jackson reeves | district five | fin

JACKSON REEVES



soul and born creation
the lion's in the house
flowers are up in the air
crashing against the dark

CIRQUE D'ÈTOILES.

Even seeing the neon sign was a privilege. To find it, one would have to enter, Hotel DuMontè, find the south side elevator, type in the pass code inked into their official invitation, (or the four digit pin of their credit card,) and then, show proof of the invitation or present the card to the bouncers waiting when the doors opened.

"We were already on the ground floor," Malcolm Reeves said, "Why are we descending so far down?"

The elevator wasn't anything special: a metal box that made Jackson's claustrophobia flare up while his little sister tugged on the back of his shirt, despite him asking her to stop several times.

"Kids," His mother said. White wine mom. Petrified wood taking a human shape and parading through District Five claiming to be a mother of two. She wore her pearls that night, which meant she didn't want to remember it the next day.

The doors opened to two stone-faced men wearing black. They couldn't have been from District Five, and if they were, Jackson was going to ask them which laboratory they were created in.

"Invitation?" The skinnier one said.

"We have a card." His father held up the golden slate. Those were hard to come by. Wealthy people had the most interesting things to be proud of, didn't they? Fact of the matter was that Malcom and Wendy Reeves weren't interesting enough to get actual invitations, and had heard about the circus from coworkers. But money has its ways.

Swiped card, the two guards stepped aside to reveal the tunnel behind them: long and narrow, the pathway felt more like an escape route than anything. Fourteen years old, Jackson found himself wishing his sister was still tugging on his shirt tail, just to be reminded that he was not alone.

A narrow passage lit with fairy lights and white archways that reminded Jackson of the gentle flames of a candle. Soft, inviting.

(How wrong he had been.)

The doors opened, and peculiar sounds of fiddles being plucked and pianos with old strings filled his ears. Scents of popcorn and alcohol and perfume invaded his sense of smell. But it all took a backseat to what his eyes were soaking in.

Women strutting across ropes, thirty feet in the air; men spitting fire toward crowds of terrified onlookers; people who wore capes and disappeared behind curtains, only to reappear on the opposite side of the stage moments later.

None of this is real, Jackson reminded himself.

There is no such thing as magic.

But try as he might have, there was no hiding his excitement. There was no hiding the wonder in his eyes, candle light growing into a forest fire as sudden as the boom of a firecracker. Salt skin pressed against his lips, palms full of sweat as a new world unfolded before his very eyes.

"Must be a trap door," his father had said of the magician.

"They did a good job of concealing her safety harness," his mother chimed in of the acrobat.

"The fire was scary," his sister admitted, "But it was over too quickly."

Jackson held his tongue, jaw and fists clenched angrily at his sides. This was why families like theirs had to pay their way in. No excitement left in their poor, greed-ridden hearts. No room for the unthinkable, no exceptions for the exceptional. Bland, if you asked Jackson, and he knew in that very moment that he never wanted to be like them.

He had realized it several times before. When his father put on one of his ridiculous top hats or smoked from a pipe, or when his mother disappeared to the nearest mirror to fix the strand of hair that had fallen free from her up-do. He didn't like the looks the got from others when walking down the street. He didn't like how children in school treated him like an investment more so than a friend. But never, in his wildest dreams, had Jack ever realized he could be whoever he wanted to be, and while his parents painted expressions of pleasure on the pretty plastic masks they wore, he slipped off the edge of the bleachers and started to explore his options.

The first tent was wide open, and showed a haughty woman with several layers of clothing on and a deck of tarot cards in her spindly hands. He never walked in, but he could hear her haunting voice spilling paid-for prophecies of good fortune to those who were dumb enough to listen.

Not for him.

The next, a hulking man holding a dumb bell over his head, while a pair of quite thin women hung from the ends by their hands. Jackson felt of his upper arms, flexed against his own grasp. I can do a hundred push-ups, he had once bragged to a friend. Suddenly, he felt as if he couldn't do even one.

Not for him.

The third tent had a woman with very severe features tossing knives at another woman who was tied to a spinning circle.

He considered going in, then imagined what the newspapers would say when he willingly tied himself to a wall and had a rogue knife implanted in his skull, and he kept walking.

Not for him.

He had all but given up ten minutes later, which said a lot about his fickle nature. He had observed at least nine practicing acts, none of which quite suited him, and he had gotten cursed out by a man with his entire body tattooed after he pulled back the door of a closed tent to find him smoking pot. It was a bust.

None of it was for him.

He had gone and found his parents just as the show came to an end with his hands in his pockets and his gaze on the floor.

In the weeks to come, Jack found himself where all privileged boys who could not have their way wound up: sitting on a therapist's couch in a tailored suit.

"I don't want to be who I am," he proclaimed. He hated talking about himself. It was a learned behavior he had taught himself so that he seemed more approachable. After all, if he just went around talking about himself and had a wealthy future, no one would have ever had the sense to befriend him. Right?

"Who do you want to be, then?"

His father had forced him to come- said Jack had been acting off for a while, and that going to therapy might have given him some answers to the questions he wasn't comfortable asking. Unfortunately, Jack had learned very quickly that all he was going to get were more questions.

"Anyone else," he lamented. It was heartbreaking, admitting that out loud.

"Why is that?" Another question. He often repeated her statements in his head, just to be sure she was asking questions and not just saying things in a quizzical tone.

"I don't know. Well, I do, but-" He struggled to find the words to say. "I don't want to end up like my parents."

"In what way?" He stood from the couch, straightening his coat. He looked at her, straight-faced, as she adjusted her glasses and pretended to finish up some bullshit note that wouldn't make a difference.

"Could you please stop answering my questions with more questions? I'm drowning in them as it is."

"I'm just trying to understand where you're coming from, Jackson. I have to ask questions in order to help."

"When does the help part start, then? Because I've been answering questions for five days straight and I only feel worse."

She pursed her lips. Women like her weren't used to being told they weren't good at their jobs. Jackson thought back to the haughty woman from the circus, holding her cards and saying things she had no way of knowing just to make people feel better about themselves, but only as soon as they dropped a twenty in her palm.

How was that any different than what was going on here, exactly?

"I think I'm just going to go." He hadn't ever been an angry person, per se, but if you ever want to break a person, take away their hope. Feeling out of place with a future headed toward him like a steam engine was scary, especially when he felt so tightly bound to the tracks that it was hopeless to squirm.

"I think that's a good idea. See you Monday."

He rolled his eyes, huffing out of the building with his chest puffed out in anger. All he wanted to do was go home and lay in his bed and dare the future to find him before he was ready.

They say time flies when a person is having a good time, so maybe, Jackson decided, if he just stayed bored all of the time, well...

He was so lost in his thoughts that the boy had to address him four or five times before he ever noticed.

"Sorry?" Jack said, looking at him. Skinny, with an odd trench coat and willowy limbs.

"I said you dropped this!" the boy called, handing him an envelope. Jack looked down at it for a moment to be sure, but he was certain. The golden wrappings and the white trim, the weight of it, he knew this was important to someone, and he knew it wasn't his.

"This isn't-" he looked up only to find that the boy was gone.

He observed the envelope again, and his eyes widened with shock. His name was there, right in the center, in pretty cursive. He was certain it hadn't been there before, and after blinking to see if he was only imagining it and rubbing his fingers over the raised letters, he was positive they were real.

"What the—" He nearly tossed it, but that would have been an opportunity wasted. Also, his curiosity had never really been a secret.

He ripped the seal, eyes sliding from left to right as he read the lines within.

Two days later, he found himself sitting in a room full of ordinary people with extraordinary dreams, and a new means to become the very stars they had been wishing upon.

————————

"We'll have to find another one,"
the words came from Nell, from beneath a mass of wrinkles and scowls and an upturned nose. Her lion, Duchess, had grown too old to perform, and so had Nell. She had been searching the grounds for someone to take her place, should she ever actually retire to the crystalline home she'd had built a few blocks away from the hotel, and her search thus far hadn't been very fruitful.

Duchess was spoiled to her, and refused to listen to anyone else, which meant bringing in a new lion to start from scratch with. The little cub wasn't even old enough to have a mane yet, which made people feel like too much was being asked of the little thing. However, Nell would just huff at anyone bold enough to say so, tossing her hand up and looking away.

"When I started training Duchess, she was a month younger that this one!"

It didn't change the cub's opinion on the situation, though. He wanted to play, claw at dangling fingers, chase bugs, climb in people's laps.

It wasn't until she sat down the new kid with pretty blue eyes and no particular talent that things began to change.

When Jack walked in on the first day, the cub sat on his feet and drifted to sleep, and after only a week of training between them, it was learning a few more basic tricks.

Jack named the little guy Soliel, though he usually called him Sully, and he never knew that, in the years to come, the pair would become one of the star attractions of Cirque d'Étoiles.

————————

Lights. Beautiful lights, and crowds of people in the stands. Inhale, exhale. Pulse quickens pace. They only chant one name as he waits for the curtains to open. One name. His name:

("Jackson! Jackson! Ja—")

Interruption leaves them silent for a moment, before the chant breaks entirely, and Jackson Reeves waves hello to them all.

"It's show time!" he shouts.