My friends laughed as I pulled back the dark purple and blue satin curtain into Madame Curioso’s shrine to the other world. A puff of incense blew past my head like a cloud of exhaust from a ten year old diesel truck, burning my eyes. I blinked and felt my friends shove me into the mysterious dome-shaped room.<\/p>\n
“Welcome… Seth,” came a soothing voice. It took a second for my eyes to adjust, then I saw the faint blue glow emitting from the crystal ball on a short table. Did she just say my name? “Come closer, dear. Madame Curioso knows all. You seek love, money, success.”<\/p>\n
I rolled my eyes. Who isn’t seeking those things? “What can you tell me?” I played along. I didn’t think she had moved, but she was standing right before me.<\/p>\n
“Do not mock the ancestral ways of communication with the departed,” she warned. “It’s not everyday you get a chance to glimpse into the future, find out what’s awaiting you.”<\/p>\n
I felt her cold fingers wrap around my hands and pull me to my knees before the illuminating orb. “Okay.” I was curious after all.<\/p>\n
She moved in such fluid motions, it was almost ghost-like. “Now, gaze into your future,” she said and reached her skeletal fingers over the ball and touched it with her finger tips. I sat on the edge of the small stool, shoulders hunched forward. I squinted, while fidgeting with my hands. The orb turned a shade of red, then white filling the room. I was transfixed on the images before me. I felt myself lift from my chair, coming closer and closer to the hypnotizing colors emitting from within this small glass object which seemed to be growing.<\/p>\n
The wind came from nowhere and pulled at my clothing. I heard a crack of lightning and a crash of thunder, all the while the ball grew. I realized soon that my clothing was growing too. My jewelry fell from my fingers which were small and childlike and fell to the table. I shivered as my clothing fell from my body. I crawled through the neck of my shirt and placed my hands on the ball. I had shrunk so small it was now five or six times my size.<\/p>\n
This couldn’t be happening. I heard Madame Curioso laugh and loom down at me from behind the ball. She was getting bigger and bigger, or I was getting smaller. My hand brushed up against a knob on the ball which I instantly jerked away from. But to get out of the site of Madame Curioso, I rushed against the knob, turning it, and stumbled through the ball into a dark thick room. The knob disappeared behind me and I heard whispering. “Who’s there?” I called out. My voice was shaking. All noise from the outside ceased.<\/p>\n
“There’s nothing to go back to now,” a woman said. “It wont be too long before you go insane like the others.”<\/p>\n
I sat down on the ground and wrapped my arms around my legs. “Is there no way out?” I asked?<\/p>\n
She laughed. “Even if there were. I think were about the size of mice.”<\/p>\n
Madame Curioso picked up the ball and returned it to the case. She walked back through a doorway to the front of her display and pressed a button. Mechanical arms pulled her tent into the back of her wagon and she sat down on the patient horses. “Yup!” She commanded and the horses began the slow walk away from the circus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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