“No...we weren’t really together until our last couple of lives, actually. We were enemies before that.”
“So tell me.” He leaned against the counter, sipping wine. “Tell me about our last life.”
“Seriously?” Jenny hadn’t expected that. Again, she worried he could sense the girl who’d been searching for him...and maybe his sudden interest in the past had more to do with her than with Jenny, even if he didn’t consciously realize any of it.
“Why not?” Seth asked. “We never talk about it. I think I’m ready to learn about our past.”
“You’re sure?”
“You keep thinking about it, I want to hear about it. I bet I was a cowboy, right?”
Jenny took a deep breath. “It was the Great Depression.”
“That figures. We wouldn’t want to miss a time of worldwide misery, would we?” Seth said. He refreshed his wine glass.
Jenny placed a ripe tomato on the wooden cutting board. As she sliced it, she began to tell him.
“I was in the carnival,” she said. “I had a stage name, in the carnival. Juliana Blight.”
Seth spat wine as he laughed. “Were you a stripper?”
“Do you want to hear the story or not?”
“Oh, I’m listening. This already sounds good.”
Chapter Five
Juliana waited on the low, narrow wooden stage, separated from the small dirt-floor audience pit by a wooden rail and a ragged curtain, which hadn’t yet opened for the evening. Out in the tent, customers who’d paid a few pennies could see Alejandro the sword-swallower, Zsoka the tattooed lady, some creepy marionette puppets, a knife-throwing act, and Punchy Pete, the dancing, juggling dwarf. For a few pennies more, they could step past the back curtain to view the star attraction of the freak show: Juliana Blight, The World’s Most Diseased Woman.
She only thought of herself as “Juliana” now. Her given name was Greek, and she’d been born in a squalid, crowded tenement in New York. Because of her diseased nature, she was rejected by everyone except a crazed aunt, who repeatedly bathed her with lye and called her “daughter of Hell.” She’d run away when she was seven years old and spent much of her life scrounging and stealing, protected from everyone by the demon plague within her. Here and there, she’d left men dead in the gutter when they’d tried assaulting her.
She was nineteen now, and she’d been with the carnival five years.
“Right this way, right this way, come see the most jaw-dropping female on Earth, the most diseased woman in the world! Don’t worry, ladies and gentlemen, she’s not contagious...unless you touch her! You, sir, would you care to see this princess of pestilence unveiled, laid bare for your education? I thought so, sir, I can see you are man with a healthy interest in science!”
The curtain opened. Radu, the sideshow talker responsible for herding the customers, led in the first group of nine or ten gawkers, the usual mix of red-faced farmers and drooling, wide-eyed children. Men and kids seemed most attracted to her show. Missouri was no different from anywhere else.
Juliana stood, still wrapped in the quilt she wore between shows, and approached the wooden rail at the front of her stage. Dirty upturned faces blinked at her in the low light.
“Juliana Blight,” Radu continued. “Bitten by a swarm of rare giant African mosquitoes, Juliana carries all forms of disease within her flesh...from Egyptian mummy pox to Arabian leprosy, and the mysterious Chinese worm virus...stay back from the railing, sir, or you risk infection!”
“She don’t look too sick to me,” one man said, leaning on the railing.
“Prepare to be dazzled and horrified, sir!” the barker replied. “By the wonders of medical science.”
Juliana shrugged off the quilt and let it fall to the stage. Underneath, she wore only white cotton underpants and a silk scarf, which hung loose around her neck to conceal her breasts. The crowd was free to inspect the rest of her body.
She held out her arms. Dark, bloody sores ripped open along them, from her shoulders all the way to her fingertips. The crowd gasped and drew back—the man who’d leaned on the rail nearly tripped over his shoes in his hurry to get away from her. A small, freckled boy screamed until his slightly older sister slapped and hushed him.
Juliana turned slowly, letting the crowd gasp and whisper at the sight of boils erupting up her back, blisters blooming along her thighs and calves. When she faced them again, a rash of bloody abscesses, cysts, and tumors broke open in a wave from her ankles to her hips, then across her stomach and chest. Her face became a horror-show mask, and her eyes darkened with diseased blood the color of bile.