corner
7.1
Circus Prayer
Scott Loring Sanders

Dear Lord,

Thank You for letting me survive the seedy and derelict circus that showed up on the ball fields of my New Jersey elementary school in 1979. If You recall, there were two shows: the early and the late, and I went to the former. I remember the pair of tigers sitting on pedestals with metal collars, the O-rings at the ends of their heavy chains affixed to steel spikes driven into the outfield. There was no fence or wall between the tigers and the incoming circus-goers. There was no cage of any sort. No, Dear Lord, the only dividers were landscaping timbers resting horizontally on cinderblocks, not more than a foot off the ground. A single line of those timbers created the only “barrier” as the patrons streamed into the tent. But anyone, from an adult to a toddler, could have easily stepped over and walked right up to a tiger if they had had the cajones. Could have easily, if so inclined, slapped one of the beasts across its beautiful whiskered face.

It was at the late show where all the excitement happened. But I wasn’t at that show, Dear Lord. No, for whatever reason, You found it in my best interest to go to the early one. And I remember that after the incident, as a nine year old, I was angry with You. Not because You let the tragedy happen. No, instead I was angry (and also jealous) because I wasn’t there to witness it while many of my friends were. You chose to have me at home as that tiger leapt off its pedestal with just enough play in its chain to pounce on the boy, a boy my age from the next town over, who had strayed to the wrong side of that useless little barrier. Who had his neck bitten, mauled, and eaten by a three hundred? four hundred? five hundred? pound tiger. Who was killed by that tiger in front of a tent-full of onlookers. Who was pulled from the jaws of the beast by our school’s custodian, Mr. Van Sulkama, albeit, a tad too late.

The following day, Dear Lord, the circus had fled. But at recess I, along with a girl from my class, found a bloody, goopy pile of something in the grass near third base. Something the size and color of a juvenile eggplant. A deep purple that resembled smashed poke berries. Thirty years later, after I located the girl on Facebook, I asked if she remembered that goopy pile or was it something my young mind had invented. She remembered.

And the parents Lord, oh, the parents. Two sets in this instance. Because You didn’t have the boy go with his own parents, no, but with the parents of a friend. So they were responsible for the boy’s wellbeing. How does one live with that sort of guilt for the rest of their lives? And then the actual parents, Lord. They send their son off to the circus and he never comes back? Not abducted or kidnapped, not killed in a car accident, but eaten by a tiger? How many parents, in the history of all parents in civilization, can say their child was killed in such a way? A hundred maybe? Ever? And at least if it was in India or wherever tigers still roam, at least then the parents could make some sort of sense of it. Still painful, yes, but it could be rationalized. But in New Jersey, Lord? How do the parents begin to make heads or tails of that one? How awkward must that conversation be, even thirty years later, when new acquaintances ask innocent questions about family, maybe while at a dinner party and they see an old photo of the boy on the wall? “Oh, who is that handsome little guy?” And then the mother, or maybe the father, tries to explain. Why would You do that to those poor parents? Were they atheists or something? Had they denounced Your name at some point way back when?

Is it bad, Dear Lord, that I wanted to be there that night? To see that boy ripped open and partially eaten by a tiger? Why did You spare me that, yet, in Your infinite wisdom, allow me outside for recess the very next day to find the boy’s viscera lying in the hot sunshine beneath a swarm of hungry green-bottle flies? To let my imagination run wild with disturbing visions possibly more horrific than if I’d just witnessed the actual event? I know I’m not supposed to question the whys of Your ways, Dear Lord, but I’m asking anyway because quite frankly, it doesn’t make a whole lot of damn sense. No sense that I can see anyway. As You well know, I’m not much on praying, so I’m not sure about etiquette here. How does the prayer stop? Do I thank you? Do I cross myself or leave some offering? Or do I just end it, and hope that somehow You’ll reply?

Scott Loring Sanders lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. He has memoir pieces forthcoming in the fall issue of Creative Nonfiction, as well as in Spittoon and several other journals. In fiction, a story he published last year will be included in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, due out in October. He’s published two novels with Houghton Mifflin, was the Writer-in-Residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, and has been a two-time fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He teaches Creative Writing at Virginia Tech.