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Show CHRYSALIS pAGE 21- cars and pitted windows and blotted out the sun. It stung our eyes and textured our dinner and turned tumbleweeds into flying miss iles. Once, the circus came to town in the middle of a terrific windstorm. Their Big Top swayed and groaned, the ropes and posts and canvases snapped like whips in the blowing sand. The daring young men on their flying trapeze may have been daring, but they were not fools, so they stayed safely on the ground while their swings billowed and lifted without them. Still, we saw monkeys and elephants, lion-tamers and clowns. We saw Bambi the Snake- Woman, and Bobo the Dog-Faced Boy. The Man-Turned-To-Stone invited our hands to feel the vibrations on his leg while he spoke. A nine-foot giant mummy, leathery and brown, reclined in a wood-and-glass case. Beside him in a smaller case there was another mummy of an ancient infant that looked like a little shriveled, brown monkey. And I remember once, Gypsies camped their tents and wagons at the far end of our lot. Someone said Gypsies stole children, dyed their skins brown with the juice of berries and walnuts, and they had to be Gypsies for the rest of their lives. I lived in horror they might kidnap me, yet I secretly hoped they would, so |