curtain hits the cast: cassandra antoniou

<center>clean bill of health
five years at the bell
no one will admit
the time or the places they've been
anon

three scales of men
trace back to begin
no one will admit
ignoring the age of my skin
anon

low.</center>

It was late. Outside, traffic lights in their yellow painted blinders blinked steadily. Her bedroom window was open and from it spilled in a salty warmth and red light. It made summer where Spring still kept the buds tight-fisted upon the tree branches that scratched against the upper glass section of the window. Soon -- any day, in fact -- pink-and-white blossoms would spill out and litter her windowsill and the floor beneath in their gentle pastel color.

With the moon set high in the skyscraper-filled night sky and city soundtrack at a low hum, she began her nightly ritual that started with the lighting of her multitude of prayer candles with their glass walls ringed in soot and cheap grocery store wax inside burning low. The smaller, squat ones were lit with plastic lighter while the tallest -- those adorned with Spanish prayers and stain-glass portraits -- were managed to life by the same tall matchsticks that her mother had always used to start portable pilot lights. She wasn't Catholic, but rather felt reassured by all the solemn-eyed Angels with their circular halos and full lips staring back out at her. Once lit, the entire wall of one side of her room fairly glowed like a church. At the other end, pillows were stacked high upon the mattress left to sink into floorboards. There were plain, blue-striped ones covered in white cotton slipcovers. Others were impressive in their decoration with tassels and gold embroidery and a gallery of texture and color. Rather than pull them all off the top of the loose spill of sheets, she sprawled atop with the sharps of her hips and knees digging in as palms splayed over the slick silks and nubby velveteens. Here, was where she dreamt of the quiet unspoken and the past in the flicker-pull of candles that would eventually spit out wax and burn wicks down. The circus came alive again as the familiar scent of sweat and packed earth invaded her urban surroundings. She felt the burn of twisted rope that had long ago built protective callouses over palms.

Her first memory was of that place -- that place now tracked by faded postcards and letters that always arrived torn at the top and smudged in places. Then striped tent that now had to have been patched up in spots over a million times had been new. The white ribbons candy-swirled with red had been truly white then, not a stately yellow. She remembered the first brass note that the band struck and the rolling beat of drums as her mother ascended the narrow ladder to the top platform where her perch awaited. It was less sight, more feel: the slow churn and wet jostle of insides with each shift of knee and hip; the vibration coming off the tymphani. Had Amalia Antoniou known she was pregnant? Had she been able to sense the awareness of the tiny little speck of being nestled so discreetly behind the shimmering splash of gold sequins and stitching of her bodice? These were the questions always asked.

Though everyone swore that the phenomena of remembering before childhood, or even in her case before birth, was impossible. There was no way that Cassandra could have possibly felt the watery shift as her mother's feet pumped off the edge of the platform or as her body folded in high above the awestruck crowd. Impossible or not, mind turned backwards to the routine. She felt the slow churn and rolls that accompanied each skillful leap and swing. As her mother's hands curled sharply just above the strong wrists and interlocking shape of her father's set, insides braked sharply only to be twisted and lurched back again as the arc of motion pushed forward and Amalia was back upon her trapeze bar.

As a child, she had insisted feverently in the truth of this scrap of memory that was more motion-sickness inducing than sentimental. Tiny fingers, doughy with baby-fat at the knuckles and dimpled tops, counted out the leaps and sketched out the rocking swing to and fro. This story, regardless of how many times it had been told, had always caused all her older siblings and cousins to laugh. Older adults patted her nest of dark hair and clucked. It was only her grandmother -- best friend, favorite playmate -- that believed, or at least, pretended to. She would gather the child's frame into her lap -- even when Cassandra had begun to sprout her coltish limbs and overwhelmed the frame of the tinier woman -- and smooth a papery palm across a shoulder. "Oh Cassandra," she would murmur in her thick, Aegean seeped accent. "The little prophetess no one ever believed."

Her skin was an unblemished stretch of milk-pale. Where, in a family full of olive-skinned and ruddy-cheeked relations, had such a complexion come from or last seen was unknown. She was, however, undeniably Antoniou. Her eyes were black as India ink: indeliable and nearly impossible to differentiate from her pupils. Framed thickly in dark lashes that stretched out and curled over at their upturned feline points, those strange eyes were her one true mark of beauty. All else was subjective and prone to being a little too sharp, a little too...

A springy thing with her light-footed dancer's step and slight shoulders, she was seemingly frail and prone to cracking at the points were angles were must acute. Only her hands gave away her family trade and talent. Years of training that included acrobatics and trapeze swinging high above every possible imaginable surface (cornfields, crackled urban parking lots), and most dangerously, nightmarish plummeting down to the nets, had made her something not prone to breaking. Instead, she was resilent and fearless. Along the insides her palms, thick callouses lifted up. For someone so delicate and flimsy, her touch was jarring in its substance and texture. It was her first body modification. What had not been there at birth was now built into skin much like scenes inked into skin.

Her back was a masterpiece. Torn from Michelangelo's classic scene, Heaven spilled out over the sharp wings of her shoulderblades before bleeding down to a firey conclusion upon the small of her back. Hours and countless paychecks had been funneled into the project that spent the better part of the time shrouded in the neutral mystery of a thin cotton t-shirt or leotard.