Truth Be Cold

By Alexa Barstow

An Anti-Cupid scared they'll never find love, an isolated girl with a chilling family gift, a teenager who keeps writing letters to someone who never writes back...

We all have ghosts, specters of our past we're too afraid to confront. The young characters in these sixteen stories, which blur the lines between the supernatural and the real, face their phantoms. Haunting but hopeful, Truth Be Cold is a debut collection about fear in its many forms and the liberating truth to be found within it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Telling Room
• Release date: Aug 26, 2020

Book preview

Alexa Barstow

THE TELLING ROOM

225 Commercial St., Suite 201

Portland, ME 04101

©2020 The Telling Room

All rights reserved, including right of reproduction

in whole or part in any form.

Managing Editor: Kathryn Williams

Book Design: Andrew Griswold

Cover & Interior Images: Extended License / / stock.adobe.com

Author Photo: Molly Haley

Distributed by Smashwords

This book is also available in print

Table of Contents

Extraordinary People

Hazel

Cliff’s Edge

Holding Tight

Polly Pocket

Windswept

Greased Lightning

Stage Red

Behind Your Eyes

Anti-Cupid

The Color White

E + A

Monster Tale

Truth Be Cold

Onward

Remember When

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Young Emerging Authors Fellowship

The Telling Room

To Marjolaine Whittlesey

For letting me cross town lines,

and for being the most wonderful friend

A Note on Content

This book deals with mature themes, including death,

suicide, child abduction, and gun violence. Some stories

may not be appropriate for younger readers.

Extraordinary People

Circus lights are bright. They have the kind of brightness that carries heat. Tonight, on the night I turn eighteen, I’m more aware of them than usual. The heat soaks into my skin as beads of sweat form on my shoulders and face. There is not a single empty seat in the crowd. I know this because the newspapers promised it, because my father promised it, because even as I stare straight ahead at the length of rope in front of me, I can sense every held breath.

Do you want to spend your whole life being ordinary? he asked me when I was five, the first time I didn’t want to step on the rope. This was back when he only had one gold tooth and before he decided to grow a goatee. We were standing in the big tent, my tiny feet enclosed in leather-soled slippers and white tights covering my legs. My hair was pulled up out of my face, secured by the large clip my mother had pulled from her own hair before placing it in mine. I had practiced holding still before the mirror that morning, trying to tame the shaking in my limbs so I would look unafraid to my father once we were in the tent. But still, faced with the true height of the tightrope, I trembled. The rope was sixty-five feet above the ground, and per my father’s rules, there was no mat underneath, only a small harness to save me if I fell. Extraordinary people, he explained again and again, don’t fall, or if they do, they don’t hit the ground.

Now, I hover halfway between the platforms on either end of the rope. Even the harness is long gone; the only thing to catch me if I fall is dirt, one of the few things I’ve been sure of in life. Dirt on knees and dirt on palms and dirt on graves. Always there after a fall from the tightrope. I take another step forward and refuse to look down.

Do you want to spend your whole life being ordinary? he asked me again when I was nine. By that time, I was up there already, performing a show every night for astonished crowds.

She’s a natural, they’d say.

It’s a family gift, my father would confirm.

They never saw the times I fell, like the time I broke my wrist or sustained a head injury that kept me locked in a dark room for weeks. I became a prisoner to the four walls of our trailer, locked away like my mother, who had started keeping the curtains shut long before my concussion. The concussion, that’s what I was trying to explain to my father when I was nine. The lights were too bright in the tent, and I couldn’t stand them with my pounding headache. Nonsense, he’d said. Bright lights only affect ordinary people.

Bright lights, like the ones on me now. I pull a scrap of fabric from my pocket, hold it high above my head so that every wide-eyed person in the crowd can see it. Then, I tie it around my eyes and take a step backward.

Ordinary. The word is tainted in my family. I was raised with the word a bitter taste in my mouth. It curled up beneath my tongue, making a home there until I proved that I wasn’t. My family spit that word back out, trying to say again and again, no we’re not, no we’re not, no we’re not.

The rope wobbles suddenly beneath me. That old, familiar taste fills my mouth, and my breath catches in my throat. The tightrope is a line that cuts through time and space. I bend the air around me, bend the dimensions, to do what people once thought no human could ever or would ever do. I freeze time and space for others and become the only moving thing in the room. Until a moment like this, when time freezes for me, too, and bitterness finds its way into my mouth. I know I make people’s hearts freeze in their chests. I know that to them, I am that vivid dream of something miraculous that they’ve never allowed themselves to believe in. But I also know the sound that bone makes when it hits the ground from a sixty-five-foot fall, and I know the way time can resume with a single misstep. I know the way it feels to know all of this when you’re standing up on that tightrope with only dirt to catch you below.

When I was fifteen, I skipped a show to attend a friend’s birthday party; it was the first I’d ever gone to, and afterward, my father made it his goal to assure it was my last. When I snuck back in my bedroom that night, he was sitting on my bed, still dressed in the red jacket and velvet black hat of his show attire. He didn’t say anything as I lowered myself from the windowsill onto the floor, still holding onto a gift bag from the party. He simply took a firm hold of my wrist and led me out of the room and into the tent. The lights were off and the stands were empty, occupied only by dropped pieces of popcorn and left-behind trash. He passed me my leather-soled slippers, anger hidden in his eyes.

I climbed up on the rope, and he made me stand there all night.

When I climbed down, I couldn’t look my father in the eye. I stared intently off to the side as fiery tears pooled in my eyes. Once upon a time, the tent had felt endless; its dome reached on forever, filled with shadows in every corner. It felt too large for my small tightrope act to fill—too many seats, too many expectations, too many possible failures to fight off. But after that night, it felt as if it were shrinking. Each time I stepped inside the tent, there was less oxygen for me to breathe.

In this moment now, so many years later, I still feel as if I’m gasping for breath with every step I take. I beg for the mesmerized audience to be enough to keep me from falling. Beneath the blindfold, I close my eyes, focusing on the stiffness of the rope beneath my feet. I keep my back straight, sustaining the bend in my knees, centering my gravity toward the rope.

You know what type of people fill these stands? my father had asked me that night after the party. We were alone inside the tent, and his eyes were even darker than the shadows haunting the corners of the room. He smelled of black pepper, the lingering scent of his favorite fancy frittatas my mom used to make him, even though they hadn’t been made for any of us in years. The scent of the past washing over me, I recoiled.

"Ordinary people. Ordinary people come to see these shows. Ordinary people go home after it’s over. Ordinary people go to birthday parties and movie showings and circus shows to try and fill their mundane existences with something that feels just a little bit extraordinary. So, let me ask you this, do you want to spend your whole life being ordinary?"

He hadn’t waited for an answer. He left me alone in the tent, where I crumpled on the floor like an empty popcorn bag. I’d made sure to wipe away all my tears by the time I returned to our trailer; after all, the only thing my father said the first time I fell off the rope was, Extraordinary people don’t cry.

My hands reach through the empty air, searching for the support that I know isn’t there. If I could ask my mother anything, it’d be if she’d felt extraordinary as she fell to the ground, or if she had been waiting for ordinariness to wrap her in its grip. After all this time, ordinary is still everything. It crawls beneath my skin, breaking through the surface like a birthmark to remind everyone in the audience what they don’t want to believe—I’m only human.

For a moment now, up on the rope, I pause, bringing myself back to when I was five, the first night after I’d tried to use a tightrope to reach the sky. My father had whispered to me in the darkness of my room, voice shaking.

You should be afraid of it. His words were unsteady on his lips, his knuckles clenching as he curled a fist around the edge of my comforter. You should be afraid of ever being ordinary.

I feel my heel touch down on the platform at the end of the rope. Careful to not pitch my weight too far forward or backward, I take the final step off the tightrope. As my blindfold comes off, I’m met with camera flashes from every direction. The audience is on their feet, stomping the ground. Kids wave their balloon animals, adults whistle with their fingers in the corners of their mouths, reporters hurriedly jot down lines in their pocket notebooks. I smile and wave, the spotlights setting me on fire, as I pray nobody can see my legs shaking.

My father is waiting for me backstage when I finish my part of the show. He’s grinning from ear to ear, all three of his gold teeth flashing, even in the dimly lit crew area. He reaches to embrace me, but I hold a hand up, stopping him before he can touch me. His arms fall back to his sides and the smile dissolves off his lips like cotton candy in a child’s mouth.

I reach up to the top of my head, pulling the golden ribbon out of my hair. Next, I retrieve the purple cloth back from my pocket, where I put it once I reached the end of the tightrope. And finally, I lean down, pulling off each of my leather-soled slippers. Wordlessly, I hold them out to my father.

He looks as if he’s seen a ghost. Or perhaps not seen, but is looking right at one. He speaks slowly, enunciating each word so delicately that they chill me to the bone and nearly scare me enough to put the slippers back on. And what do you think you’re doing?

Taking a deep breath, I prepare the words I’ve whispered to myself for years, trying to work up the courage to finally look him in the eye and say what I need to say. I’m quitting.

His eyes glint, holding the look of a predator watching its prey. I beg myself not to tremble. Quitting, he says thoughtfully, as if I’ve spoken a foreign tongue. Tell me, dear daughter of mine, when did this fame become not enough for you?

A faint smile rises to my lips. "Since day one, when I was five years old and told you I didn’t want to do it, when I told you that I was afraid. When, like a normal father, you should’ve hugged me and told me that I didn’t have to do it, that I was still worth something to you even if I didn’t walk on a tightrope.

You should’ve told me that I was worth something, even when I was standing on the ground.

You wish I had coddled you? Raised you to be someone cheering in the crowd rather than someone being cheered for? He takes the slippers from my hand, waving them in front of my face. "These are your keys,