As they approached the marquee, they were greeted by more and more people walking in the same direction. ‘I expect so,’ he replied, and realised he had given no thought to the other acts.įor a moment his grandson skipped from one foot to the other, but then remembered his role, and walked as soberly as his excitement allowed. ‘Will there be a fire eater?’ the little boy asked. The old man trod carefully but with purpose, each being a guide to the other. He saw the boy’s excitement, and for a moment he felt it too.Īs they walked out into the dark evening, the little boy took his grandfather’s hand tactfully, as his mother had told him, and they made their way together. ‘He’s not been still since you told him,’ his daughter said, when he called to collect his grandson the following week. Now, if he could believe in magic, or something like it, there might be an alternative.Īnd so, from the post office he bought two tickets for the circus, and prepared his strategy. He had heard about others in the same position tales of ether, cocaine, and shaky, inexperienced hands that could pierce him into sightlessness. He had to find a way to heal his eyes or be laid off. Any inaccuracy could quickly lead to discontent amongst men, no longer young, who bought livelihood through the daily pain of their bodies. It hadn’t gone unnoticed that the work was taking him longer. Shapes that were once distinct now had to be prised apart. Everyone in the village was a survivor of some sort.īut within the last year, the rows of numbers had begun to coalesce. He was moved above ground to prepare wages for the men he had worked alongside, or those that were left. But his wits saved him - he was treasurer of the working men’s club, and could calculate figures as fast as anyone. They were now his incentive to continue, if he could find a way.įor nearly four decades, like most of the men he knew, he had worked hewing coal in the local pit until his lungs thickened and his spine faltered. His daughter and her little boy had lost a husband and father respectively.

The women remained but of the men, only the old and very young. In the years between, a generation had been taken from the village. Gradually, small freedoms were returning. Once an annual event, this would be their first visit since the close of war. Next week, the circus would set up again on the common ground just outside his village. His life had allowed little poetry of thought, but something encouraged him to believe that what he had read could be true. After a while, he folded the paper carefully and sat back, looking within himself. His lips moved silently, as though only fierce attention could draw meaning from the smudged print. He passed a magnifying glass left to right in three inch sweeps across the newspaper spread before him. The old man sat bent forward at his kitchen table, his posture rigid from years of labour. Continued abuse of our services will cause your IP address to be blocked indefinitely.Faced with losing his eyesight, an elderly man puts his hope in a circus performer with an unconventional gift in Mike Fox’s short story. Please fill out the CAPTCHA below and then click the button to indicate that you agree to these terms. If you wish to be unblocked, you must agree that you will take immediate steps to rectify this issue. If you do not understand what is causing this behavior, please contact us here. If you promise to stop (by clicking the Agree button below), we'll unblock your connection for now, but we will immediately re-block it if we detect additional bad behavior. Overusing our search engine with a very large number of searches in a very short amount of time.Using a badly configured (or badly written) browser add-on for blocking content.Running a 'scraper' or 'downloader' program that either does not identify itself or uses fake headers to elude detection.Using a script or add-on that scans GameFAQs for box and screen images (such as an emulator front-end), while overloading our search engine.There is no official GameFAQs app, and we do not support nor have any contact with the makers of these unofficial apps. Continued use of these apps may cause your IP to be blocked indefinitely. This triggers our anti-spambot measures, which are designed to stop automated systems from flooding the site with traffic. Some unofficial phone apps appear to be using GameFAQs as a back-end, but they do not behave like a real web browser does.Using GameFAQs regularly with these browsers can cause temporary and even permanent IP blocks due to these additional requests. If you are using Maxthon or Brave as a browser, or have installed the Ghostery add-on, you should know that these programs send extra traffic to our servers for every page on the site that you browse.The most common causes of this issue are: Your IP address has been temporarily blocked due to a large number of HTTP requests.

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