Mermaids, headless girls, Ferris wheels, women aflame. Bears who dance (or used to) and crowds who pay to watch. Whether you’re here for the conjoined twins or the trapeze artist, you’re bound to find yourself somewhere in Gillian Devereux’s sideshow.
“The fantastical tone carries you to a Tom Waits style of readability that grabs your hair and makes you watch the story unfold. Nobody but him has made the carnival so sexy, raw, or appealing until now.” — Zach Fishel, Girls with Insurance
August 2011
34 pages, trade paperback
ISBN 978-0-9823741-4-6
Print: $8.00
PDF: $5.00
The Way He Throws the Knife, an excerpt from They Used to Dance on Saturday Nights:
She left him five times. She stayed away all last season, hid in some random city, wore each new job like a costume, told lies about the past. No one knew the true story. No one spoke her name, but we imagined her happy, safe inside the ordinary world, free of the spotlight and the stage, disentangled from her sequined bodice and the slight tremble that sometimes strikes his left hand.
Quick as a shadow, she fell back into their old routine, her body flat against the wall, her breath held hostage to the knife. The target is all that matters. It’s her face, her fate, her fear on display. Her life risked for a restless audience. Statistics demand that the knife must hit its mark eventually. Still, she never flinches when the blade draws blood; she never cries or closes her eyes, not even when he kisses her slowly, not even when he breaks her heart.
The less you see, the less you fear. And yet she meets his gaze every night, watches as his thin arm takes aim at the outline of her body, the space shaped by silhouette and absence. Like any addiction, he consumes all thought, clouds memory, camouflages lust. It isn’t love that binds them. Love doesn’t lure her back. It’s just the way he throws the knife.