Polly of the Circus

A trapeze sylph plummets from her cobalt empyrean into the hushed austerity of a parsonage garden, her sequined body a comet of scandal across the monochrome New-England sky; the fall fractures her ankle and the town’s propriety in one brittle crack. While convalescing beneath the austerity of scripture-lined walls, Polly Fisher—smelling of sawdust, gunpowder, and rosin—teaches the stiff-collared Reverend John Hartley that grace can arrive wearing spangled tights. Their clandestine covenant of marriage, inked in moonlight and circus brass, detonates the congregation’s pieties; the pulpit is vacated, the ring is abandoned, and the lovers find themselves exiled to opposite frontiers of their respective heavens. Polly must choose: watch the man she loves suffocate in the dust of a vestry that no longer wants him, or vault back into the aerial firmament alone, carrying only the memory of a kiss that tasted of cotton-candy and communion wine.