The Grand Tour

Fantasy adventure readers will delight as they take a trip into this short story collection by E. Catherine Tobler.

Step right up! Come one, come all, to Jackson's Unreal Circus and Mobile Marmalade. The steam train may look older than your great-grandmother's china, but within her metal corridors are destinations you have only ever dreamed. They're real, friends, each and every one—and yours for the taking.

Witness Rabi, Vanquisher and Vanisher Extraordinaire, who can make coins and the past vanish before your very eyes. Dare to visit the Beauty and the Beast, our conjoined twins who are terrible and tortured by turns. Sample Beth's marmalade, the sticky sweetness containing the very memory of the day you turned sixteen, and your beloved's lips touched yours once and never again.

It's worth the price, traveler. Jackson's Unreal Circus is where you can be whoever or whatever you want. Whether it be a ride on the Ferris wheel, slipping inside a skin that is not your own, or the opportunity to live as you never have before—it is all possible on this, the grandest of tours. The train beckons you—come, come!

For the first time, E. Catherine Tobler has compiled a collection of her popular circus stories. With nine stories ranging from the first published work within this universe to a previously unreleased piece, this is your ticket to her magical world. Welcome to The Grand Tour.

Contains the following destinations:

"Vanishing Act"
"Artificial Nocturne"
"We, As One, Trailing Embers"
"Liminal"
"Blow the Moon Out"
"Ebb Stung by the Flow"
"Lady Marmalade"
"Every Season" (original to this collection)
"Inland Territory; Stray Italian Greyhound"

Also features a special introduction by Hugo-nominated author A.C. Wise!

Includes interior accompanying art by Tressina Bowling.

Excerpt

From: "Vanishing Act" 

Jackson’s Unreal Circus and Mobile Marmalade picked her up a day outside Denver. Jackson wouldn’t stop for a cow on the tracks, but he stopped for this little thing, with her pale hair and paler eyes. Brought the entire train to a stop to scoop her from the tracks with his long arms.

She huddled against his chest, her small body nearly folded in on itself, and we all watched, in confusion and fascination both. The long hem of her dirty shift caught the cow catcher and the remains of said beast.

She was none of my concern, but Jackson placed her in my car and made her just that. He lay her down in the corner, in my favorite chair, my only chair. She looked all the more pale against the blue and gold stripes. Their brilliance had long since faded, but looked new against her washed out skin. Her bare feet were crusted with dirt and muck and I didn’t look much beyond that.

I was working with the quarters when she began to wail, rolling them across my ,ngers before trying to turn them into nickels. The steam whistle crowed as we crossed the state line, Colorado into New Mexico, and she came alive as though submerged in hot water.

The quarters tumbled off my fingers, onto the floor where they lay as she shrieked, curled her hands over her ears, and moaned. Her face was creased with pain; for a moment, she looked like she’d been raked with hot metal, so did these creases mark her pale skin.

After listening to her, I wanted to do the same; curl into a ball and moan. Instead, I went to her. Crouched before the chair and tried to get her to lower her hands.

First thing I noticed was that her hands didn’t feel like hands. She was soft, as though her bones hadn’t yet firmed up. A baby in the guise of a ten year old. Second thing I noticed was the way she went quiet when I touched her.

I thought she would twist away, scream, holler, anything but what she did, which was melt into me, against my chest. Her soft hand curled its way into my shirtfront, her thumb working over the nearest dirty button.

“Stop that.”

Tried to push her out of my arms, I did, but she wouldn’t go. She took to purring like a cat, like the big lions Jackson kept caged in the car behind mine. To keep me in line, he said, but I could make them vanish with a thought. Still, I didn’t like the idea of where they might end up, so I left them alone, and they did the same for me.

The girl’s purring took up residence inside my head, worked some kind of magic and made me tumble toward the mattress Opal had snickered at, but had still come to. And where did that memory come from, I wondered as I drowned inside that rumbling sound. I was lost inside it as though it was a maze. Couldn’t find my way out, so I just gave in and eventually it bled into a familiar dark quiet I recognized as sleep.

Woke to the train slowing again and I wondered if Jackson was stopping for another sprite on the tracks. Stars painted the sky overhead and the air smelled like manure. We’d reached our destination then.

I untangled myself from the boneless girl. She lay as though dead and I moved away as quick as I could. Before she could latch on again. Before she thought to hold me and purr and make me a lost thing.

The air outside was cool, smelled like snow would be on the ground come morning. I pulled my coat around me, rubbed my hands together, and approached the first of the weird sisters as they emerged from their own car. I offered up one hand; Gemma took it, but Sombra’s hand was just as quickly there. It seemed one hand around mine, though I knew there to be two.

The sisters were two halves of the same thing, one light and one dark. Where one was concave, the other was convex. Where one was sharp rocks, the other was smooth water. Sombra’s hair was the night sky while Gemma’s was the stars. And sometimes, they were exactly backwards from that.

Why, I wondered, couldn’t Jackson have placed the little girl in with them? They were women, they’d had children, countless children, or so they said. I’d had plenty of women, but no children. Never would. Didn’t need or want them. Would be all too easy to wish them gone and have them vanish.

Sombra and Gemma moved like fog across the ground. Their feet never touched the ground as they drifted away. They wouldn’t help with the unloading; they never did and no one ever expected they would. They floated into the night and dissolved into fireflies against the blackness as they swept and blessed the campsite.

Five long and pale fingers wrapped around my half-warmed hand and I started at the touch. Looked down and found the little girl clutching me, her fingers warmed, water barely contained by skin. She looked up at me and her mouth curled in a crescent moon smile.

I could see now that her pale hair was drawn into dread‐ locks. Messy on the ends like they hadn’t been tended in a few years. Her mouth was as pale as her skin; her smile slipped away, but her grip tightened and she looked around, as if to ask where and why we were.

“Performin’ here,” I said and tried to loose my hand from hers, but she was having none of it. I walked and she fell into easy step beside me, though her little legs shouldn’t have been able to keep up.

About the Author

Since 2000, E. Catherine Tobler has sold more than one-hundred and twenty science fiction and fantasy short stories to markets such as Apex, Lightspeed, Fantasy, and Interzone. Her Clarkesworld story, "To See the Other (Whole Against the Sky)" was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. She has published seven novels with small press markets, and co-edited the fantasy anthology Sword & Sonnet, which was on the Ditmar, Aurealis, and World Fantasy award ballots. In 2019, her thirteen year run as editor at Shimmer Magazine made her a Hugo and World Fantasy finalist. She currently edits The Deadlands.

Read More from E. Catherine Tobler

"The Kraken Sea  Excerpt" - Issue 85 of Apex Magazine

"Homewrecker" - Issue 141 of Apex Magazine

"Remembered Salt" - Issue 146 of Apex Magazine