Flappers & Fiction

The Widow Blake stands at her garden gate every time the train whistles, waiting for a boy who fled a fairground fight eleven years ago. She does not recognize the massive, melancholy lion tamer who arrives with Slate’s Great Moral Hippodrome, nor does he know the white-haired woman watching him from the weeds. But when the lions turn on their master, the wounded giant is carried to her door. In the delirium of pain, a terrified confession about a jack-knife and a “murder” finally brings the wanderer home.