[Author's Note: After a long spell of writer's block I've finally had the urge to write again! This is also my first story uploaded onto YWS so yay! Anyways...it's a bit confusing...and it's not that great I wrote it in around an hour and a half after a few days of thinking about. So enjoy and review please!]
I greeted the small audience with false confidence and a faltering smile as they slowly filed out of the tent. Others lagged behind in the seats - my disappointed fans I presumed. I bowed to the dwindling audience my pretense remaining intact as the familiar farewell music began to play. I turned to the stairs on cue and started my slow ascent gently caressing the cold metal that I would never feel again. My foundation was slowly crumbling with each painful step. Tears fell freely down my cheeks flooding me with the harsh remembrance of how easily the circus could do away with me.
I regained my composure as quickly as it had slipped away and continued walking up the stairs feebly attempting to regain the pretense I had previously flaunted. I finally reached the top and tried to stare past the blinding lights and tried to imagine my fans in puddles of tears. Although I desperately willed myself to do so, I could not. I had nothing to give to them and I hadn’t given them anything years. My routine progressively became careless and shorter and my once elaborate stunts were adopted by the lithe newcomers. I couldn’t help but wonder how they could support a disappointment such as myself.
I finally mustered up my courage and to take my last step forward upon the tightrope, swishing my weight for balance as best as I could remember from my fading, sienna memories. As I continued my light steps across the rope I heard hoarse screams fill the tent and a scrambling for the exit. I faltered on the rope, losing my balance and sense of thought, but quickly recovered. I gradually increased my pace over the rope out of fear. I coughed, suffocated my smoke and sound. I fumbled once more, and the rope snapped and swung towards the ground. I was falling and I could barely feel it. I felt dead as the heat caressed me. I was rapidly nearing the destructive monster below me….and when I finally hit the fire and I felt alive once more.
I was alive in reality, but perhaps not in the way I had imagined. I closed my eyes, hoping to find this all to be another horrible nightmare. Hoping desperately that I would wake up in what I once thought a tent to small for the most popular performance, but instead I woke up on the cold asphalt in an alleyway with nothing but a frayed, damp blanket and a small knapsack containing my belongings. I had thought the circus needed me, but instead I needed the circus. I was nothing more than a discarded coat. I was frayed, and a size too small for the circus. I fit wrong and I was easily replaceable by a newer model and now I was alone and wash-out. A simple smudge in the circus’s history.
And about the second sentence, I think tightropes are pretty strong and wouldn't be likely to just snap like that... please correct me if I'm wrong, though.
