Alfonso and Thessaly

The poster appeared overnight as though the hands of midnight carefully plucked their expressions from the moon. Their complexions were milky white, superimposed on an obsidian backdrop, silently commanding the town’s attention. We all stood, mute, observing the identities pasted on to the disused garage wall.

The Amazing Alfonso and the Tantalising Thessaly for one week only!

A grandfather/granddaughter act none of us had ever heard of before, but an act we were all dying to see. They had revamped the disused garage with fantastic fairy lights and glowing candles which illuminated our way into their ethereal kingdom.

I saw Thessaly first sitting at a silver table shaped like a coin. She looked beautiful; her wet hair plastered to her face, mascara streaming down her cheeks like dark claws, her mouth the darkest of buds. She spoke to me in hushed tones as though her voice was not her own, a gift she had inherited from an elder spirit. She gestured for me to sit and took my palm, tracing it with her fingertips, her mouth, and finally, her tongue. She showed me the future I could have if only I wasn’t afraid to let go – the things I could achieve, the wonders I could see, the amazing man I could be.

Suddenly she disappeared before me like she was a dream, an invention of my imagination, a ghost I wanted to cling on to and call my own.

Then Alfonso appeared, the old man whose beard resembled a tangled fishing net of hopes and wishes curling into a loose hook. He spoke in an ancient tongue, the tongue I like to believe the old Gods possessed, and showed me how to move chairs with my mind, how to turn lights on and off without touching them, how to raise the dead.

Alfonso and Thessaly

I saw my late father as a middle-aged man, much too young for Death’s insatiable grip, looking at me through translucent eyes and mouthing that it wasn’t my fault despite what everyone said. I think there was something else he wanted to say but then Alfonso’s face appeared where my father’s had been, a fleeting ghost of a man, before the hooked beard completely tore away my father’s eyes, nose and mouth.

I watched, mesmerised, as Alfonso muttered something unintelligible and clapped his hands as a smokescreen burst before me, separating the real from the spiritual.

Now I am outside again, the poster of The Amazing Alfonso and The Tantalising Thessaly is nowhere to be seen and I am alone, completely dumbstruck as I stare at the blank disused garage wall.