Amusement

by Scott Bryan

Kieran White

“Where’d you get that scar on your chin?”

I jerk my attention down from the great, dangling gondolas lining the curve of the Ferris wheel. On the ground we are illuminated by lines of delicate, buzzing light bulbs, but above us the wheel vibrates with strained neon tubes like slits cut into the hard black nighttime skirt.

Vertigo washes over me and I reach out and clutch the thick chain that separates me from active riders. I focus on the inquisitive man in the overalls. He arches over me like all grownups. His eyes are rough terrain, tilled earth left to dry. His words bounce off my face, leaving traces of chewing tobacco and cotton candy.

“Birth defect,” I lie without thinking, regurgitating my best story. “I was almost twins, but I didn’t fully split in the womb. When I was two, I started to grow teeth outside my jaw like there should have been a second mouth. Had to have them removed.”

“Is that so?” he doesn’t believe me. Maybe my response is too fast, too open, too detailed, too strange.

“Yeah,” I confirm. “I’ve also got a little undeveloped eye socket on the side of my head. You can see it when my hair is short.”

He pulls the crank, lunges to swing open the safety arm of an empty car, and returns to release the hook of the chain, shaking it free of my hand as he does so. I step onto the wobbly metal platform, which gives a little shudder under my scant weight and makes a sound like a cookie sheet in a hot oven.

“Well, at least you meet the height requirement,” he says with a formality that makes me think of toy soldiers. “Just barely.”

“Some kids with scars aren’t tall enough?” I ask, searching for relevance. Then I straighten to my full height and seriousness. “Keep me safe, mister. My dad died on one of these.”

His teeth clamp under the red bristles of his mustache. I give him a salute and step onto the swaying gondola. He timidly puts the arm back in place and locks another chain, this one separating me from mid-rotation freefall.

“I’ve done all I can do,” he says, and I don’t doubt him.

My dad is dead, that part is true. He didn’t die on a Ferris wheel, but he loved the carnival. It makes me mad that no one here remembers him. He didn’t show up one year, and they had the fair anyway, without him. They probably didn’t even consider canceling the event just because of one dead dad, so what does it matter if I tell this carney the truth about my wounds? We are all temporary and unimportant, just distractions lumped between birth and death, especially to each other. I hate that I already know that.

“Have you ever lost a customer on this thing?” I ask as I settle in.

“Unfortunately, yeah,” he says with mock sincerity and a sinister grin. He steps away. “Hundreds.”

I am not afraid of anything. “Unfortunately?” He doesn’t seem sorry.

“If you lose too many, they dock ya,” he shrugs and pulls the lever again.

The gondolas are attached to the arm of the wheel with little fiberglass umbrellas. The design suggests if the ride came apart and chunks of the thing plummeted to the ground, littering the dirty open space behind the high school with rods and bodies and shattered bulbs, my cart would distinguish itself from the other debris and float through the night, maybe land in a field of wildflowers.

All safety is an illusion.

The machine cranks and I rise away from someone I don’t know toward things I know nothing about. Of course, the infinite sky above me is obstructed by the functionless parachute, which makes the two-ticket price tag seem a bit steep.

I am confident I will circle back around, so I run my thumb over the smooth, new skin of my scar and try to think up another lie for the next time someone asks about it.

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Scott Bryan publishes the online novel/zine Get It Away From Me and penned the screenplay for the feature film Drunk. His work has appeared in X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, Coffin Bell Journal, Soda Killers Magazine, and Variety Pack.