A circus moved into my attic while I slept. The traveling-type, caravan-type, all the bells and whistles, jugglers and top-heavy mustached men. And I know it’s my fault because in a conversation with a coworker I had mentioned my life was getting boring. Too many tax forms, digital days, and “run-ins” with men in finance. Then the very next morning I woke to a unicycle parked in my driveway.

The attic of my little house on Bloomsbury Street was a tomb of never more and forever gone.

But that morning palming the trapdoor, I heard quite a clatter. My eyes cleared to a tufted monkey swinging from the low hanging 40-watt bulb. Two mimes spitting vulgar french phrases, tangled in an intense turn of poker. The fortune teller cheered them on, peeling mandarins, skins petalling out in citrus spirals. 

By Wednesday, they began to spread. The juggler, bird-perched on my dollhouse, was telling lies about resurrecting the trade economy. My routine disassembled by the sea lions belly-up in my bathtub tired of balancing balls. I didn’t have many problems with the arrangement, except for the food. The elephants liked their eggs soft-boiled with jammy sun-yolks. Fernando, the ringmaster and a recovering gambling addict, took his coffee tar-black and bitter, but the aerialists liked cappuccinos, milk foam lips laughing loud at my clumsy clutter.  

On Thursday – too many bodies and not enough beds, I woke up spooning the ballerina. In the bullseye of my living room three clowns were having a tea party, using the zebra’s back as a table, and doing what clowns do, shuffling feet, talking politics. Beneath them, the rug wrinkled like the skin of a roasted tomato. Later, opening my fridge I was hit with a barricade of frozen mackerel, food for the felines. 

It was too much. 

That Sunday, in an empty phone box I called my mother. I told her about my sticky situation, she advised immediate and forced removal. Fernando, apologizing profusely, begging my mercy, pleaded their case. 

The exterminators arrived before lunch. It was brutal and a little bloody. They were reluctant, I was insistent. One by one they vanished, swallowed by the night. And my little house on Bloomsbury street emptied, standing silent again. 

But my life didn’t go 

back to its predictable pattern, 

I fell in love 

with the russian 

tightrope-walking, 

former ballerina 

She kept me on my toes 

So she stayed.