A travelling freak show is visiting the town. In various tents, visitors can see Siamese twins, the furred lady, the man without limbs, the Elephant girl...
 |
| Image by artflow.ai |
But the biggest attraction is ‘the medusa’. Inside a cage that is obscured by curtains the director proclaims, resides the mythological creature the Greek hero Perseus encountered, whose sheer view could turn people into stone. To protect the visitors, the medusa is not shown directly, but only its shadow silhouette projected on the curtains by a light inside the cage. The silhouette seems to be that of a female figure with moving, hissing snakes extruding from her head.
To prove further, that it is a real medusa, the director holds a living bunny through a gap in the curtains, which in his hands seems to turn into stone!
Possibilities
1 It’s a swindle - the medusa is a normal woman with a pair of harmless snakes bound to her head. The bunny turning to stone is a trick, involving a fake stone bunny.
If the swindle is openly revealed, the members of the freak show, who’ve just lost their main attraction, will be really angry with the spoilsport... ever seen the movie ‘Freaks’?
2 It’s a swindle - though ‘the medusa’ really has a pair of moving extrusions like extra fingers on her head. In fact, all the freaks are the product of the director, an insane but powerful sorcerer abducting and experimenting on normal people to create a race of ‘improved’ humans - with the freaks being the failed results who at least survived his procedures but stay because they have nowhere else to go. The director always looks for new test subjects...
3 It IS a real medusa - and she does not like to be trapped...
© Philipp Mählmann
No comments:
Post a Comment