Hide(17)
She climbs onto the carousel. The platform is rusted and falling apart. One of the poles holding a horse has snapped, and as she twists to avoid a fallen chunk of wood, the metal scrapes her arm, drawing blood. “Shit,” she hisses, covering it with her hand.
Food, bathroom, first-aid runs—all will get her out. She’ll be fine. A few drops of blood fall, squeezed out between her fingers. Is a single day enough time for infection to set in? Probably. She keeps going. Her steps are a careful dance around further injury as she makes her way to the center. Two panels around the closed interior of the ride have come loose. She slides between them, careful of her arm. She used to have curves—god, she loved her curves, the weight of her boobs, the soft comfort of her belly—but she’s lost too many pounds from stress and poverty. She squeezes in between the big metal gears that once ran the carousel. There’s just enough space to sit, and she can’t see outside. Tiny knife cuts of light pierce the space from above. Good enough.
She pours some water on her arm. It’s bleeding, but it’s not terrible. Won’t need stitches or anything. She wishes she had a strip of cloth to wrap around it. Thinking of wrapping herself up in things sends her mind away, though.
Sometimes when things got bad—worse, really, since they were always bad—with Mitch, she’d sit in the back of the closet and imagine herself small. Not skinnier, but actually small, like a child. And then she’d curl up, wrapped in her grandmother’s shawl, and stop being herself for a few precious moments.
After she left, he sent her photos of that shawl. Then, when she didn’t respond, he sent her a video of it burning along with all her photos.
She clutches the pendant around her neck, accidentally getting blood on it. She makes her own memories now, out of silver, out of metal. Strong and beautiful and only her own.
* * *
—
Christian laughs when he sees the roller coaster in the center of a large, relatively clear space. He doesn’t actually do rooftop solar installations, but he’s gone on enough service calls to have no fear of ladders or heights.
The roller coaster is a wooden skeleton, not even the biggest one in the park, but he doesn’t know that. A few sections have collapsed in on themselves. He picks the most stable-looking portion and climbs up the latticework of the exterior. A few sweaty and splintered minutes later, he hits the top.
He did not think this through.
There’s nothing up here but rotting track. Even if he lies flat, he’ll still be visible from the ground. And he can’t see any better options from this vantage point. The trees are greedy for the sky, obscuring everything. He can make out a few areas where there might be some sort of buildings, a distant Ferris wheel, and a couple of other ride things breaking through the trees, but there’s no way he’ll make it to any of them in time.
Down a tremendous swooping dip, a single cart is still on the track. Taking a deep breath, he aims for it. He doesn’t realize until he’s halfway there that it’s completely possible for him to die doing this. But he needs to make it far enough in the competition to impress the company. A broken neck will not impress anyone. Especially not Rosiee. Whispering promises of a cushy job, already picking out furniture for the biggest house in the town (without solar panels, fuck his monthly energy bills), which he’ll share with Rosiee and their two kids and a dog, he makes it to the cart and climbs in.
And laughs in surprise. On the side of the cart, stamped into the metal, is his mother’s maiden name. STRATTON ENGINEERING, it says. What are the odds? He never met her family—they disowned her when she ran off with his father. It wasn’t a romantic story. It was a story of slowly being ground down, worn thin, aged before his eyes. He was always sure she regretted her choice—regretted him—regretted giving up what she came from. She died of breast cancer three years ago. He read once that stress can lodge in the body, can fester and multiply, a cancer of the spirit that contributes to a cancer of the body. So in a way, her choice to abandon money and comfort for his sucky, loser dad actually killed her, didn’t it?
It feels like a sign, seeing the name Stratton here. Like this is his chance back into the world she left behind. The one he’s going to make for himself, and his wife, and his kids. He smiles and settles in, kept company by an imaginary Rosiee while the real one bleeds and sweats and worries in the middle of an engine.
* * *
—
Logan has always been afraid of clowns. A few years ago, there was the double whammy of the new It movies plus the random clown sightings in forests, and the recurring nightmare he’d thought was left behind in childhood popped back up. He didn’t sleep well for weeks. He’d never admit his phobia to anyone—can barely admit it to himself—but really, is it that stupid? It’s a more rational fear than, say, sharks. It’s 100 percent guaranteed that a shark can’t get you if you don’t go into the ocean. But clowns? Apparently they hang out in forests now.
Logan thinks of all of this as he stares at the giant clown head. What its original purpose was, he can’t say. Its nose has fallen off, and only one eye has kept its paint. But the clown’s gaping mouth is a doorway, framed by cracking red lips and browned teeth. He can’t figure out what it led to, because the building behind it is gone. (There was never a building. It was the entrance to a tent featuring a magic show parents forced their kids to endure so they could sit in the shade for a few blessed minutes, rest their feet from trying to figure out where the next ride was. Logan would be relieved to know the clown itself was false advertising.)