Oscar Fritz sat behind the long foldable table as music crackled through the record shop’s sound system. He tapped his eight-fingered left hand to the beat as an employee with narrow eyes watched from across the store. The line for the meet and greet was dangerously close to spilling outside, the same entitled and unfiltered fans that had shown up for over a decade to gawk at the musician.  It got old, fast.

In his right hand, the two fingers pinching like a claw, Oscar held a sharpie.  Glossy posters were neatly piled on the corner of the table showing the Centipede Man – his fingers working the neck of a guitar like a hundred tiny feet stamping out notes.  Beside that was a framed article from Rolling Stone Magazine hailing Oscar Fritz as a musical prodigy, his latest guitar-driven album Freak Show an instant classic.

Corn Salsa Rob stood beside the table facing the line, counting bodies.  Friend turned manager, his blue zoot suit and bald-head sparkled under the humming fluorescents.  He flicked his split, serpent-like tongue over his pierced labrum and calculated the potential profits for the day. Growing up inside of a traveling circus’ sideshow, Rob knew how to turn people’s macabre curiosity into profit.

“No more little incidents today, yeah?” Rob said, loud enough for Oscar to hear.

“I hate these things. I hate these people,” Oscar said, thrumming his eight fingers against the table.  The pack bustled, craning their necks for a peek at the freak.  Large crowds, even at shows, reminded him of getting surrounded at the orphanage, or at school, or at the grocery store when all he wanted was to blend in.  Events like this seemed to further that divide and make him see exactly how different he was.

And then there was the fire…

The employee herded the onlookers into an aisle, the line from the center cashier island to the sidewalk outside.  The two guys in the front whistled to grab the attention of the worker.

“Are we allowed to shake his hand?” one asked.

“If you want to, dude,” the employee said.  “But if you do, don’t jump or cringe. It drives him nuts.”

Oscar overheard and looked at his left hand. Three extra fingers allowed for innovation across the fret board.  New scales, sweeps, phrasing, and positions created a body of work that was unmatched by every other professional working the road.  He was sure the people in line listened to his album at home, or on the way to work, or, if he did his job well, while they were having sex.  How many five-fingered babies had been created through an eight-fingered form of expression, he wondered.  Would they ever know the terror of fleeing their home in the middle of the night as a fire ripped through their lives, the only means of survival – the kindness of a traveling circus?  They would not, but they would still cheer him as long as he kept putting out albums.

Yet when it came time to say hello, to see him as a person beyond the notes of a song, to get their picture taken, each one of these fans not-so-subtly cringed when Oscar put his hand on their shoulders.  Oscar wasn’t a bad looking guy – tall, dark and tortured with thick, expressive eyebrows – but it was also clear that something was off. Perhaps his cheeks were a little too sunken, his skin a little too ashen, his lips a little too purple, but onstage it didn’t matter.  Onstage, it was expected.  It was elevated.

As the line wound outside and around the block, Corn Salsa Rob nudged Oscar.  A young woman bumped through the doors swinging a white cane. She wore a long floral summer dress, white fabric with yellow and orange blossoms.  Hairy legs led into wool socks, which filled out open toed sandals

“She’s got no eyes,” Rob smiled.  “A place for ‘em, but they ain’t there.”

“Is he here yet?” the woman asked.

The people in line looked at her, their silence spoke volumes. Each person stepped aside as the young woman with frazzled hair and crooked teeth moved toward Oscar’s table.

“Welcome, love,” Corn Salsa Rob said.  “To what do we owe the honor?”

“I’d like to speak with Oscar Fritz.”

Oscar looked at Rob, and Rob nodded.

“I’m Oscar.  What’s your name?”

“I’m Hailey,” the woman said.

Oscar leaned back in the chair and looked into Hailey’s hollow eye spaces as her lids flitted over nothing.  He watched as she shifted weight between one foot, and the other.  Something about her seemed familiar, though he couldn’t place how.

“What can I do for you?” Oscar asked. Hailey didn’t respond.  Instead, she reached into the thin blue purse hanging by her waist and pulled out a long cigarette. She popped it between her lips, lit up, and took a drag exhaling exclusively through her nose.

“Tut-tut,” Rob said, and plucked the fresh cigarette from Hailey’s mouth.  He stamped out the glowing-red tip with the heel of his snakeskin cowboy boot.  The crowd looked on, treading the razor-thin line between waiting around and giving up.

Oscar noticed Hailey was also missing fingers, though they looked to have been removed.  Crude scars stitched the skin at the knuckles.

“Alright ladies and gents,” Rob announced.  “Come meet the Centipede himself, the man who re-imagined the musical landscape as we know it!  Autographs are $100, pictures are $100, picture and autograph are $185.  This is a once in a lifetime talent, folks.  Don’t shortchange yourself.”

The two teens at the front of the line stepped toward the table and stuttered over their names.  Something like Taylor and Brian.  They paid Rob in full, got a signed poster of Oscar shredding the guitar neck under purple and green lights, his face awash with sweat, and tried their best not to flinch when he stood beside them for a photo.  One of the teens held out his hand to shake Oscar’s, but pulled it back when he saw the two-fingered palm up close and instead acted like he was just stretching his shoulder.

“Your first album gave me purpose,” Hailey said.

“Chopper did that?” Oscar asked, signing another set of posters for two giggling women in tight shirts that read Finger My Fret Board and Pluck My G-String.

“No, your first album. Dark Mind,” Hailey said.

“Where’d you dig up a copy of that?” Oscar asked.  It was a self-produced album that sold fewer than five hundred copies before the mastered tracks were lost to a studio fire.

“I’ve been following you for a while,” Hailey said.

A dad with his small daughter clinging to his leg stepped forward and held out his knuckles for a fist bump.  Oscar obliged.  The little girl hid, her wide-eyes curiously scanning the room and its occupants.

“I used to put my daughter to sleep with your song Death of the Swan.  I’d never seen her so peaceful,” the man said.  He wore a blue polo shirt tucked into his jeans.  No belt.

“That’s…an unusual choice,” Oscar said.

“You think?  I guess maybe a little.  I’ve always taken it to mean that things change, and change is a part of nature.  Seemed like a good lesson to me,” the man said.

Hailey chuckled.

“That song is about how people destroy beauty,” she said.  “How they feel inferior in the face of something truly special, and lash out.”

“You think?” the man laughed.  The little girl watched Hailey’s face, looked at her hollow eye sockets, and then touched her own face.  She tugged on her dad’s empty belt loop and pointed at Hailey.

“She’s bad,” the girl whispered.  The man’s face exploded into patches of bright red. He knelt down and grabbed his daughter by the shoulder.

“Hey, she’s different, and that’s a very rude thing to point out,” the man said. He stood up and apologized, then yanked his daughter toward the door where people had pressed their faces against the glass to catch a glimpse of the eight-fingered wonder.  The signed poster was left on the table, the signature glistening under the humming fluorescents.

“And that, my friends, is why I take the money up front,” Corn Salsa Rob said.  “How are you holding up, Osc?  Water? Tea?  We’re in it for the long haul.”

Oscar waived away the suggestion.  He tapped the sharpie against the edge of the table and looked at Hailey, still trying to place her.

“People have no filter sometimes,” he said.

“You’re not like them.  They can’t relate to you,” Hailey said.

“Cheer up, mate.  This is good coin we’re bringin’ in,” Rob said.  He flicked his serpent tongue.

Oscar waved forward the next group and bent over to sign his name for a handful of un-showered teens in black hoodies. It made Oscar remember the night he ran away, the orphanage ablaze, dark bodies giving chase through the woods.  His chest trembled.

“You boys kind to others at school?” Oscar asked.

“Sometimes,” one of the kids said.  “I mean, mostly yeah.”

“When are you not kind?” Oscar asked, sliding them the poster.

“Can’t we just, like, have the poster?” the same kid asked.  Hailey grinned.  The teens walked away, poster in hand.  Oscar waved forward the next person in line and looked at the clock on the far wall.

“I have a question about Freak Show,” said the approaching woman.  She smelled like perfume sold exclusively at mall kiosks, and had a sixty-dollar haircut.

“Awesome,” Oscar said.

“It feels like this album is incredibly self-aware, like you’ve finally figured out your place in the world,” the woman said.

“Is there a question in there?” Oscar asked.

“Am I right?  Have you settled into yourself? Into your role?”

Oscar re-capped the pen and put his palms on the table, the fingers spread out like uncooked Irish sausages.

“Would it make you feel better if I said yes? For you to hear me say that I’m a freak?” Oscar asked.

“I mean…” the woman shrugged.

“That album isn’t about me.  It’s about what I see in people like you, the people who need to give other people labels, put them in boxes, to tell them they’re different just so you can tell yourself you’re normal, so you can pretend you’re ok, so you can go to sleep and say ‘well at least I don’t have eight fingers on one hand so yeah, life could be worse.’”

“Let’s give the woman her poster,” Corn Salsa Rob said, smiling through the side of his mouth.  He whispered, “what did I say about incidents?”

“Somehow I’m the freak.  It’s me who lives in a ‘circus’ just because I’m a little different, just because life handed me a challenge different from your challenge.  What gives you the right to tell me anything, lady?”

The woman bent over and balled fabric from her pants into her fist and pulled up to expose a leg.  Just under the knee a small, limp baby leg pushed out from the skin.  The flesh was pink, the tiny toes curled toward the shin.

“I used to be a twin. In the womb.  Spent a long time believing I’d never be accepted by others, that I’d never accept myself.  Then I heard your album and, until a moment ago, felt truly seen, truly understood.  Sorry for making you assume.”

She let her pant leg fall as she turned to leave.  The person behind her gagged so loud that he had to apologize and step out of line.

“Hold on,” Oscar said, and pushed away from the table.  He ran up to the woman and stopped her, all ten fingers on her two shoulders.

“I didn’t mean…”

“I know,” the woman said.

“It’s just…”

“I know,” the woman said.

“It’s hard to love myself when the rest of the world thinks I shouldn’t,” Oscar said.

“The reason your music is so great,” the woman said, closing her eyes and leaning into his fingers, “is because you figured out how to turn your pain into art for everyone.  No one else here can claim that.”

Oscar let go of the shoulders and felt something inside of him move, a paradoxical shift that proved his difference as a uniting force. 

“Can we take a quick five?” Rob said.  Oscar nodded and hung his head.  “Folks, my apologies.  One sec.”

Oscar sat down as the line milled near the door.  Hailey inched closer to the table.

“We’ve met before,” she said, reaching into her purse.  “Back when I had eyes.”

“I appreciate your gusto,” Rob said, “but you’re starting to overstay your welcome, Miss Hailey.”

“Of course he doesn’t remember me.  He only thinks about himself,” Hailey said.  She pulled out a bottle of lighter fluid and popped the top.  The pungent smell made Oscar cringe.  “I was at the orphanage the night they came for you.  When those kids lit the house on fire, I was in bed while you ran away.  The fire took my eyes, my fingers and my soul while you ran off to make millions.”

The crowd fell silent as Hailey dumped the fluid on the floor, dousing herself in the process.  The yellow and orange blossoms on her dress began to wither.

“Whatever you have planned, mate, now is not the time,” Rob said, pointing.

“Do you know how long I’ve planned this?  Tracked you down?  What’s worse is that when I heard your music, I actually liked it.  It made sense to me, the pain was real, it was misunderstood.  But this latest album?  It’s like you found peace, like you’ve experienced acceptance and I’m left to suffer!”

Hailey flipped open a lighter and breathed against the flame.  Oscar looked at the crowd and had flashbacks to that night – the quiet creeping brigade, the death threats, the way they chased him through the dark forest until the smoke from the fire blocked the light of the moon.  He never thought about the other people in the orphanage, the other people that were in danger through association. Collateral damage never seemed to be a possibility.

Now, he had unknowingly endangered his fans and the guilt began to stack.

“Cap that lighter,” Rob said, pulling his suit jacket so hard that the buttons popped.

“This is what the world wants for us!” Hailey said. She dropped the lighter and laughed as flames buckled her knees and ripped the air from her lungs. Her white dress caught, wrapping the woman in blue fire, which slithered across the floor like it was alive, the whoosh and crack like an arthritic body.  Corn Salsa Rob kneeled and tried to pat out the flames with his zoot suit jacket, but Hailey’s lifeless body fell on top of him and pinned him to the floor. 

The fire climbed, reaching up the walls melting the record store vinyl.  The people by the door watched horrified as the world around Oscar became engulfed.

“Don’t move,” they called out.  “We’ll save you!”

Oscar felt his legs buckle.  He started to cough.  The orange heat made waves in the air and fired panic into every receptor in his brain.

But he couldn’t stop moving, he refused to meet his end like this, in front of the only people that had ever showed him love, that had ever made him feel worth something.

In the next moment, four bodies jumped through the flames and picked him up and rushed him to the door.

Cool air pushed across his brow as Oscar was heaved into the wide-open air.  They placed him on the gray concrete. He coughed.  He shook.  He saw the flashing reds of an approaching crew.  People screamed like they did at his shows.

“Why?” Oscar said, over and over like a broken record.

“You’re safe,” his fans told him.  “We’re here for you.”

An EMT arrived and told Oscar to sit back and relax, that he was going to be ok, and slid an oxygen mask over his face. They rolled him onto a prone gurney, and as they popped the wheels and carted him to the back of the ambulance, Oscar held up his hands, eight and two.  One by one, his fans came over to give their thanks, each one holding the palm as fingers wrapped their wrists, not one of them flinching or pulling away.

# # #

W. T. Paterson is the author of the novels Dark Satellites and WOTNA. A Pushcart Prize nominee and graduate of Second City Chicago, his work has appeared in over 70 publications worldwide include Fiction Magazine, The Gateway Review, and The Paragon Press. A number of stories have been anthologized by Lycan Valley, North 2 South Press, among others. He spends most nights yelling for his cat to “Get down from there!”

Photo: Benjamin Ranger