QK Agent Round - The Barringer Museum

Title: We, Freaks
Entry Nickname: The Barringer Museum
Word count: 78K
Genre: Adult Speculative Fiction

Query:

Sideshow barkers claim the true freak is born, not made. That a pregnant mother’s fascination with an eerie neighborhood dog led to the birth of a fur-faced baby boy, and that a woman’s all-consuming fear of sea serpents etched scales on the fetus growing inside of her.

To Theodore, a museum owner in 1850’s New York City, these boasts and backstories are improbably beginning to resemble truth. And after his museum burns to the ground, he decides he’s willing to pursue any lead if it means restarting his career with a theater of the most astonishing humans the world has ever seen.

In a parallel storyline set in present-day Michigan, zoo ticket seller and PhD candidate Max is grudgingly hosting a scientific study testing if expectant mothers can impress bestial traits on their fetuses through extensive exposure to lions. When Max attempts to quash what he considers to be mockery of science, he’s kidnapped by a collective of unusual humans depending on the study to validate their origin stories.

As Theodore risks his reputation to exploit a folktale, Max contends with the nature of belief as he becomes introduced to a world he hadn’t thought possible. At the center of both stories lie the individuals with fur or gills or multi-colored skin who seek an answer for their bodies, but are instead becoming wrapped up with the lives of men who will never understand their existence.

First 250:

Theodore Barringer had planned to spend his morning crafting an exhibit about a romance between Thomas Jefferson and America’s first swivel chair, but instead, he faced the extraordinary: two women whose natures he could not discern. At Spooner’s and the Eastern Dime Museum, Theodore could always recognize the hoax—the 90 year-old woman boasting 160 years of age, the siblings from Virginia advertising Mayan heritage, the thin men who never weighed as little as they claimed they did… The frauds of humanity were growing commonplace in New York City, but the sisters currently sitting in front of his desk… Yes, they were asking to perform in his museum, and yes, they were identical twins, but they were also beings he’d never once heard rumors of. He knew of giants, Circassian beauties, and wild men, but no humans quite like these—none so completely authentic in their peculiarity.

Because the fascination was more than their twin sisterhood, but rather that the sister on the right explained that with costuming assistance the two could create the illusion of four bodies, yet failed to describe how it was that each sister reflected the other as a live mirror of flesh and movement. How upon the right side of one and the left of the other, their tan skin shrunk into the thin lines of a crooked spider web and broke a reflective, silver coating up into shards. Their reticence made him want to scream out: how had a mirror shattered and fused itself to you, and how could he replicate the effect?