Circus Lady
by Jason Miller

THE STORY: The “Circus Lady” of the title is a grossly fat, slatternly woman who has been reduced to living in squalor and on welfare, while beset with fears that the rapist-killer who has terrorized the area is coming for her next.

Her son, fed up with their slovenly existence, is about to go off to join a government training program; the welfare investigator wants to move her to a furnished room and arrange for psychiatric treatment; and her sister refuses to take her into her own home.

Ultimately she confesses to her son that his father did not desert them as she had always claimed but, instead, had committed suicide—and for the same reasons that others are now abandoning her.

In the end she is alone, resigned to her fate, and tragically aware that this is of her own inevitable making.