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come back ?” Dave’s Fish and Strips closed its doors for good a week after Kitty took it over. Two months after that, the Freakshow was born.
    Have a prehensile tail? Wear a miniskirt and use it to carry an extra tray when you’re serving drinks. Got wings? How do you feel about swinging on a perch suspended from the ceiling? Cryptids of every race and creed were invited to come and show off the things that divided them from the human race—and every one of them who did just helped to raise the Freakshow’s cred a little higher. There was even a review in the New Yorker, calling it a “cunning use of smoke and mirrors,” and “a fantastic example of the misuses one can manage with a degree in theatrical makeup and costuming.” In short, it was so in-your-face that everyone assumed it had to be fake, and the human populace of the city was all but busting down the doors for the chance to dance with the monsters they still didn’t believe in.
    Still, every gimmick has its shelf life, and Kitty knew that if she wanted to keep the Freakshow running, she would need to have more than just a few strange but pretty faces on staff. She’d need actual entertainment . Well, that, and some of the stiffest drinks in the city, courtesy of our bartenders, Ryan and Angel.
    All of which goes to explain why I scrambled to the middle of the stage less than a minute before curtain, wearing a corset, a ruffled black-and-red cancan skirt, high heels, and enough glitter to start my own David Bowie tribute band. In the end, no matter how tight the timing, the show must always go on.

    “Ladies and gentlemen, honored guests and less-than-honored neighbors, the Freakshow welcomes you to a night of thrills, chills, and sweet surprises that can be found nowhere else in this fairest of all fair cities.” Kitty always did her ringmaster act from the center of the stage, despite the fact that she’s a bogeyman, and should hence want to avoid the light whenever possible. I guess she never got to that page of the bogeyman edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves . She strutted back and forth between two precisely placed marks as she used her womanly wiles to get the attention of a rowdy crowd.
    Her luck was usually good in that regard. Something about her wearing an outfit that looks like a classic ringmaster’s attire as reinterpreted by a designer who specializes in high-end fetish gear just managed to catch the eye. It didn’t hurt that she had the subtly inhuman proportions shared by all bogeymen, making her difficult to look away from.
    I said Kitty changed the place after Dave left. I never said she made it classy .
    “—and now, my beloved guests, if you would put your hands together for our sweet sugarplums, our cancan belles, our Freakshow dancers, the Scarionettes!” Kitty finished our introduction with a flourish, her heels hitting the floor with gunshot precision as she walked off the main stage half a step ahead of the opening curtain. Floodlights splashed down from the rafters, revealing eleven dancers in corsets and short ruffled skirts, all frozen in perfect clockwork doll poses as we waited for the music to begin.
    The tapping of an unseen conductor’s baton echoed from the speakers, catching the attention of those patrons who had learned to ignore Kitty’s posturing in favor of sucking down cocktails while they waited for the floorshow to begin. Then Emilie Autumn’s “I Know Where You Sleep” blasted out, and we started to dance.
    Kitty was being generous when she called the floorshow’s first number a “cancan.” I’ve danced the cancan, although never professionally, and while it does involve a lot of girls hiking their skirts to heaven, they’re usually doing it wearing outfits that look less like they came from the remainder bin at Hot Topic. Still, it was athletic, enthusiastic, and involved cute girls in high heels and corsets bouncing up and down for five minutes without stopping for air, which was more than