Carnivals

She’s always loved carnivals. She loved the whirling, twirling ferocity of them – the faltering through crowded rows of tented crafts or watergun games, the dirt, the trek through adult legs and elbows and the treacherous craning of her neck to see the top of the Ferris wheel. She loved the carnival and the circus.

There were days now when she wished she hadn’t run off to one, though.

As a girl, she had thought the fun would be in the magical nights with the visitors (always visitors, never permanent) and the cool breezes and night skies (over Dallas, Minneapolis -- over Gatlinburg, as silly as that was) and the cotton candy sights and buttered popcorn smells, but now she hated the nights. Now she hated the nights.

During the day, at least she could see what she was doing. At least she knew where she was headed. But night came, and the crowds came, and she became another version of herself – a version that cried at children when she should have been capering (she was a clown), or busted up her own fixed game (she was a game-runner) or soaked in gin and pretend drunkenness (she was supposed to take tickets at the gate).

The whirling never stopped at night. The stars, fixed like the games, turned. The trucks clanked and roused her the mornings they left – her favorite times – out of what felt like a deep, dreamless and essential sleep. She was basically dead.

Basically, but not completely. Tremors of surprise ran under the surfaces of her routines; she felt sometimes that she was almost feeling them – almost, but not quite.

She had considered running off and becoming an acolyte of some eastern-guru religion – some cult, she told herself – and wearing only natural fibers in loose, billowy styles, moving to India, cleansing lepers or walking barefoot in a particularly holy ashram or sitting with crossed legs watching the Guru as he transcended earthly things. It just wasn’t violent enough.

Leave the carnival and she would explode into violence, she saw. Left without the peculiar restrictions of permanent travel and exhibitionism and the forward-forward motion of carnival life, she would have to march herself straight into jail before she could axe anybody dead.

“I haven’t yet,” she would tell the police, “but I will. I think about it all the time. I’m thinking about it right now, with you.”

They would let her go and she would eat herself alive, instead. Her courage, coiled like a snake around her heart, would have left her, would have been used up by the trip to the police station. By the time they had released her from the interrogation room, if they even took her in, she would have felt it slither off. She would be staring at the crinkled white paper in the wastebasket, staring at it even when the drug-induced mania of a wild-eyed man from a street raid climaxed in his smearing black ink all over the walls near fingerprinting. She would not have looked up. She would have been silent.

So she had decided to start a war. Nothing more pro-active than starting a war, she told herself.

She would do it at the carnival. She would start it with a bomb and a fire. She would blow up the Himalayan – it never went anywhere, anyway, always circling, pushing passengers to the outside, always sent them clutching the far end of the bar gasping for breath, trying not to crush the friend who had sat on the right. (The Himalayan always went counter-clockwise, and never backward.) Teenage boys sat gloriously, painfully happy as their dates squeezed into them, hands flailing and grasping smooth metal bars, hips pressing into each other. The girls laughed, nervously at first and then shrieking their joy with an embarrassing abandon. When they stepped off the Himalayan, the pairs looked away from each other, one of each couple pointing to an over-priced carnival booth they both knew neither of them wanted to play, and both feigned intense interest. (Mooches.) After one or two games (if the boys became competitive), they wandered away, never looking back at the Himalayan.

She would start by burning the Himalayan.

It would have to be a first move, though, followed by aggressive act after act until everything came to a head. It would not be a war, otherwise – it would be a standoff. It would be a hostage situation. It would be a “crisis.”

War. She wants to start a war.

Because fuck peace, and fuck sanity.

And fuck carnivals.