"This," cried a rangy man in a deteriorating red coat, "is the Brazilian wandering spider."
He held aloft a clear glass jar which held a brown spider about the size of a mouse. The spider lifted its front legs into a "v" shape and swayed menacingly.
"It is one of the world's most venomous spiders and can kill a man in a few short, agonizing minutes."
The man with the spider snapped his fingers, and two raven-haired women stepped forward, each holding a jar containing a spider. The three performers moved closer to the audience, brandishing their jars for the children and women who gasped and screamed. One lady in a dark velvet coat fainted into her husband's arms.
Behind the performers, a man with graying black hair was manacled to a strange round platform. The vertical platform was painted with a huge white spider, although the paint was starting to crack, giving it a dappled look from the audience's point of view. The man was chained in the center of the spider, and an enclosed maze surrounded his body like a web.
He put on a nervous face for the crowd, but he had done this stunt so many times that the only thing running through his mind was his usual mantra: "Shoulders first, then elbows, then wrists, but wait until they're screaming. Finally, free the ankles, but don't do the last one 'til you feel the spider's legs."
"Milosh here," said the man in the red coat, "the Human Spider, will have to escape five Brazilian wandering spiders before they bite him. If one does, he will feel intense pain as all of the nerves in his body burn. Then, before anyone can save him, he will be paralyzed, and then… he will die, before your very eyes, ladies and gentlemen!"
There was a terrible scream from one side of the tent, a young boy, hardly older than five. The boy had dark, pointed features and striking yellow eyes. He sat on the lap of an austere white-haired woman who clasped a hand over his mouth to stifle the scream.
The man in the red coat continued, "My lovely assistants here will release the spiders, but first our Human Spider will be blindfolded!"
Sweat poured down the escape artist's face as he the third assistant put the blindfold on him. Milosh prided himself on his ability to feign nervousness.
The young boy shifted in the old woman's lap, but her iron grip held him tightly.
The spiders were released into the maze, and Milosh struggled against his bonds. Through the glass, the crowd could see the spiders crawling closer. An old man with a long mustache played an ominous tune on a concertina missing a few buttons. He did not miss a beat even as some notes came out flat or in wheezes.
Milosh dislocated a shoulder and wrist to wrench one hand free, then the other as the audience gasped. A spider was an inch from his neck.
The yellow-eyed boy bit the woman's hand, popped both shoulders out of place, and slid easily from her grasp.
"Dat! Dati! Dati!" he shouted, running toward Milosh as the escape artist hopped down from the platform and removed his blindfold to the audience's applause. He took the little boy into his arms and waved to the crowd. The old woman looked at Milosh sternly and whisked the child away from him.
The boy crouched in a corner of the wooden wagon, his bony hands covering his eyes.
"But Milosh, I told you he wasn't ready!" shouted a woman's voice from outside.
"He was going to see it eventually, Aisha, and he wanted to. Imagine if Elena hadn't been holding him!"
"Yes, imagine!"
There was a snapping sound as she shook out a blanket.
"Lyubitshka, lyubitshka, my dear love," Milosh pleaded. "You aren't listening to me. I mean, what if he had sneaked into the tent. He could have ruined the act."
"The act. The act! That's all you care about. It's a small wonder he wasn't bitten, and we don't have the money for a real doctor."
"There's Mihai."
"He's not a real doctor, a poisoner if anything!"
"Aisha! Aisha!"
The wagon rocked as she stomped in.
"Hanzi!" she called. The boy kept his eyes covered, but he whimpered. "Hanzi, you should sleep. We're leaving in the morning, and I know how you hate riding in the wagon."
She laid a blanket and pillow in front of him. Hanzi opened his yellow eyes and stared into his mother's. The only difference between their eyes was that his were full of tears.
Aisha, his mother, had a round, flat face and an upturned nose. She would have looked enough like a snake to pass as an oddity even if her head had not been shaved and tattooed with green scales.
"Your father is fine, child," she whispered, taking his tiny hand. "There is nothing to be afraid of. You can sleep now."
Once he was in his makeshift bed, Hanzi gazed at the ceiling, thinking of all of the spider webs that must be hiding in the dark corners. His mother leaned against the wall and hummed until she was asleep. Her skin was clear and beautiful, a deep olive under the tattoos. Hanzi had inherited his father's pallor. While she snored, her long tongue, which had been excruciatingly forked when she joined the circus, peeked out between her lips.
When Milosh returned two hours later, the smell of brandy strong on his breath, he wrapped a blanket gingerly around Aisha's sleeping body and kissed her forehead. Hanzi pretended to be asleep, and Milosh kissed him too before going to bed himself.
Ten years would change this peculiar little family beyond recognition. When Mihai and Elena began talking about divorce, Elena wanted to keep "Serpentina", as she called Aisha.
Hanzi, now an unattractive, spindly-limbed teenager, overheard her screaming about his parents' fates as he replaced the bulbs in their electric sign.
"I see what it is!" she shouted. "Ve! Ve! Get out of here, and take the escape artist!"
"Romni! Romni! My wife!" he cried, kissing her pointed leather shoes.
She kicked him hard in the chin.
"I'm through with you, Mihai. Take your Gypsy language straight to hell with you."
"But I can't," he said. "I will have no means to make money, no citizenship."
"Then leave Spain. Go back to Bulgaria. When the sun rises tomorrow, I want you and Milosh and the boy gone!"
"You can't mean to break up their family! I cannot take the boy from his mother."
"You should have thought of that before you let the freaks have children!"
She sauntered toward Hanzi who went back to work, turning a bulb so furiously that it shattered in his hand. Elena wrinkled her nose as she looked him up and down. His hand bled, pierced by slivers of glass, but he ignored it and looked her in the eyes.
"Not even good enough for manual labor," she said. "I should have drowned you when I had the chance."
She turned abruptly on her heel and marched away.
The years had taken a toll on Aisha. She plucked the hair where her eyebrow would have been in front of a small mirror hung from a nail on the wagon. She had gained weight, and her tattoos stretched across her chubby arms. Her eyes had dulled, and the few hairs that grew on her acid-treated skin were gray.
Aisha leaned close to the mirror to see a single hair against her dark skin.
"Mother!" Hanzi cried, running around the wagon to her.
His mother jumped, poking herself in the corner of her eye with the tweezers. She screamed as the mirror she had bumped fell to the ground and broke.
"Prikaza!" she shrieked. "A bad omen!"
Her yellow eyes burned as she gazed at Hanzi. She leaned against the wagon with a hand over her heart.
"Elena is sending us away," Hanzi said.
His mother closed her eyes and muttered to herself.
"She is making Mihai leave before the morning, and he is to take Dat and me with him."
"Your jokes break an old woman's heart."
"It's no joke, Mother."
She turned her back on him and did not speak to him the rest of the evening.
When his father returned to the wagon, long after the sun was down, Hanzi was silently packing his few possessions.
"Milosh!" shouted Hanzi's mother, running to the aging escape artist. "Your son is a liar!"
"What has he lied about?"
"He says you are going away before morning!"
Milosh laughed nervously. "We are, my dear one. Me and Hanzi."
"And you leave me here, just like that?" she yelled.
"Aisha, Aisha my love," he purred. "Mihai and I are compañeros."
"Don't use Elena's disgusting language!"
He moved closer to kiss her, but she pushed him off.
"You're drunk, Milosh."
"Don't you see that I have to go? I'll send money back to you. Mihai and I will make the big money, and I'll send some back."
"After you spend most of it on cards and brandy! I'd rather you were dead!"
"Don't say that!"
"You and Hanzi! Buried in the ground back in Bulgaria!"
"No…"
"Dead! Dead! Rotting in the ground! Eaten by the - !"
"Dosta! Enough!" Milosh bellowed, and he punched Aisha square in the nose. Hanzi heard a sickening crack, and his mother was kneeling on the ground, blood pouring from her face. Hanzi ran to her. Milosh held his sleeve to her nose to stop the bleeding.
"Hanzi," he said quietly, "get Mihai quick."
Mihai was in a wagon he had fashioned into an office packing his own belongings.
"Ah, my boy," he said when he saw Hanzi, "are you ready for a new adventure?"
He spoke brightly, but his eyes were red as if he'd just been crying.
"My mother is hurt, Mihai."
"Mi Dios! Elena will kill me if it's serious. She'll think I sabotaged her!"
He picked up his small medical bag and rushed out the door. Hanzi did not want to see his parents argue again, so he stayed behind. The shelves behind Mihai's desk were stacked with clear jars, each containing a single spider.
His fascination with spiders had grown over the years. For a long time, he would not even touch an empty web and called his mother to clear any he saw near his bed. When he hit that adolescent age at which every boy revels in destruction, he took to pulling the legs off of every spider he found. A bite from a black widow and a month with a swollen hand had taught him to respect them.
He examined the shelves of Brazilian wandering spiders. Mihai said they were the most poisonous in the world. There were plain males and banded females with hairy red mouths. He forced his hand to touch the glass where one of the spiders had pressed her underside against it.
The females scared him the most. They were usually bigger and brighter, and they always carried the marking which signaled the spider's lethality. So many species ate their own mates too, as Mihai happily explained to anyone who showed the slightest interest in his spiders. The male Australian redback spider impaled itself on the female's fangs after mating, perhaps too frightened of her to live with her while she protected her eggs.
Hanzi stroked the glass jars one by one, his eyes gleaming. After inspecting each one, he took three females from the shelf and set them on the table. Then he rearranged the spiders on the shelf to fill the gaps. He stuffed the jars awkwardly under his shirt and crept outside. Mihai sang drunkenly in the distance, making him easy for Hanzi to avoid.
The wagon was silent when he arrived. A pile of bloody rags lay outside. His parents slept naked in their bed, his mother's folds of fat moving up and down as she breathed. Her face was bandaged, so she snored through her mouth, her long tongue hanging out. His father's lithe body was curled close to her, and his arm rested across her breast.
Hanzi edged next to the bed. He shook all three jars violently until the spiders inside reared back to display their fangs. Carefully, he opened a jar and tapped it over his mother. The large spider fell out, but his mother did not awaken.
Hanzi dropped the second spider onto his father. Immediately, he lifted his hand to brush it away. It sank its fangs into the soft skin on his neck. He jerked. It was only a moment before he was screaming in pain.
The other spider bit his mother, and she sat up. Hanzi hid behind a crate and listened as his parents tore the bedding, searching for the spiders. Soon the wagon was filled with shrieks. Hanzi covered his ears and stared at his own spider in the jar between his feet. It leered at him with its front legs raised.
The screaming continued, peppered with Romani curses. They weren't dying! He hadn't expected it to be like this. He twisted the lid and reached a solitary finger into the jar. Then he hesitated. He yanked his finger away, threw the spider in its glass prison behind him, and shot through the doorway.
Other circus workers were gathering outside, gawking at the wagon but doing nothing. As Hanzi darted into the woods, the man who cleaned the camel's stall shouted and tried to chase him, but the boy was too fast. He caught a branch and climbed into a tree where he waited until no one was looking for him anymore.
He stayed in the trees the next day and the following day. On the third day, he watched the workers bury his parents under the full moon. The man with the concertina played a wheezing dirge. Mihai held his red hat and wept. Elena kept an arm around Mihai's shoulders and kissed him on the cheek. Then Hanzi ran. He left the circus behind, the wagons, Elena and Mihai, his parents' graves, their years in Spain, and finally, his name.