Free writing exercise.

I enjoyed writing this a lot more. The title, in keeping with the Star Trek theme, is

"Bread and Circuses"

The entire circus train fell in the manner of a child's toy into the ravine just outside of town, its cars folding up in the fall so that from a distance it looked like the rough angled line of teeth on a saw. It was late at night, and the only lights came from the town's distant Main Street. For a minute it seemed everyone and thing was too shocked by what had happened to say, do, or scream anything, but then the night's dark, icy calm was broken by the shouts and cries for assistance from the passenger cars, the roaring from the lions' den, and the elephants' panicked trumpeting. After the preliminary first aid to man and beast was seen to, a group of men from the village gathered in the freezing night with the intention of hunting down the one lion who had managed to escape from the damaged rail car, despite the pleas of their wives and the circus owner that they leave the monumental task of collecting the escaped animal to the proper authorities or, at the very least, the lion tamer, who was currently down for the count after taking one of the trapeze artists' pieces of Samsonite luggage to the head during the crash. All the villagers' better judgments were eventually successfully appealed to with the exception of that of old Eleazar McGrath, who ran off into the woods vowing to shoot the creature dead. Neither Eleazar nor the lion were ever seen again. The lion tamer was so enraged and saddened by what he viewed as the mishandling of these valuable and noble animals and the pointless loss of life that he vowed to exploit them no more and never again had anything to do with lions or circuses, save for the fact that he married the trapeze artist whose luggage had so injudiciously incapacitated him in the first place.

(Original first line from Albert Alvaro Rios.)

8/30/2009