The Cyberkink Sideshow. Ophidia Cox
this was obviously little to do with the music and very much to do with the matching gemlike object on the flute-player’s forehead. They slid away from the women and began to dance with the man, rearing and swaying their bodies in tune to the music, tracing circles around him, and rolling into knotty writhing tangles while changing color all the time. After playing for a few minutes, the musician tucked his flute into the waistband of his kilt and stood still, and the snakes came to him and climbed onto his outstretched arms. They returned to their amethystine coloration and he held them aloft while the audience applauded.
Both women went to the man and sat at his feet on either side of him, and they reached up to the waistband of his kilt. It flopped to his ankles, and a gasp rippled through the audience. Sylvia stared. The man had two penises. They protruded from the nest of his pubic hair like a pair of pythons, bowed together at the heads. The main screen changed to show a close-up, and she realized that in fact his original phallus had been circumcised and surgically split in two down the length of the urethra.
The two women each took hold of one half and greedily thrust their faces into the man’s groin. He stayed in the same position, holding up his snakes, while his face twisted into an ecstatic rictus and his shoulders and thighs started to tremble. When he came, it spurted out of the cleft in the middle of his groin and onto the women’s chins.
He raised his snakes once more, the women rose from the floor of the ring, and all three of them bowed to the applause of the audience before turning and leaving the same way they’d entered.
The noise died away when the ringmaster raised his hands. “Now then, for our next act, I’d like...”
The rasp of an old car horn interrupted him. He turned to face the entrance as an old Volkswagen Beetle, painted with garish chartreuse and magenta flowers, roared through the curtains. A pair of buttocks painted with a smiley face was pressed up against the back window. The doors opened and five clowns fell out. One of them wore a giant purple phallic rubber nose and a wrinkled skinhead wig with droopy rubber breasts hanging down on either side of his head like bloodhound ears. He ran at the ringmaster with a raucous yell and shoved him backward so he stumbled down on the sand. Another clown wore a pair of trousers with a large rigid hoop sewn into the waistband, held up by bracers, but when he walked the sway of the trousers revealed he wore no underwear, and had painted clown makeup on unmentionable parts of his anatomy. One wore a quilted, hooded suit and snow boots, the sort of attire people wear when traveling in the Arctic Circle, only the crotch was cut out of it. The fourth–the one whose backside had first been presented–wore his costume upside down, with his legs in the sleeves and his arms in the legs, hands in a pair of shoes and feet inside a giant limp-fingered pair of white gloves, his head a nondescript lump where his rear should be and his bottom protruding through the neck hole. The last clown wore not very much at all, aside from an orange curly wig and matching pubic hairpiece with an oversize pair of shoes and a lot of makeup.
The Hermaphrodite Twins–for want of anything better to call them–had rushed over and helped the ringmaster back to his feet. He pushed into the milling clowns, shouting indignantly. The first clown snatched the mic from him and shouted “Cunt!” through the ring’s sound system and blew a raspberry. The clown juggled the mic, with several phallic batons, while the ringmaster tried to grab it back. Brass band music played and the clowns started to fight, using desserts for ammunition. One of them somehow trapped his testicles in the steel jaws of a rattrap and ran about shrieking. The ringmaster tried to break them up and slipped in a pile of red jelly. He and the Hermaphrodite Twins eventually managed to round up all the lewd clowns, including the one who was by now behind the car with his knob stuck up the exhaust pipe, and force them back into the car.
The audience thundered with laughter, reminding Sylvia of nothing more than the crowd frenzy she’d experienced when she’d been on duty at Leicester City’s home football games. This was stupid and Sylvia felt embarrassed watching it, but these people were entitled to their entertainment, and she needed to keep an open mind. She’d never really got why people liked to watch two teams kick a ball up and down a muddy field either, but it was consensual and didn’t hurt anyone, and this was the same, so she needed to stop thinking like this and treat it in the same way. Because it was. And that was okay.
As the clowns drove away, the ringmaster put the mic to his mouth, and his lips moved, but the sound didn’t seem to work. He looked at the thing in his hand and realized it was one of the clown’s batons, much to the crowd’s amusement.
“...before I was so rudely interrupted,” the ringmaster continued as he picked up the real microphone from the floor, “I was about to introduce our magician.” He paused, frowning. “I hope there’s no one here who’s under eighteen. You see, our next act, although he is a magician, he’s not the sort of magician you’d want at your kid’s birthday party...”
The circle of light on the ringmaster fled back to the curtain, where it jerkily followed an elderly man in a royal blue robe patterned with pictures of planets. He carried an orange toolbox painted in the same pattern, on a slow walk toward the stage. Clonking music suggesting decrepitude played.
He grumbled querulously to himself as he climbed arthritically up the steps and set down his box. He turned his back to the audience and bent over the box, and immediately he let off a great slack-buttocked thunderclap of a fart that caused his gown to billow out behind him. Laughter and cries of disgust spread outward from the audience who were seated directly to his rear.
Great. Flatulence humor. Sylvia rolled her eyes. This at least she could handle.
“It happens, when you get older!” He turned to the audience, throwing out his arms as though to absolve himself. “Speaking of being old, I’m going to do a magic trick for you all in a minute, but I need a piss first.” He pulled up his robe and dangled his manhood over the audience, who screamed and flinched, raising arms defensively over heads.
“Now this isn’t right,” he mumbled to himself. The main screens showed that he appeared to be slowly pulling what looked like a piece of white string out of his urethra. As he teased out more and more of what appeared to be an endless length, he wound it around the fingers of one hand and laughter rippled over the crowd.
“Don’t laugh!” He stopped pulling out the string to aim a glare and an accusing finger at the spectators. “It’ll happen to all of you some day!”
The end of the string finally came free. It had a bath plug attached to it.
“Wondered where that had gone.”
The audience laughed and made ugh noises. Well, Sylvia thought, it had to be a sleight of hand. That thing couldn’t really fit up there, so it was silly of them to be disgusted. The conjuror twirled around and pulled a bunch of orange lilies out of his anus, which he hurled up over the audience where it exploded in a shower of confetti. Then he stood still and let forth a long fart that inflated his robe and increased in volume, until with a loud crash one of the midgets from the earlier act fell out beneath him and rolled from under the hem of his robe, swearing and shouting. He vomited a string of colored flags and shot streamers out of his sleeves and a small firework out of his bottom. He left the stage to a mixture of applause and groans in equal measure. Sylvia wondered if he might have had a different response if he’d been younger, or perhaps female, and had done exactly the same act.
The ringmaster was already out and announcing the next act as the magician shuffled away. “From one kind of magic, to an altogether different sort!” he shouted. “Whores and bastards, I give you Marvin the incredible Electrosex Wizard!”
A nerdy, plump young man in thick-framed spectacles and a heavy metal t-shirt, and a tall, blond-haired woman with a huge bosom next took the stage. Their act was centered around the man tying the woman to a table and sticking electrodes into her various orifices while she made irritating chimp noises that Sylvia presumed were meant to be interpreted as enjoyment. Sylvia couldn’t watch it. It was objectifying of the woman to make a spectacle of herself like that, to let the man do it to her in public. What if people watching it thought this was normal, that they went out expecting to get it from relationships, or feeling pressured to do it? The giant surgical steel dildo reminded her in a way