talked about this kind of thing. We still share a bedroom, too small for the two of us even before Moss started growing exponentially. For the longest time I slept on the bottom of our wooden bunk beds because I was afraid of the height of the top bed, but one night as Moss climbed up the ladder whinnied under his weight and I traded spots with him. When he asked if I was sure I nodded, then launched myself up the ladder with ease, balancing one toe on the lowest rung. He laughed and said, “Of course.”
We spent many nights right after Daddy died talking to each other without seeing one another, our voices sounding distant with the slats and a mattress between us. After his growth and my balance bloomed, he started talking about striking it rich, maybe joining a circus or something. Moss told me I could too, thumping a meaty fist into my mattress above him.
“What about Mom?”
“She’d be our manager. Booking agent.”
“Maybe she could have a plant show or something.”
“She’d like that.”
After six months, neither of us has acted on this talk. Where to go, what to do? Kids have taken video of me on the school railing, and some of those videos have gone viral, but likes and views aren’t money or fame. There are too many people out there with strange talents; the world is full of freaks.
That last part I say to Seth: “The world is full of freaks.”
He shakes his head, finishes his Coke. “You’re not a freak, man.” Seth’s voice is soft, the word freak like something precious laid out on a velvet cushion. He crumples the can and sets it on the table, looking at the dented aluminum like it is a crystal ball telling the future.
*
I start getting stronger. My body doesn’t balloon like Moss, but I can feel muscle growing where it hasn’t before. The few boys that still like to knock me around have stopped, mostly because my feet remain steady beneath me, like I am made of stronger material: lead, iron, gold. I can tell, after a few months of heaving and grunting at the gym with Moss, that my muscles are fuller, stuffed with blood and fibers that can do more than before. If Moss cares that I can’t gift him anything of myself, transfer or help him with acrobatic balance, he doesn’t show it.
Guys come up to him in the gym and ask questions about his routine, his nutrition. They start talking about protein shakes and pre-workout powders, boiled eggs and chicken breasts and macros, and Moss just nods, eventually shrugging when it is supposed to be his turn to talk. They never have anything to say to me.
One night, he tells me he signed up for a strongman competition. He asks me not to tell Mom, and I ask why.
“I think she doesn’t like people knowing.”
“Knowing what?”
“What Dad’s death did to us.”
I think about this, sucking in air between my teeth, staring at the ceiling, its popcorn texture close. I reach out a hand and brush the surface, which tinkles down white flecks of paint on me like snowfall. The difficulty, for me, was figuring out what, exactly, Daddy’s death has done to me. Of course I was torn apart by it, the image of him collapsing in front of those fryers, the men around him laughing at first like he’d played a joke and coming to slow realization that something was horribly wrong. The picture makes my stomach roil. His absence makes my jaw ache. But these are physical things, just like the surety in my feet and hips, the way the world snapped into strange alignment right after he died. When I try to think about what it really meant to lose him, I am left with a gaping, blank void.
I go with Moss to the strongman competition, which is held in a small, smelly gym at the back of a grade school nearly an hour away. The bleachers have been partly rolled back to make room for the various apparatus: a fat bar for squats, heavy sandbags, balls of concrete, gargantuan tires. The crowd is thin, and I sit by myself in a corner. The men wear singlets and knee and elbow braces, their bodies wrapped up in heavy supports so they don’t snap under the strain of pushing and pulling and lifting. Their bodies bulge, heavy and thick, forearms hairy and bellies distended with muscle and fat. Moss looks different from them, lacks a certain swagger that comes from years of sacrifice and effort. For him it’s all happened too fast, his physical shape too quick for his brain to catch up. He is wearing a t-shirt and a pair of swishy green athletic shorts. His shoes are plain Nikes, ragged from use.
Of course he wins. It isn’t a question of whether but by how much. Instead of straining and tiring with each event, Moss’s body grows, absorbing the effort and transforming it into more strength. I am surprised that his clothing doesn’t rip apart right away, the new swell of his shoulders and chest bursting the fabric’s weave. By the end, the scattered spectators are all watching him as he heaves and twists and practically prances with ever-increasing weights in his hands or dragging behind him. If someone had actually managed to bring in an F-150 for a truck pull, I’m sure he’d yank it across the floor like all he was doing was pulling a child in a Radio Flyer.
His prize isn’t much: a thousand dollars and an entry into the next level of competition if he wants it. I watch Moss stand atop the three-tier podium for the finishers, looking bashful. I wonder about my brother’s ambitions, what he dreams of when he thinks about the future. Does he, too, want to spread his wings and fly into the wider world like Daddy and Mom?
And what of myself? I try to imagine my future, out in the bright, wide world. But the thought of the years ahead are the only thing that can leave me unsteady, because I have no idea what I might want.
After the award ceremony, I hug Moss. Where the other men are slickered with perspiration and effort, Moss is dry, perhaps the slightest crack of sweat on his forehead; he holds me tight, my face against his shoulder, and I can smell the slightest whiff of salt on his body. He is like an ocean, deep, unexplored, dense and unknowable.
*
Seth and I are sitting in his basement, the lights out so the only illumination is the ancient television on which we are playing his old Super Nintendo. Neither of the other boys ever wants to play it, but Seth loves Super Mario RPG and A Link to the Past. Tonight we are playing Mario Kart. The pixelation hurts my eyes, but I don’t say anything. Seth’s basement smells of vanilla from incense sticks dotted around in one too many diffusers, and I’m not sure if Seth or his mom has planted them here; as far as I can tell, no one but him comes down here, where the artificial aroma works hard to mask the wet smell of the concrete walls that are hidden behind bright white paint. The basement is unfinished, but Seth has arranged a pair of green throw rugs and some old furniture, couches saggy in the middle and a recliner that has been torn up by a cat on the edges, to offset the dankness.
“That’s cool,” Seth says when I tell him about Moss. “Do you think he’ll go pro?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t think so. Is there money in that?”
Seth shrugs. “He’d know better than me.” He raises his left arm and flexes, laughing at himself. “Not so strong like bull.”
I laugh, too, but I do think Seth is strong. He is the right kind of muscular that shoots hot saliva up my throat. I want to reach out and squeeze his arm but we have never touched like that. As we reach the end of a close race in Mario Kart, Seth grows excited and leans into me. When I beat him he gives me a playful shove, forgetting that I won’t topple over. He laughs again and pushes me harder, but I don’t budge.
“Dude,” he says. “You’re like a rock.” He shoves me again, this time leaving his hands on me, one on my shoulder, the other wrapped around my ribs, his fingers a tight coil of warmth.
“Moss is the strong one,” I manage to say. I keep my eyes on the tv screen, where Toad is celebrating first place, his little balled fists pumping in the air.
“I mean, sure,” Seth says, taking his hands off me. “But so are you.”
“Not really.”
“Maybe it’s a different kind of strength.” Seth presses a button on his controller and the game cycles to the next race. A countdown to the start begins on screen. “Maybe yours is inside, and his is outside.” He glances at me. “It’s just yours is harder to see.”
I open and close my mouth, unable to think of anything to say. Seth turns his attention back to the television, his regular calm concentration restored. The game screams for us to go, but I can barely move.
*
Moss wakes me up one morning nine months after Daddy dies by shaking the bed frame. I jolt awake, thinking that an earthquake is sending everything crashing down. Of course, my body isn’t jostled by my brother’s antics.
“There’s a circus,” he says, holding out a flyer.
I blink at him. The light through our bedroom window is gleaming and hard-white: snow on the ground, on the bushes, ice encasing the gnarled, empty branches of the trees. I shiver; Mom keeps the heat down, likes to wrap herself in blankets and sweaters, and with Daddy no longer around to complain about the chill, this was how we live. Moss and I can’t bring ourselves to fill his shoes whining about the cold.
Moss holds the flyer out, garish red and yellow and blue. An announcement of a traveling circus of sorts; a trapeze artist’s body is caught mid-swing in the center of the paper, a dark silhouette against all that light. The address for the show is a convention center not far from our house.
“You want to go?” I say, voice still croaky with sleep.
“I want to join.”
I sit up, careful not to bash my head against the ceiling. My brother is wearing a tight gray t-shirt and dark shorts. He looks wider than ever, practically a car stood upright in the room. I feel my breath constrict.
“Why?”
“Why not? I could be a star. We could both be.”
“What about Mom?”
“What about her?”
“We can’t abandon her.” Our mom had been afforded bereavement leave at the end of the school year after Daddy died, and she spent the summer wandering through the house, clucking at Moss’s bulging body and my balancing acts. When the new year began, she trudged off to school but came home each day even more tired than usual, tossing her bag onto the sofa and throwing herself down next to it. Half the time her bag wasn’t closed and student papers, loose pens, folders full of administrative paperwork—she had been asked, before Daddy died, to head the sciences department and hadn’t backed out afterward—and she didn’t bother gathering up the mess. On weekends she barely pulled herself from bed; we had to remind her to eat. Moss had taken to cooking meals, towering over the stove with a spatula in his hand, staring down at blocks of beef spitting grease or chicken searing, moisture screaming as it boiled off. She would eventually emerge, looking sleepy, as if she was the teenager and not us, slouch in her chair with a wet, loose smile on her face, saying thanks and then eating in silence, vanishing before either Moss or I was finished.
“Mom’s basically abandoned us,” he says.
“I don’t know that’s fair.”
He blinks at me, eyes blank.
I draw in a breath. “Could I invite someone?”
My brother’s face lights up. “Yeah. Sure. Yes.” He lays a meaty hand on my shoulder. “Please.”
*
Seth, Moss, and I go on a Tuesday night because the tickets are cheap and my mom has end-of-quarter parent-teacher conferences, which she drags herself to, pulling on boots and complaining about the weather, which is slushy and blustery and unpleasant to drive in. When I introduce Seth to Moss my brother grins and snaps up Seth’s hand in a tight squeeze; I can see the tiniest bit of pain on Seth’s face, a grimace he tries to hide. We trudge through the convention center parking lot, Seth and Moss slipping on a few patches of black ice as we dodge through side-falling snowflakes.
The convention center is toasty as if warmed by a fireplace. The air smells of hay and the sweet-sour of manure. Though there is seating for several thousand, only the lower bowl is open, and even then the stands are filled intermittently, like a mouth of half-lost teeth. The floor is covered in a bright tarp the colors of the flyer: screaming red, ocean blue, saffron like hearty wheat. I sit between Seth and Moss in the front row; we can see everything up close: the crisp of the ringmaster’s peacoat; the glistening muscle of the acrobats; the smeared trenches of paint on clowns’ faces. We say little as lions and elephants are trudged around, as performers dance with flaming sticks. When the Strongman comes out, lifting huge barbells, I can feel Moss tensing, can practically hear his thoughts of comparison. I glance at Seth. His shoulder brushes mine and neither of us moves apart.
During an intermission, Moss stands and says he is going to the bathroom. I hear something tight in his voice but think little of it. But when he hasn’t returned by the time the lights dim and a trio of aerial cyclists appear, my gut starts to stir. Twenty minutes later, Moss is still gone. I tremble in my seat, feeling off-kilter. Seth sees and leans in, whispering, “Are you okay?” I shake my head.
When the show is over, he is nowhere to be found. I have no idea what to do; every step I take, leaving my seat, walking out to the concourse, making, at Seth’s suggestion, a full lap past the various concession stands cinched up for the night and the bathrooms around the lower level, feels hitchy and uncertain. The balance that has sunk deep within me is suddenly gone, vanished along with my brother. I imagine him skulking around the building, trying to find his way to some secret tunnel behind an employees-only door, where he can march up to a ringmaster or, more likely, some manager in a business suit, and show off his prowess, make his body grow by performing a pushup or lifting up a trash can. How he probably didn’t manage to find anyone and, instead, decided to leave on his lonesome, off toward what, I have no idea.
We tumble out into the frigid night. Halfway across the parking lot, I slide across a patch of black ice, invisible, and my feet go out from under me, but Seth catches me, fingers digging into my forearm, before I hit the ground.
“You’re okay,” Seth says. He pulls me into a hug. Through the puff of our coats I can feel his body, his weight, muscular and sturdy, maybe not as muscular as Moss or as sturdy as me—or as I used to be—but enough. I squeeze tight, and he squeezes back. My breath crystallizes in the air and flosses along his ears. I want to shift my face, turn my mouth to kiss his chilled skin, but I am frozen.
Seth detaches himself and we trudge toward where we parked, even though Moss drove. Our parking spot is blocked by a hulking SUV, a gigantic black Escalade that seems to stretch on forever, the kind of thing I imagine my gargantuan brother might dream of driving one day. I try to picture him finding the ringmaster, securing his spot in the world of the circus. I try to picture my mother, what another lost family member will do to her. And then I try to picture myself, me with Seth or me with my impenetrable balance, steady and capable, and that is the hardest thing. I can’t see myself hanging on, spinning through the world with certainty, not when so much has been taken away so fast, the ground beneath me porous and slick.
Author’s Note: Oftentimes, my work is inspired by an image or phrase--something that finds itself popping up in my head. This story, in particular, I found myself imagining someone who couldn't fall--and that's where things began. I often don't know where the story is going, and didn't here until I landed on an exploration of grief; from there, the story unfolded fairly quickly and smoothly.
Joe Baumann’s is the author of three collections of short fiction, Sing With Me at the Edge of Paradise, The Plagues, and Hot Lips. His fiction and essays have appeared in Third Coast, Passages North, Phantom Drift, and many others. He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction. His debut novel, I Know You’re Out There Somewhere, is forthcoming from Deep Hearts YA. He can be reached at joebaumann.wordpress.com.
