Performer's Nerves

Solomon was a trapezist by training, a high-wire act by aptitude, an acrobat by synaptic antic, a serious contender for testing the devil-may-care gap between life and death…

He travelled from circus to circus, improving his daredevil skills amid the airy heights of each big-top, glancing downward at the various failsafe, foolproof methods for inopportune falling … with giant safety-nets and unwholesomely over-nourished spiders lurking in these nets.

Solomon never needed such fall-backs because he was so unfoolhardily surefooted on the tightrope, so strong-gripped on the thin swing. Except, one day – his partner was a new one – the air-artiste who was due to grab Solomon’s wrist’s (or was it vice versa?) as he left one swing for another.

The handhold of these swings is called an aglet … or that was what Solomon once heard them called, except he was half deaf half the time and often misheard the calls of fellow swingers in the dizzying upper depths … and Solomon’s fingers sweated as he hung and swung back and forth in the spotlit criss-crosses of the tented heavens – nearer and nearer to the other’s swinging half-blinded shape or shadow.

Then Solomon saw what he thought was the other aglet snap – and then his partner of the canvas skies slipped slowly toward the engulfing net below, only to be swallowed whole by a spider before falling finally (as the spider) through a gaping hole in the net towards the inadequate sawdust in the circus ring below.

Already, however, before the slightest blink, Solomon was skimming the thermals, gliding painfully near-motionlessly, if not emotionlessly, towards the same snapped aglet…

His nerves stretched to the untutored tautness of a high wire, until the big-top’s supports were dislodged by mass hysteria and pulled apart till his nerves tugged upon a breaking-point … and he self-possessedly performed a somersault, followed in close order by a nip & tuck, like a high-diver as he, too, careered towards the swirling ring … beyond the reach of the cheep-cheeping safety-net spider – but just before Solomon hit the swaying sloping sawdust surface, he glanced upwards a last minute look and, with relief, saw that his own ganglia of stringy nerves had thankfully broken his fall.