Smoke on the Midway
- Jan 28, 2023
- 2 min read
by Charlotte Hamrick
Our last year together felt like your beloved game of chess, the board of us nestled nonchalantly under your arm one day, stuffed in your locker the next, kings and queens rolling against each other in repose waiting for the interlocking of fingers.
You were a tire swing launched over a river of turbulent waters, swaying from side to side. Landing on my bank one week, on hers another.
She was Elton John, piano lessons, only child, 16th birthday new car, college prep classes.
I was Led Zeppelin, headphone drums, oldest child, bummer of rides, part-time shelf stocker.
She was a smooth still lake, I was a house on fire.
It was me you took to the carnival, sounds of hurly-burly music and crow calls of the barkers weaving through a murmuration of bodies in the midway. She would have shrunk away from the musk, the sweat, the proximity of flesh. I imagined her wrinkled forehead, hand over mouth. To me the carnival was exotic, the restlessness of the crowds a high, its travelers living an enviable freedom.
You knew this about her, about me.
I lost you that night when you lost your leather-fringed jacket, a prized possession, to the carnival barker, a trade for another try at a stuffed animal I didn’t want. You shivered in the cold November air, one step ahead as we walked back to your car.
Your daddy bought back the jacket. I saw you wearing it a few days later, your arm around her.
You left me behind, a lingering smoke, a house burned down.
Charlotte Hamrick has been published in a number of journals, recently including Atticus Review, New World Writing, and Still:The Journal. Her Flash Fiction was selected for inclusion in the Best Small Fictions 2022 anthology. She is Creative Nonfiction Editor for The Citron Review and Features Editor for Reckon Review. She lives in New Orleans where she sometimes does things other than read and write. Find her on Twitter @Charlotteham504.
