words | John Riccardi      art | Patrick Rocard      music | David Murphy

Dressed in red velvet from his jaunty, tasselled hat to his pointy, belled slippers, a saltimbanque tripped and flipped about a public square on a cheery, spring day. With a flourish of his sleeve, he poured out painted lines in a perfectly crossed, crimson pentangle while he bounded and whirled on the pavement. He juggled shoes and hats and belts like snakes gathered from onlookers; he teased them with witty taunts, and spat fire to make them ooh and ahh. On all fours he thrust his rump up towards the sky, elicited guffaws from the gathering watchers with clownish, lewd remarks, and then shouts of pleased surprise when the cloth folds of a little box tent appeared from his shirt, and from his trouser cuffs, as he leapt straight into the air like a cricket. No-one knew how the tent stood - that was part of the funny trick - and the onlookers snickered when he reached into his trousers to extract a covering flap.

The beguiling performer pranced round the inner perimeter of the crowd, then threw himself over in a dazzling series of back flips to somersault into the very centre of the tent. He sprang out on one side dressed in Harlequin's flashing diamonds, then flipped back in to bound out almost at once on the far side wearing Polichinelle's golden braids and fat paunch. The audience expressed amazement and delight. The saltimbanque emerged once more from his quick-change tent wearing his original red, and sallied along the points of his painted star to display prodigious skill in prestidigitation. Objects whirled from shoulder to knee across his willing subjects, disappeared from their palms to reappear behind their ears.

Then the clever clown showed the enthralled watchers feats of alchemy such as they had never seen. He called forward all the children, took from them bits of wood and stone, shook the splinters and pebbles in his fist, and handed back metal coins. The crowd roared approval; the children jostled to play. One father gave his child a copper coin. The saltimbanque returned it silver. When the smallest child was pushed forward with a largish coin, the little lad was barely able to stand. The wizardly performer bent over the infant's offering, clasped his long fingers over the child's, then lifted the small boy high in the air to display a slice of shining gold in his tiny fist.

The crowd rumbled and gasped; there were no shouts; this was beyond their ken. With the child upon his shoulders, the saltimbanque tickled and pinched his audience, pulled long polished sticks from their sleeves, extracted cylindrical logs from beneath skirts. In no time he had built a wooden palisade in and around the tent that centred the painted pentangle. He put a thin, wooden rod into the free hand of the child on his shoulder, and took the other hand still clutching the gold, to brush it against the first. The tip of the slender stick lighted with a diaphanous flame.

Everyone clapped and then screamed when the performer suddenly turned to jump into his tent, with the infant boy still riding his back. The whole apparatus at the pentangle's hub burst into a white-hot conflagration. None could approach, not even the child's mother, so high was the flame and so intense the heat. The crowd's perimeter thrashed larger; the concentric ordering broke down as terrified spectators ran this way and that.

Without warning the flames snuffed out. On the blackened embers lay two scorched skeletons, those of an adult and child. The infant's mother dropped to her knees beside the pyre, and then fainted in terror when the adult bones suddenly sprang erect and shook. Half the crowd fell to the ground; the rest trembled with fright or covered their eyes. The large skeleton picked up the small like a rabbit from behind the neck, and began to dance. It pulled from its sternum one of its own ribs, to play with knocks and taps and thunks on the smaller bones waving in its segmented, skeletal hand. Then it slowly walked back to the pile of embers. Its prehensile feet gripped the pavement between heel and toe. In the centre, it held the infant bones straight above its skull, to sink methodically, majestically into the ash. When the small skeleton touched the sooty floor, the skeletal claws released their grasp. Nothing living moved or breathed for a moment.

Then carefully, proudly, the saltimbanque rose from the ashes, garbed as before in impeccable, red velvet. The tiny skeleton straddled his shoulders. He took off his hat to bow before the silent crowd. "My son?" whispered the child's mother. "My wages?" he responded, and extended his empty cap. Those in the audience who had not run, began to throw coins at him. Every metallic disk hurled in his direction angled as if guided by arcane forces into his cap. "Not enough," he declared, and began to sink away. The thin rain of coins intensified. "Not enough for talents such as mine," were his words as he sank into the pyre. "This pittance is no price even for a puny child," he declared to the mother as he disappeared. The crimson hat full of coins remained among tiny ribs, on the pile of ashes in the centre of the star.