Shepherd

Step right up

You hear him before you see him. That is the whole idea. A voice keen as an auctioneer and warm as a con, rolling out over the whole Midway — step right up, step right up, discerning souls only, something magickal behind the flap — and by the time you've placed which tent it's coming from, your feet have already turned toward it. He is the best talker on the lot. He could sell you the coat off your own back and have you thank him for the deal.

He is selling you something. You already knew that. You're walking over anyway. That, he would tell you with a wink, is the trick — and it isn't even a trick. He just won't stop until you listen.

The boy no one heard

There was a house, before this, where a boy's voice did not carry. He cried out — the way children do when the people who are supposed to keep them safe are the ones they need saving from — and the walls ate the sound, and the neighbors turned up their radios, and the world went on exactly as if he had said nothing at all. He learned the cruelest lesson a child can learn: that you can scream, and scream, and scream, and it will change nothing, because no one is listening.

So he made himself a promise, small and hard as a stone swallowed. One day he would have a voice so large that not listening would no longer be an option. One day he would be impossible to ignore.

Avenging, out loud

There is a hostess on the far side of this Midway who carries the same wound he does, and carries it the opposite way. Her grief turned inward, quiet and mournful, singing to a room that will not witness. His turned outward, and got loud, and learned to grin while it worked. She mourns that no one came. He has decided, with terrible cheer, that everyone will come now — every last one of them, in through the flap, whether they meant to or not — and they will listen to every word.

That is his revenge, and it is a strange one, because it looks exactly like hospitality. Every soul he calls in is one more ear that finally turned toward him. Every night the crowd gathers because he told them to, and hangs on his voice because he willed it, and in that moment — the whole Midway leaning in to hear the boy no one heard — he gets, for a little while, the one thing the world denied him. He is listened to. He cannot stop needing it. So he never stops calling.

The last voice you'll trust

There are three great liars on this lot. One lies sweetly, in a fortune-teller's tent. One lies with her hands, in the open, and dares you to catch it. And Shepherd lies at the top of his lungs, from the mouth of the show — the loudest of the three, and somehow the one you doubt the least, because a lie told that boldly, that warmly, that gladly, hardly feels like lying at all. It feels like being welcomed. That is the most dangerous grin on the Midway, and it is aimed, right now, at you.

He will make you feel like the only soul he ever wanted to see walk through that flap. And you will believe it. Everyone does.

So step right up. His voice is the warmest thing in the dark, and the surest, and it has been waiting a very long time for an ear to turn its way. Give him yours. He earned it the hard way — and he promises, with that gleaming, gorgeous, unreachable smile, that what waits behind the flap is something you'll never forget. He isn't lying about that part. He never was.