Escaping the Final Flood
- Feb 18, 2022
- 4 min read
by Molly Andrea-Ryan
There is only one way out, you realize, squinting past exposed wiring and broken crates. The glowing exit sign whispers, “Catch me if you can,” each red letter blowing you a playground kiss.
You take your daughter by the hand. She is, by now, screaming. The gorilla rattling its metal cage looks painfully fake to you, but somehow, this doesn’t provide comfort. Somewhere deep down, your daughter also detects imitation, but the tin-can screaming persists.
Funhouse. A misnomer regardless of what hides behind plaster facades and crooked mirrors but in this case, an affront to all definitions of the word fun. You imagine tearing the sign down with your teeth, splitting it apart board by board. You poke your tongue between two canines and bite down until it starts to hurt. Your thoughts drift to something you read once about carrots and fingers requiring the same amount of pressure to bite in half.
The next room is quiet and impenetrably dark. You place both hands on your daughter’s shoulders, bumping her across a shaking drawbridge. Mist from a nearby waterfall wilts the bow in her hair. Lights flash from below and your daughter claws her way onto your front like a koala. You have no choice. You hold her. There is only one way out.
Ahead, the walls curve into a barrel that rotates at 2 miles per hour. Your ankles creak beneath tensed calf muscles and you whisper curse words and apologies into your child’s ear. Your elbow sings with pain as it glances off the railing they’ve installed, a mocking gesture toward safety.
The teenaged boys in front of you are roughhousing. One pushes the other who bumps into you and your daughter. They don’t apologize and you don’t want them to. You want to send them, in your mind, with your entire being, straight to hell. You want to blame them, these boys you don’t know and whose mothers you’ve never met, for the existence of this place.
And it is their fault, isn’t it? In a way? You’ve known this place for years. You came here when you were a child, and it was nothing like this. Every amusement park in America used to want to replicate Disney World. Now, they just want to impress these kids who play Doom on their computers and idolize Tony Soprano. They want to shock an unshockable generation. They didn’t even bother to change the name. Not a warning sign in sight. How were you supposed to know?
The exit sign floats back into view. You guess that it’s no more than ten feet away but for some reason, everyone has stopped moving. The teenaged boys jump and crane, looking for a better view into the strobe-lit nightmare ahead. The stillness closes a hand around your throat, and you feel your legs trembling beneath the weight of your kindergartner. You want to tell someone something, you think. If you could just tell someone something.
Everyone steps forward. A sign on a closed door spells out, “The Final Flood.” You hear muffled screams. Despite the blocks of foam padding, water pools just outside the door. The room, you realize, fills with water.
You push the teenaged boys, throw your back against the emergency exit door, and hurtle across the pavement. In the seconds that it takes for your daughter to wriggle free and look to you for an explanation you can’t provide, you rearrange your facial features. You don’t want her to know that you were just as scared. You smile brightly and pull the wet ribbon from her hair. She plays with your necklace while you retie a bow at the crown of her head, pulling it tight so the fine hair sticks up and over like a fountain. She forgets it all. You buy her a hotdog, just to be sure.
You wonder if the mechanical gorilla will show up someday in her dreams. You wonder if she’ll awaken outraged and fearful or if, by that point, the mechanical gorilla will be fuzzy around the edges, perhaps even comical. And maybe she’ll be so grown up that she lives in her own house somewhere and has to pick up the phone to call you and say, “Do you remember that time?”
You take her on the Tilt-a-Whirl and the Leaping Frog and the Train to Adventureland. She plays one of those squirt gun games in the hopes of winning the grand prize, a giant stuffed rabbit with purple fur. She wins a goldfish that dies on the drive home.
Before bed, she asks when you will take her back. “Soon,” you say. “Next week?” she says. “Not that soon,” you say. You read her a book about a man who sells hats before getting in your own bed and reading a book about a man who commits crime. You fall asleep with the light on and the book dog-housed across your lap.
You dream of the mechanical gorilla, and it frightens you. Awakened, you vow to write a scathing letter to the amusement park owner in the morning. You turn off the light feeling satisfied with your plan and forcing your mind to stay focused on happier things. You dream of sitting on a boat in the late afternoon sunlight with Alex Trebek. You float atop a pond full of giant goldfish surrounded by trees wearing hats. The sun drifts behind a kaleidoscope and floods the boat with carnival colors. Alex assures you that you won’t drown. It’s only light. Your daughter does the backstroke through jelly-red clouds.
In the morning, you have the sense that you’re supposed to do something. You’ve forgotten what. You catch your daughter watching a program geared toward young adults and turn it off. You burn the toast. She pets your head. You try not to blink as she grows but you can’t help it. You blink and blink.
Molly Andrea-Ryan is a poet and prose writer living in Pittsburgh, PA. Her work can be found in Barren Magazine, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. You can also find her on Twitter @mollyandrearyan, where she mostly talks about her cats.
