Kaleidoscope by Darryl Wimberley

A thick fog clings like a dirty nightshirt to the flanks of the Alafia River. An Indian-summer scent rises from the water. Cottonmouths that would in cooler seasons eagerly feed on bream and bullfrogs fast in wait of deliverance from dog days gone too long even for reptiles to endure. To the west lies Tampa, swathed this summer of ’29 in a gauze of mosquitoes and fruit flies, those plagues only somewhat abated among the palmetto and conifers bordering the banks of the Alafia.

An unlikely caravanserai convenes along the river’s sluggish bend, a coven of vehicles clinging to a single, serpentine road, two ruts submerged beneath the fog in a pan of loam. Road wagons of all sorts drift in the miasma that attends—circus wagons, gypsy tugs, car homes, and trucks, their wooden beds sheltered by parasols of tarpaulin.

A handful of cottages and tents mingle with their mobile cousins on this boulevard of sand. Kerosene lamps are mostly wicked out for the night, though in one residence a signature illumination shimmers through needles of pine and shrouds of moss. It’s a vast structure in comparison to the cramped quarters which are propped on wheels or stumps on all sides, a two-poled pavilion rising high above the neighboring canvas roofs. The bigtop tent glows like a Chinaman’s lantern, illuminated from within by a necklace of whitehot globes. You could be drawn like a moth to that enticement. And if you were, you would see, cast onto the canopy’s unsteady screen, an enormous silhouette. An Amazon’s shadow ripples with a sluggish breeze, perfectly proportioned, naked. She is bathing. A tub casts its own firmly delineated shadow with avatars of steam.

“It’s all right,” her voice coaxes from within. “You can come.”

A pair of breasts lift huge and pendulous. The slap of flesh on water.

“Come on. Don’t be afraid.”

A runt-sized man hangs onto a tent pole inside the Amazon’s palace. His larynx bobs with a swig of gin. His tie is loose and filthy and sopping sweat.

”You want me,” she says. “It’s natural. Can’t be helped.”

He shatters his hooch against the tent’s pillar and an alarmed snort signals the presence of the tent’s second, permanent resident; a chain shackles an enormous, African elephant to the big-top’s second pole.

The beast snorts once again, tossing a pair of wellworn tusks.

“It’s all right, Ambassador,” she says.

The aging bull’s ears flap like mammoth fans to cool the woman whom, until now, we’ve only imagined in shadow. She’s not what we expect. She bathes, first of all, this Amazon, not in a tub but in the elephant’s watering tank, an immense, ironriveted cistern.

And her figure is not anticipated by the shadow cast onto the cloth of her tent, for this woman is huge. Six hundred and fifty pounds of wallowing flesh, her arms are the size of kegs. Her eyes recede like raisins pressed into a face as large as a pie. A mop of corn silk hair presses flat against a pail-sized skull. She sinks back into the steaming water and her breasts swell like buoys.

“Come on!” she urges her visitor. “Come on!”

He sheds his pants, first, as he clambers to the lip of the tank. An erection preposterously out of proportion to his stunted frame stands like a flag.

“Oh,” she purrs. “Hurry.”

“Goddamn!” the runt exclaims and dives in.

He surfaces like a toy between her legs.

“Hurry!” she moans.

He plunges into her. Buries himself.

“Yes…” she hisses. “Yes, there you are! There!”

Ambassador jerks alarmed against his length of chain—

—and distorts the silhouette cast onto the canvas outside. A confused play of light and shadow casts the mismatched lovers onto a billowing screen. They sink into the outsized tub. Water thrashes furiously. A groan of effort or passion bursts from the tent’s interior. And then the enraged trumpet of an elephant.

“AMBASSADOR!”

The canvas tent explodes outward with a wall of water. The Amazon gushes from her ruptured tank. Ambassador charges through a mangle of iron and, as the Fat Lady screams, stomps her toy-like lover into the sand outside.