Timothy Cabbage’s Circus offered the greatest attractions from everywhere in the world: he had the seven-fingered girl Rosa, who was otherwise “beautiful as an Asian princess” though she came from a village on the Adriatic sea; he had Frantik, the dwarf from Andorra, who could support his own body weight with only his tongue; he had the talking elephant, who had lost his voice in a Babylonian fire but could write “I am all alone” into the sand with his trunk. Timothy even had a most precious ring from the hand of Jesus Christ himself, which had done miracles through those who wore it. Rosa, the many-fingered girl, wore the ring during the show: “I could work as a ring model,” she said when anyone wondered why she worked at the circus. She could in fact have had many careers, but she loved traveling with Timothy and his motley crew of freaks and geniuses. Though she was only eighteen, she had already had a child with a prince who’d lost two fingers of each hand in battle: he wished to have a normal heir and by the powers of genetic arithmetic invested in Rosa, he got a boy with ten fingers altogether. At her young age, she had seen all of the world twice over, including “the far side of the Carpathians, the ruins of Carthage, and the legendary mermaids of Seville,” she said. “No water”, spelled the elephant and meant Seville, but Rosa only laughed the throaty laughter that she had picked up among the gypsies and said someone should bring the poor animal something to drink.
#42/1000. Part of the flash novella 100 Days And Nights 1000 Years Ago. Published in: mad hatters review. Photo: Mummers, Bodleian Library MS. Bodl. 264, fol 21 v. (Deutsche Übersetzung.)
(Source: 100daysandnights)
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