The Carnival Slept

My waterlogged boots made dull thuds against the grounds of the lifeless carnival. The thuds were where idle chatter, victory bells, shaking coaster bars would have been. They buried the place of the screams, the laughs, the scent of fried pickles, the bright blue summer sky, even quaking hands gripped to gondola rims. Maybe it was just a mistake, trying to bury the petrichor.

I had no idea where my daughter had gone.

I came to a halt, my hands down by my knees. I gave up the constant breathing. Whatever heavy breaths tried to broke through were just a labor, and I didn’t hear them, only feel the burning in my stomach, hear the constant pounding of the rain, louder than before, almost deafening rain.

And the wind which poured down over the hills all around, big, black porous bumps in the sky that brought my claustrophobia as high as it would ever go.

If there were tears from this face, they were held back by the rain. Or, maybe it was the same fear that hid the gut-swelling breaths. The puddle I saw was darker than black. Oh, God, was I sleeping? If it were but a dream, then, all my eyelids cupped together so no color came at all, oh, how relieving it would be. And I looked up to the moon.

“Maria!” I howled. “Maria!”

I heard my breath beneath the rain.

It was an hour, what had passed for me, no mind to what else could have passed in a dead carnival. It was Nick I texted, arms beginning to quiver against my breast, feet numb from a mile’s swim in running boots.

Nick, please text me back right now.

I couldn’t have bothered with an ASAP. Well, I hated ASAP. I loathed all those shorthands and phrases snuck into the day-to-day, which made me feel as if I were still a schoolboy dodging teacher’s pets a dozen to a class.

He hadn’t texted me yet.

“Maria!” I cried out again. “Hey, Maria!”

#

“Uh, hey.” I mustered, finally out by the electrician’s confused turn. “There a circus here?”

He winced a little. He had a bit of a beard, thirties-odd face but still baby-eyed beneath his hat. Perfect to work a Ferris wheel’s lights on a scalding summer day, I thought.

“My name is Travis,” he paused, “and I’m with the electric company.”

“So, they got a circus here, soon, or something?”

Travis looked over a moment, some coworker, then back to me. “Sir, pardon me, could I have your name?”

“Why do you need my name?”

He rubbed his forehead a little, and then he took out his phone and just tapped at it for a good while, and I waited, and then eventually he looked up over to me. “Carnival’s on the twentieth.”

I breathed. “I live about a mile out from here, with my daughter. How much is a ticket?”

“Sir, I don’t need to know where you live.” He had his hands to his hip, turned over to the same coworker then. “Do I need to know that?”

“No, he don’t gotta tell you all that.”

Travis turned to me again, but I had to cut in.

“I’ll be here.”

#

Only reason I could see was the Ferris wheel lights, white lines between white circles lighting up corners of stands, and some lifeless balloons, half-deflated, and puddles in thick cracks, like pools filled with fluorescent lanterns. Just then, a horrid wind howled past me, and I shook all the way, head, neck, shoulders stiff beneath wet jacket pads, navel thumping, knees both ways, feet barely holding me up. I took my soggy jacket and threw it down to the ground.

It floated slowly away.

I grit my teeth.

I heard a cruel, cold buzz in my pants pocket, and reached my hand to it like it were my own daughter.

What’s going on?

I sighed a deep sigh of relief.

I’m at the carnival.

I told you about it.

[…]

It felt like an hour, each dot.

In Chester Hill?

With Maria.

Yes.

Wasn’t there a storm? Didn’t they cancel?

How could I know?

[…]

The next message took especially long. I felt my eyes pulled to the wheel again, to the fourth gondola up, on the right. They hadn’t remembered to turn off the thing.

But I had to look around me.

A toy stand, each character left monotone, black-gray checkers of whatever shape nearly hidden from the wheel’s stark white. A reindeer plush whose eyes I couldn’t see, its cheap felt too clear with loose S-shaped threads glowing at every hem; beside it, a rabbit plush with a flat, lifeless smile, stubby arms like Madeleines; torn wallpaper hanging like broken nails around them both. So cheap, so careless, barely trying to appease children to win their own buck and keep afloat.

And I was biting my lip.

You need me to come over?

I took a deep breath, looking into the center of the Ferris wheel as I thought, and then I forgot. It was like I was still in it, that light which gave this whole thing life, which made all of it clear. Without any dressing left over it all, without freezing rain pouring down between the far-gone hills, without my lonesome.

And I screamed her name.

“Maria!”

I grabbed my face, let out a good sigh, and responded to Nick.

Please.

#

My spine shot up from the tip with the sneeze, all at once like a shotgun shell. The light had been blinding now, somehow, and I thought I heard laughing as I stepped right up to the high striker. All it was now was a solemn pillar watching over me. I thought I’d step right out of my body then. I didn’t really know where I would go. There wasn’t any way to know where it was, and I felt that all I could really do was go there or wait a little longer.

I coughed it out, again. “Maria!” I coughed some more, tried to ball up numbs hand I didn’t feel, and lurched over to the stuffed toy stand I had made it back to.

As I sat, and cried, “Maria,” time and time again in coarse tones, I held the rabbit plush in my hands, and turned it around, pushed into the cotton, of which there was far too little so it had been mostly fabric flapping up around my finger, and I looked into the big circles stitched high up its face.

It was two-thirty when Nick picked me up.