The Cyberkink Sideshow Read Free Page B

a bath plug attached to it.
    “Wondered where that had gone.”
    The audience laughed and made ugh noises. Well, Sylvia thought, it had to be a sleight of hand. That thing couldn’t really fit up there, so it was silly of them to be disgusted. The conjuror twirled around and pulled a bunch of orange lilies out of his anus, which he hurled up over the audience where it exploded in a shower of confetti. Then he stood still and let forth a long fart that inflated his robe and increased in volume, until with a loud crash one of the midgets from the earlier act fell out beneath him and rolled from under the hem of his robe, swearing and shouting. He vomited a string of colored flags and shot streamers out of his sleeves and a small firework out of his bottom. He left the stage to a mixture of applause and groans in equal measure. Sylvia wondered if he might have had a different response if he’d been younger, or perhaps female, and had done exactly the same act.
    The ringmaster was already out and announcing the next act as the magician shuffled away. “From one kind of magic, to an altogether different sort!” he shouted. “Whores and bastards, I give you Marvin the incredible Electrosex Wizard!”
    A nerdy, plump young man in thick-framed spectacles and a heavy metal t-shirt, and a tall, blond-haired woman with a huge bosom next took the stage. Their act was centered around the man tying the woman to a table and sticking electrodes into her various orifices while she made irritating chimp noises that Sylvia presumed were meant to be interpreted as enjoyment. Sylvia couldn’t watch it. It was objectifying of the woman to make a spectacle of herself like that, to let the man do it to her in public. What if people watching it thought this was normal, that they went out expecting to get it from relationships, or feeling pressured to do it? The giant surgical steel dildo reminded her in a way the other exhibitionist’s bodies hadn’t of her own failures with the last man she’d tried with.
    Why had Pikesley had to send her on this one? Why not one of the others? Just because they were all married and had children and it would be considered indecent and inappropriate for them to investigate suspicious activity in this sort of environment? Did the people with whom she worked mutter and speculate behind her back? Did they suspect her inadequacy? She’d always feared they did. It was the air they had when December invariably came round, and one of her colleagues would, as always, ask her if she intended to bring anyone as a guest to the office party. She’d only heard fragments of conversations about her. She knew some of them suspected her of being gay and in denial. Others more likely merely suspected her of being some sort of prude with a Victorian attitude to sex, from the way she fell silent whenever conversation descended to bawdy jokes and is-this-normal marital discourse. Perhaps Pikesley had thought it a right fine joke, sending her on this job.
    The audience was applauding. Sylvia looked up from Max, who she’d been staring at to try to keep her mind off what the performance had made her think. The nerd and the buxom woman bowed and left the stage. The spotlight returned to the ringmaster.
    “As for our next performer, well, he has no name, not that anybody knows. Some say he sought revenge on those who destroyed him and left his body a ruin, that he hunted them down and killed them in cold blood. Some say his injuries were caused by wild animals on the loose in Birmingham. Some say what was done to him gave him sight beyond sight–the sight to see into the very soul of his fellow men...”
    The ringmaster paused to reflect, leaning back on his heels and thus pronouncing the curves of his waist and backside. “All we know is he’s a bionic man.” The ringmaster bowed slightly, and gestured with an opulent motion of his arm to the curtain, where a spotlight illuminated a figure who strode at a steady pace toward