“Calliope” by Tina Wayland
2026 Short Story Contest
Runner-Up
He is a liar and she knows it. Or, more to the point, she knows that he knows that she knows it—a kind of infinite thought loop she can’t allow herself to stop and pick apart. Even as she stands facing him, mascara a linebacker’s double smudge, shoes in hand, she can see the glee playing at the thin corners of his mouth.
Come on, he says. Like he always says. She’s just a colleague.
She wants to scream but instead throws her shoes, the red heels she paid full price for, something special to wear to his business dinner. They travel through the air, missing him, landing somewhere in the gutter. He turns to look, grin widening, perfect teeth a too-bright beacon in the growing dark.
Unshakable. That’s what he is, she thinks, grit digging into the soles of her bare feet. He is unshakable and I’m a mouse in the paws of a bored cat.
I bought those for you! As soon as it’s out she regrets it. She could have bought a pair of heels studded with diamonds, had her tummy tucked and breasts lifted. She could have promised his boss a ride in the backseat of her 2019 sedan, with the pleather seats and the windows that won’t open all the way, in return for a raise and promotion. It still wouldn’t have mattered.
She tries to calm herself, takes two big breaths and holds them, exhales to the count of eight. A bobby pin bites into her scalp—one of dozens the hairdresser poked into her to keep everything in place—and suddenly she can’t think of anything else. The pain in her head, the ground cutting into her feet, the way the woman in the pink dress winked one wrinkle-free eye at her husband and he spared no time winking back.
Can we go in now? His arm outstretched towards the house, the dark cuff of his best suit opening like a hole she wants to crawl into and never come out.
She means to walk inside—not at his bidding but slowly, in her own time. Showing him she’s angry, yes, but somehow, despite everything, all her yelling on the ride home notwithstanding, she still has the upper hand.
Instead she walks past him, the grin slipping from his face, and bends to pick up her shoes.
He doesn’t expect it—she can see that in the sudden O of his mouth, grin swallowed now, his cat paws pulling at the heel embedded in his thigh. When the second heel hits his temple he lets out a yelp that sounds to her like the calliope of a carrousel, something remembered from her childhood, sitting on the lacquered horse as it rode her up and down, around and around and back again.
Hushhhhh, she says, voice like vapour pushed through the calliope’s whistles. He bends forward and she takes his head in her hands. We’re going for a ride.
***
Whether he is stunned from the blow to the temple or under her spell—her confident walk disorienting, perhaps, or maybe it’s the way she digs her fingers into his upper arm and pulls—her husband follows her wordlessly to the sedan parked at the far end of their driveway. She walks barefoot alongside him, blood from the gash in his thigh staining his good pants and leaving a trail that runs from the street to the passenger-side door.
Get in, she says in a voice she doesn’t recognize, then walks around to the driver’s side. She knows he won’t run—knows he has only ever learned to chase but never flee. She starts the car and the calliope fills again, steam slipping through each whistle, notes humming against her back teeth.
She doesn’t know what to do next and is surprised to find she doesn’t care. She can sense her husband staring, face smeared red, confused, and hits the gas quick before slamming on the brakes. He lunges forward, his thick black mane unslicked, arms galloping for the dash.
Step right up, she says, and finds the gas again. He rocks back into his seat, then forward, his half-limp body leaning into every turn. She circles the block, then again, and by the time they pass the house a third time she knows what to do.
She sees the woman as they approach his office, pink dress obscene against the dark of the unlit street. She hadn’t expected it to be so easy—to simply pull up and find what she was looking for, the saunter unmistakable, an eruption of hoop earrings in the headlights.
Is that…? her husband asks, her heel still protruding from his thigh, his voice like gravel.
Ding ding ding! she replies, reaching across him to open the passenger door. He flinches when she brushes against him, a twitching she wants to absorb and let her body savour. Is this what it is, she thinks, to be feared? Is this what power feels like?
When she kicks him he lands on the sidewalk with a thud, a carpet splattered red and unrolled before the woman in pink, who stares at them with her O of a mouth, another hole to crawl into, and when she leans towards the door she has never felt so free.
He’s yours now, she says, and shuts the door with a creak, the calliope grinding on its rusted gears, slow and uncanny at first, then building speed until the horses run in circles without moving, pulling empty carriages behind them.
But when she turns the key in the ignition nothing happens.
She looks at her, the flawless woman in pink, eyes round but mouth now closed. Then her husband raises his head, eyes clear, one hand at his hip to pull her red shoe free. The gears grind faster, the music so loud it drowns out everything else, and when she reaches to lock the passenger door her husband gets there first.
***
When she was six her father picked her up early from school and drove to the carnival that had set up along the pier. It was late April and raining and they were the only ones there, the workers still setting up rides, hands black with grease, backs bent under the weight of rusted metal and sun-bleached seats. Her father had slipped the carousel operator a folded bill, asked him to keep the ride running, the green disappearing into the gape of the man’s dirty pocket.
She chose a horse with a festive mane, impossibly green and purple, its black eyes empty and staring forward. Then she hooked a foot into the chipped gold stirrup and pulled herself up, wrapping her hands around the cold pommel. It took her a moment to realize the carrousel had started—that the noise she heard was music and not the whine of machinery, the whole thing threatening to tear apart beneath her.
Her horse pranced out of rhythm with its partner, crankshafts lifting and falling, the world beyond a canvas of blurred greys until a single burst of colour stepped towards the figure of her father. She watched in sweeping loops as the bright silhouette bent to him and he bent back, mouths lost under the wide brim of his hat, the music she had no name for rising and plunging around her.
When it was over she stepped dizzy from the carousel, the man in overalls shaking her father’s hand, a fleck of colour caught in the corner of her eye, her father’s shoes—polished and mirroring the world back to her—moving quickly away from the sudden hot splatter of cotton candy.
This is what she’s thinking as her husband pulls the car door open, her bare foot pressing against the gas pedal, listening to the empty click of the ignition as she turns the key again and again.
How could you? he says, the confusion waning, his anger filling the space between them. She realizes she has no answer, only the taste of bile in her mouth, a sugary sickness she fights to keep down.
It has always been like this—his wanting and her obliging, an endless coil that pulled her tighter and smaller until there was hardly anything left of her at all. Now she looks at the dried blood on his fingers, flakes of red against his white shirt cuff, and knows.
How could I not? She opens the driver’s side door and steps out, a yawning hole he watches her through, mouth opening and closing. He lifts his hand then lets it drop, as if unable to find anything to pull himself up again. As if, she thinks, he’s needed me to prop him up all along.
We have a winner! she says to the woman in pink, her husband a consolation prize she’s eager to give away. But the woman only shakes her head, hoop earrings a jangle against her neck, one hand clutching her shoes.
She doesn’t know where to go and it doesn’t matter. Behind her the pink recedes into the palette of night sky, her husband a stoke of white that blurs and fades before disappearing.
There is no sound along the street. Her bare feet are silent on the pavement, and the trees stand still in the thick of the summer night. From within her she feels the whirr of something waking, the grinding to life of cogs and bearings, a canopy of stars above her, the ground lifting her before setting her down again.
Her lungs fill with the scent of damp earth and machine oil, and when she exhales the calliope grinds out its first notes, chattering against her teeth, a hum that warms itself against her before slipping out into the dark. She can see it—its greens and purples, the way the calliope wraps around everything she passes, the world in colour again.
She walks around the block, then again, trailing the whistling of music behind her. Then she steps from the shadows and makes her way towards the pier.