The sword swallower swallowed his last sword when Alice, one of the conjoined twins, swapped his dull, ball-tipped blade for a razor-edged real McCoy. Her motive was jealousy—a lover scorned—because she loved her sister, Alex, with all her soul, romantically and sisterly, claiming that her heart literally beats for her (which was true, as they shared the same organ between them).

Alex had been kissing the sword swallower while Alice swapped the blades. Alex thrust her tongue beyond the tonsils of her lover, who had no cause to strain for breath, so accustomed was he to plunging full-length cavalry sabers down his gullet. While the lovers kissed with abandon, the sword swallower mistakenly groped the left breast, the wrong breast, the wrong sister, and Alice swatted his hairy knuckles away, shifting in mock revulsion as a ploy to make her murderous move.

At the time of his performance, the sword swallower took up his sword, which was not his own, neither dull nor with a rounded tip, and smiled to the crowd while inserting the deadly decoy into the wide tunnel of his esophagus. The blade’s razor edge sliced the lining of his throat; the pointed tip nicked his heart. His eyes went bovine-wide, bulging red like two misplaced clown noses above his own. With his last breath, expunging guts, he withdrew the sword from his belly, contributing a flourish of dark blood to stain the shins and shoes of the startled observers, women and children among them.

The big top was filled with bloodcurdling screams. The blood did not curdle—it’s just a phrase. Among the horrid wailing, none shouted half as loudly as Alex, whose shock and grief were so explosive that she did not notice the second head to her body, her sister, Alice, giggling softly in satisfaction. “There, there,” she cooed, petting Alex’s head, turning her own to plant kisses on her sister’s cheek, which was never more than three or four inches from her own.

The crowd sobbed and vomited, standing up from their seats to scramble down the aisles to the nearest exit. The man selling donuts was overpowered by the surge of mothers with their children. His donuts went flying like a juggler’s rings high into the sky. Haircuts bobbed in fury. An old lady was left behind, blinking through formidable lenses.

Alice laughed so loudly that she had to pretend she was weeping, masking her amusement with the one hand her body allowed her to control, peering through the gaps in her fingers at the sword swallower’s bloodstained body. But in the end, the joke was on her.

The lion tamer whipped his leonine thrall, but the beast withstood its lashings, frenzied by the smell of blood that filled the canvas palace, roused and compelled to feast on the fresh kill. It swatted the strongman aside with paws as wide as dinner plates, lockpicking his iron chest with two-inch talons to spill a cache of rubies from his ruptured pectorals. The animal remembered that it was an apex predator, born and raised on zebra meat, wildebeest heart, and had braved bull elephants, much like the ones now chained to posts behind the big top. The lion crossed the sand and found the sword swallower sprawled and doused in plasma, and, beside his twitching corpse, a curious figure, or maybe two—a lady with a pair of faces. One was crying and one was laughing. The lion made no distinction between them, but one was a little closer.

The beast stepped forward, tongue lolling, a god with flames for hair and eyes of molten gold—a face like Lyle Lovett on fire. It may have smiled, or maybe snarled, flaunting its fang-flanked salmon vortex of doom.

Alice stopped laughing, and the lion settled into its meal.

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James Callan lives and writes in Aotearoa (New Zealand). His fiction has appeared in Apocalypse Confidential, X-R-A-Y, Hobart, Reckon Review, and elsewhere. His 2nd collection, Fish Out of Water, is forthcoming from Anxiety Press.