Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. I wake a fog so think
it feels like cloth pulled over my face. The world
is pressed close and muffled, like bleeds and teal and
blood red like bruises seen from a distance. I am
on my back beneath a rusted carnival arch, the letters
half eaten by orange corrosion, the paint flaky and thin,
curling tones around me. The midway yawns, empty and patient,
the chevast of stoll sacking at the edges like tired mAbs.
I do not remember arriving. There is chove into the
lining of a pocket, a name tact that is almost blanket,
torn rectangle of plastic with a ghost overtesieve, and the
faint escape where letters were once rubbed away. I slide
a finger beneath its corner, and the fabric of a
place seems to lean closer, as if the tag were
hinge on the world itself. The fog curls around my
feet in one tea let go. It fingers my ankles
like a thing that remembers my name, even when I
do not. The first thing, the carnival does is insist.
I belong is a soft insistence at first. A pull
at the base of my skull that's dead is my
legs and makes me stand the light of a sputter
in a temper that should be comforting but instead feels
like a pulse measured by someone else's hand. Bulbs blink
with the indifference of things that have watched too many faces.
Their glow is dawned, as in specific, as if they
are naming certain sins by color somewhere beyond the stole,
something last, high in tinny at first, then sliding down
into a low, breathy chuckle. Their trills off like a
thread pull through a seam. I move as if on
a core compulsion. Here is a physical thing, a tangible
tension that tugs attendant and broone, not merely an idea.
A photograph lies folded in my coat pocket. When I
take it up, my fingers tremble, not from coal, but
because there is weight in the image, a memory condensed
into silvered paper, an angle of light on a face
I have tried to keep in shatter. The face is
mine and not mine, younger, more unguarded eyes, bright with
some name that the photograph remembers, but I cannot speak.
The paper is soft at the edges, worn by repeated handling,
the crease down the middle like a reverbed and rut.
When I press it to my palm, it feels like
some that could either open me or close me forever,
Like the blade of a quiet knife you keep polished
for the day you might need it. The midway gate's
head stalls like empty mouths post as culling at the
edges of promises rusted into lies. A carousel in the
distance revolts in a slow, patient orbit, though no hands
move its mechanism, Its rotation is more like a remembering
than a machine running. The horses as a painted glass,
their smiles fixed and accusing placquered miles to have ut
lived whatever a gallows humor wants animated them. The world
here is staged in deliberate every prop harm with the
specific grace of an accusation. A poster board a bush
shows a face has scraped out. The gap forms a
familiar cluette that pricks a hollow beneath my sternum. Each
flucker of bulb light uncovers a scrap of something shame
made a small, cheap trophy with the name etched away,
a child's sheet with a brittle lace tide and a
desperate knot a half melted candle that smells of wax
and something blood warm, as if someone blew out a
secret and it left ascend behind. There is a key
in my jacket I keep forgetting my fingers find is
cored by habit or warm brass object that lives on
a loop and rest cold on my chest. Sometimes it
feels like an anchor. Sometimes it feels like a weapon.
Sometimes it is only a piece of metal that has
uplived its purpose and insists on being important. The midway
nudges me forward, as if the key were a compass needle,
pointing not north, but toward that unspoken center. I trace
the seam of the cord when anxiety tightens my shoulders,
and the action is small and private, the furtive reassurance
that there is still something I can hold. The key
clicks faintly when I move, a tiny percussion that the
fog eats almost immediately. But in my head of rings
like a bell, a mirror may stands like a folded
cathedral of glass. An invitation to repetition and fracture. The
ancient stores are clouded with fingerprints and the ghost smudges
of palms that have clutched at nothing and found something instead.
Inside the maze, my reflection splinters into faces that mouthed
names I do not recognize. They do not speak aloud. Instead,
their lips move and slow, obscene performance, syllable stretched and
softened until meaning sacs under the weight of intent. Each
mirrored face is a version of meat that kept different choices,
different cruelters, sometimes to eyes in the glass are younger,
sometimes older, sometimes simply different enough that I think I
could call them strangers. The reflexions do not help me
identify what I have lost. They only copy my avoidance
back at me with the fallless cruelty of glass. One
mirror holds condensation like breath pressed height in the wrong season.
I watch my finger right on the damp skin of
the glass, and the letters smear into a suggestion, a nark,
a stroke left and finish, A letter that refuses to commit,
a smear of red paint surface, half a letter like
a memory flade, and half healed. Wherever the paint touches
the glass remembers differently. It makes the mouth in the reflection,
a little more honest, a little more eager to say
what I refuse. The maze forces me into witness. Images
come at me and fragments. A custroom desk scarred with
carved initials, a dim hospital corridor lit with that too
bright florescence, a door jar with a field of light beyond,
small sharp relics of a life I had sealed away,
like specimens beneath glass, I am not alone. Something among
the mirrors moves with the wrong rhythm, human in shape
but stretched thin, slipping between reflections with the ease of
a thought. The laughing clown first appears as a figure
in the periphery, a suggestion of patched suit and tufts
of faded orange hair. At first it is so only
a smear of color and a pane, the suggestion of
a shoulder, then a hand. The name tag on its
chest is perverse in its partial erasure. Lad has grown
down until only an imprint remains, rings of abrision that
suggests something said and then denied. It tilts its head
and thirds in emotion. I did no could be ascendants.
It studters me, as if deciding what part of me
to read aloud. When the clown steps forward, the light
catches one pupil like quinnach, the other a faint luminous
on add in that sliver of mismatched color, my skin
remembers how to flinch. It carries a small brass bell
bound to a cuff. The bell is not musical so
much as an announcement, a statement of possession. With its
first laugh, the maze picks up the sound and multiplies
it shards of lot of ricochet, like glass tapping glass.
The laugh is layered a high tinkling on top of
a low whisper that settles into my brown and the
creature is theatrical imprecise, a predator making a public theater
of private things. It leads me toward a carousel, as
if guiding a child to some sour servasion. Ando sickly
spot light, the horses rotate, and the ride projects tabulcs
of my past. Frozen moments chain into motion like puppets
on a string. One horse carries an image of me
stepping away from a doorway, shoulders hunched to the photograph
of that moment sharpened into accusation. Another horse shows me
handing someone a crumpled envelope. And closing my hand as
if to hide what was inside. Each figure drifts into
view in holds like a memory pressed beneath class. The
image is a backlet and clinical like evidence pin for inspection.
The carousel's engine hums with an ambient drone that vibrates
in my teeth. It is not a tune that invites dancing.
It is a metronome that counts the seconds of what
I will not say. Riders are absent. Spectators are blurred
into the shadows, their faces suggestion only like smuch charcoal sketches,
Sometimes as spectator becomes a reflection for an instant, and
then snapped back to shadow, as if the carnival cannot
hold any face for long. The laughing clown stands at
the carousel's room, bell in hand, and each ring seems
to pull a thread tighter. The ride re arranges the
space around it, aligning the midway and posters and mirrors
to focus on the tablocks. Shim is not described, it
is enacted. I fill the air, tighten around my throat,
as if the carnival itself is leaning and to read
the name I will not say. At the center of
the maze, there is a chamber where mirrors meet at
impossible angles, a cathedral of fracture truth. The space is
hardly larger than a broom calls it, and yet within
it the geometry of gilt expands until it feels like
a world. The gas does not reflect so much as
show choices in three dimensions. I watch myself answering in
the glass, an old name of a voice that is
mine and not mine, and even the distinction is poorous.
The voice in the mirror is a hinge, and the
hinge swings solely. The side of reflection sits, the photograph
unfolded and splayed, as if placed with deliberation, and the
brass key rests and the palm like an offered verdict
in the glass. My hands reach for them before my
body does. There is a lag between what I see
and what I feel, an unbearable pulling top between self
and image. The laughing clown circles the chamber like a
conductor officiating a private ritual. Its belt takes out of
sync with the room's pulse, each ding wobbling the meaning
of time. It moves with puppet logic and an even gait,
limbs slightly toul on, and it tilts its head as
if sivering the exact angle at which exposure will hurt most.
It is intimate and its cruelty. Leaning close enough to
the breath, It smells of cotton, candy, rot, and coins.
Whispers against the glass. While letters might be on its
name tag, its skin seems to hold an impression, a
map of removal that is almost legible if you know
how to read scars. The moment of choosing is not thunderous.
It is a small collapse, intimate and immediate. A photograph
slips from my fingers and flutters down like a small
white bird. Time in the chamber compresses, the key hits
my palm, and the letter cord burnes called on my
skin as if it were a brand. There is a
sense of recognition that is terrible in its clarity. It
is as if some one had turned on the light
inside a clothes box. My reflection mas the lawn buried
name in the sound it makes in the glass, fits
into my mouth like a two large puzzle piece, edges
grinding against enamel. I have the choice to put the
name back, to wear it like a n ill fitting coat,
or to leave it in the cold metal table of
the maze and walk away into the new anonymity the
carnival offers. I reach and for a breath, I am honest.
The hand that touches paper trembles, and there is a
physical age where shame translates into muscle memory. Its exposure
is a physical thing, an oxygen, deep bone on the tongue,
a taste of rust and old coins and disinfectant, the
fair suggestion of something metal to solvient water. The laughing
clown's laughter becomes a low concordance, not cruel so much
as satisfied for a single terrible moment. The mirrors a line,
and the figure in the glasses hold the younger and
older cells, folded into one stern, honest face that knows
the name and does not flinch. It is like seeing
yourself in a photograph and having the photographs speak back.
I stagger out of the chamber, clutching the photograph and key.
The mazic seals behind me like a wounded animal, hinges
in glass, relaxing with a finality that tastes like defeat.
The laughing clown sees into the reflections, bell half hidden,
as if it has no interest in pursuing me. Farther
than it needed. I move through the midway, and the
space seems narrower. The stalls closing in the paths should
so that behind me there is not simply entinus, but
a deliberate rearrangement that closes doors I had hoped would
remain open, where before there were gaps between boost there
and now walls. Whether it been the possibility of a
left turn, there is only a straight line forward. The
knowledge of the name sits in me like a stone.
It is not lighter nor heavier. It is simply present, dense,
indifferent is memory. The carnival watches within different lights, each
bulbous spectator that does not blink. At the ticket booth,
dawn is a thin strip of cye, and that does
not promise one. The booth is cold and smelling faintly
of enamel and stale popcorn. A tall nametag flutters on
a strain, a small stirt of paper that tastes like
both accusation and invitation. I press the photograph against it,
trying to align image and tag, but the seams do
not meet cleanly. The photograph wants to be anchored, the
tag wants to remain torn, and both of them seem
to prefer not to be whole. The carnival feels patient
and inexorable as tide water. It offers no closure, only
the unbearable luxury of a question left open on any air,
like a neon sign that refuses to die. I leave
the Madway in a stagger that is part retreat, parts surrender.
The hog thins but does not go. It becomes a
memory of weather instead of weather itself, and after taste
of atmosphere that linges in the back of the fruit
behind me, The roustad arch swallows teal and red, until
it is only a so wet against a sky that
is too pale for day and too honest for night.
The laughing consolator falls me in smaller echoes, as if
the creature is testing whether the name will slip from
me again, whether I will return it like a garment
shed in haste. The photograph and key remain in my possession,
but the choice they pressed upon me holds like a bruise,
something that will fade but never fully leave the skin.
I do not know if I have reclaimed what I abandoned,
or if I carry it now only as burden. The
name sits in me like an imprint. And there are
night when I hear a belltick out of sink in
my apartment, when a breath smells faintly of cotton, candy,
rot and disinfectant, and when the filled grain of memory
arranges itself into carnival colors. The last image I have
is of the tor named Tag at the booth, fluttering
in a dawn that is too close to cold and
too far from mercy. The carnival promises nothing but the
persistence of the question. It trades in recal, not redemption.
There is a small comfort inning the shape of what
I fled. The key in my pocket is small and ordinary,
and it turns in my hand with a reassuring click,
and the photograph cruises along a fold that maps to
a younger Joline. Sometimes I wake hering a thin, precise
tilt of laughter, and other times I open my palm
and the brass bell is warm, as if by proximity
some one something has wrung at once more. These are
small hauntings, ascent a sound, a tactile proof that the
plays exists in some shadowed axis of me. I am
left with the truth that is indefinite and intimate. The
name exists. The carnival remembers My answer is still night,
not an end. When I close my eyes, the midway
arranges itself around the memory, like a theater, resetting between nettes.
Shame's architecture is not a punishment meted in thunderbutt and
bright cinematic detail, the Teelcian lights, the blood red rim,
the film grain of all photographs, the brass of a
bell that tells you have been noticed. If there is
a mercy here, it is not deliverance but recognition, a terrible,
dark kindness of knowing what I once tried to erase,
and keep in company with it. I step forward when
I must, otherwise the carnival will step for me. I
am left to decide if the name will be a
bridge or a door. I keep shut. Tab flutters in
my memories, if it will always be waiting for my
hand un Still, Sometimes, when the city is quiet and
the light through my blinds is the wrong kind of soft,
a descant beltics out of sink and aloft reads the
edges of sleep. The fog curls at the feet of
my thoughts and will not unlearn me. The laughing clown
does not promise release. I promises only to be that
the next time I wander back into a place that
remembers me better than I do. If there is an
echo to close on, it is this that the question
remains patient and watchful, and that I, like every one
who passes beneath a rusted archway and feels a tug
at the base of their skull, must choose whether to answer.
I worked a fog curling around my feet before I
knew where I was. The ground under the mists felt
like splintered wood and altar, the kind of surface that
remembers rain and neglect. Light stitched through the haze and
teal threads and splushes of blood red, and somewhere beyond
the blur, carousel weas like an old beast e ceiling.
The carnival smelled like cotton candy, gun, sore and disinfectant,
a metallic seam of old coins, and the sweet rot
of sugar. The air saddled on my shoulders like a
damp coat. I did not know how Larna stood there,
listening to the distant half remembered music that zipped and
stuttered in the fog. My hands were in my pockets
for habit, like a child clinging to the lining of
a coat, and when I drew them out, there was
a tiny weight against my palm, a warm braskeya I
did not recall placing there. It was cold and hummed
with the curious warmth of something intended to be used.
I turned it under my thumb until its teeth caught
the rim of my skin. The motion was mechanical and
an attempt to find purchase in a place that refused solidity.
At the midway edgitic at both crutched like a prop dialid.
This glass was cracked in spider wet that refracted the
teal and red into eyes. A tor nametag clung to
the inside of the pane by a single jagged thread.
The latters were half erased, ragged strokes of inkhor The
rest had been scrubbed away, but a sliver of penmanship remained,
a lip, a tail, a slat that told me with
a physical age that I had known this name Inton
at thee. Once the sight moved, something loose inside my chest,
a rusted hinge, opening with a sigh of trapped air.
I pressed my palm to the glass. Though it had
been IROs of days or years since I allowed myself
to touch that shape of memory. The torn tag fluttered
when I breathed for a moment, the carnival kept its
distance like a beast, a line and inspection that would
end in hunger. The our knees was not abstract. It
had texture. It felt like eyes behind a glass watching
me watch the glass. The midber felt longer than it
should have. Game souls leaned against each other like tired men,
their posters culling and eyes faded. Prize for it was
sud in Saorge frames, faces in the photosmile too wide,
teeth too white, captured in motion that did not belong
to me. Until trapped in a corner, I found a
stack of prize photographs that smelt of all bleach and memory.
The flush had caught a younger version of me in
a way that denied me distance. Chicaiina recognized hair falling
over an eyebrower, carried now as a faint scar a
laugh I had tried to burn. Each glossy print seemed
to have been positioned with intent. Eche to ard descenter
of my filled of vision, as if the Midway itself
were gathering pieces of my life and arranging them into
a trail I could not refuse. I moved between stalls
like a purse, and following scar the lights he keeped
overhead cast in the world into staccatto frames in the
crack reflection of a warped mirror. A face that was
mine and not mine, shifted its angle on age with
every blink of neon. The photographs did not lie. They insisted.
There was a name handwritten on the back of a
single print, scrolled and a hurried hand. I could not
read it at first, because my fingers trembled around the paper.
The letters pressed against my memory with the stubborn weight
of a carved word. I folded the print into my
pomun till the edges dug into my flesh, and it
felt like calling a key too a locked room. The
laughing clwan caught me then at the base of the
ferris Wheelhere the crowd thinned and shadows behave like trained animals.
He appeared at the periphery with a knees that made
the hair on my arms pollen lines, a tilt of
his head, the pale crack paint catching a red room light,
and an erase named tac Haying crooked on his chest.
He seemed to catalog me with a detailed interests tilted head,
leaning shoulder, the precise third that his manner is In's favorite.
When he moved, he did so with a slow, puppet
like gait of someone who was held on strings. Each
step measured to make the heart ticcup. There was something
predatory in the attention he paid. It was as into
matters some one peering at a photograph of your underclothes
in a drawer. I felt naked in a way that
went beyond skin. The exposure was to the angles of
my life I had cleaned and wrapped and labeled as
not mine. Being observed by the clown was not merely
a threat. It was a deliberate, possessive cataloging of what
I had tried to forget. The midwin narrowed into pathways
that carried me exactly where I did not want to go.
The Carnival's nights are not governed by clocks, but by
a perverse logic of revelation. A mirror miss stood off
the main path, like a math waiting to shew me teeth.
Its entrance was a seam of cobalt and teel. Mirrors
angle to fort corridors of reflection in side lights scattered
into showers, and my steps multiplied into dozens of versions
of my body. Each won a different age and resolution,
some smooth and taut with youth, others hollowed and small
with time. It was in a mirrored pain half a
step down that my face changed. The glass caught me
like a trap and refract to me into myself and
the person whose name I had stolen from the world.
One flicker, one tilt of reflection, and the face that
came back at me answered a question I had been
refusing to ask. Recognition did not land as a voice,
It hit like bone, dry, inevitable. The reflection's eyes were
the same hazel with the mute of green rim, only
there was a light inside them that I could spend
years smothering. The mirror of that look forced memory into
a clarity that cut. A memory does not always rive whole.
Sometimes it comes as a smell, accadance, the exact angle
of a pair of hands. The mirror did not offer piecemeal.
It offered a revelation that rewired the presence. I saw
myself pulling the name away, and act committed with both
tenderness and terror, as though the name were a child
and a blade. My palms remembered the shape of letters
I had to raise from documents, from photographs, from my
very mouth. The mirror was proof, and proof is a
kind of execution in a carnival of secrets. When I
left the maze, I walked toward the carousel, as if
guided by a subtle line in the air. The laughing clowns,
laughter breath that lay it a high tinkling over a
low whisper, fritted itself through the fog and into my bones.
It did not mock or cook so much as insist. Come.
With each drag of my fit, the brass key warned
against my sternum, as if acknowledging a purpose. The path
to the carousel couptwen strings of torn pennantce and a
tent that smelled of dust and onion skin programs. The
fog thicken, and the midway's gaze condemnsed lugger lenes. The
carousel was rusted, each horse of sculpture of joy that
had been weathered into something more honest, chip smiles, flaking
paint eyes dulled by repeated staring, A single spotlight thin
as a hell breath found the central platform and stained
it red. The rest of the world fell into a
shape of tea shadow. The laughing clowns stood on the
platform by the painted horse, with a grin carve too
deep into the skin of his face. In his hands,
he held a folded photograph as though it were a relic.
He produced it like a priest revealing a consecrated object.
He smoothed the photograph flat with the attention of some
one laying out accusation, slow, ceremonial, precise. The paper unfolded,
and the name was there in a hand on either
way parts nor the lines of a map. It was
written in ink that had been hurriedly affixed and then
tamped down by the weight of years. The name made
the world shudder. The carnivals breathing slowed, and then began
to exhale an audience of shadows. This was the point
where a choice should have been simple, say the name
and claim what it had been, or keep the silence
and let the name remain a lock thing no one
could drag into daylight. The photograph on the carousel was
more than image. It was a catalyst. The laughing clowns
boll chimed like the click of a judgess gavel. My
chest tightened into a fist. In that pressing interval, the
spectator shadowed figures, and the stance leaned forward in a
movement that felt too patient for comfort. They were cheers
without faces. Their attention of pressure that broke into my skin.
The photograph was the kind of thing that unspooled consequences.
His paper edges seemed to hold accusation like Bob's. My
past had been collected up in cramped town writing and
returned to me at the height of exposure. Memory flooded
in like sewage through a cracked pipe. Names addresses the
terrible smallness of the moments where I had hidden a
person's existence from the world, like a smudged fingerprint. I
remembered the exact way I had told myself that erasing
a name was kindness. I remembered the night I cut
the tap from a coat and shoved it into a
drawer and convinced myself the act would keep harm at bay.
The carousel's spin had always been an image of childhood,
but here its rotation felt like a conveyor of judgment.
The clown watched for the split second before the world decided.
He toy with the pocket watch on his wrists, Taking
purposefully out of sync with my heart beat, he tilted
his head, each gear of the motion, deliberate. The photograph
in his palms showed a smaller version of my face,
and beneath it the name that had been severed for
me and soon into a new life. Seeing the latter
as made my mouth go dry. There were no words,
only the ghost of how the syllables used to fit
my jaw around. As the carnival responded to the reveal,
the carousel's platform groaned, the horses blinked under paint that
flake like scap The stands filled with former spectators leaned closer,
folding space into the smallness of the platform. Their presence
was suffocating because it turned my passed into public exhibit.
A clarity of the photograph was punishment enough. It invited
every memory to assemble into an indictment. Betrayal shimmered at
the edges of recollection. Faces I had abandoned, promises I
had dissolved by omission. The pain was not only that
I had stolen a name, but that in doing so
I had severed something real. After the photographs revealed. The
world slid into an aftershock, as if a bell had
been struck in an empty room. The carousel tapped into
an uneven spin, and the shadows in the stands became
more than passive watchers. They leaned in like patient jurors.
I felt the past as a physical weight pressing against
my lungs. There was nothing theatrical left in this exposure.
There was only the roar ad dress chronology of choruses
and their brittle consequences. The laughing Clan let the tour
name tag florid away into the fog like a confessional slip.
It drifted and sned against pennance and barbed flakes before
dissolving into the till haze. He watched the tadgir as
a person, watch as a bare lever cage, with an
expression that was neither pleased nor disappointed, but precise. He
handed me nothing but the photograph and a small understanding
that I had to decide. A brass key in my
pocket felt suddenly hot, as if the metal recognized a
locket had been made to turn in my palm. The
folder ticket the clan had given me crumpled into a
map of choices. If I spoke the name, it would
be reclaiming and the confession simultaneously, something like stepping into
a doorway with both hands open. If I remained silent,
I would be choosing a smaller life, one with the
name stayed buried and the wound closed over in a
scar that only I would carry. The carnival had done
its work by clarifying that there was no neutral ground.
A mission had wait. I left the platform with the
sound of the crowd in my ears. Their attention followed
me like a droughtnet. For a long while. The midw
felt like a corridor of mirrors, each reflection turning my
decision over in tiny increments. The photographs I had collectedly
folded in my pocket like a slow burning fuse. The
laughing clown watched me from somewhere behind a strain of lights,
his lofty trailing like a rub I could feel at
the back of my neck. When the clon let the
torn tag slip away into the early predontal haze, the
choice narrowed into a sequence of small, intimate moments. The
torn ticket I kept in my palm was warm from
the friction of my fingers. I walked until the midway
end and an end to be stood with a single
torn name tag caught on the edge of its counter.
The tag fluttered like a muff. I stood above it
and understood that the carnival had sharpened the stakes so
that there could be no doubling back. The name would
not stay buried. That certainty had the steadiness of a tide.
The tent flaps at the perimeter of the fair ground
opened and closed with the breath of wind. Somewhere a
distorted collio played out of tune, and the sound knife
threw the fog like a ballard sun just behind the teeth.
I felt as if the world had been re arranged
to display me as an exhibit of failure and tenderness.
Shame was now not an internal weather pattern, but a
thing with teeth and memory. The sensation of exposure was
a pressure that demanded an action in return. To speak,
to claim, to own. To refuse would be to accept
the Carnival's verdict de verser. I folded my fingers around
the posograph and the ticket, feeling them as objects that
had been designed to impose direction. There were small material
things with decisive functions. A key, a ticket a photograph.
I had arrived at the carousel with a plan to escape. Instead,
I found out I had been delivered into a court
room without laws. In you. The laughing clown had given
me an alt of memory, and then stepped back to
watch how I worshiped. The chapter closed not on a
spoken word, but on a narrow choice. The taun tag
blew past my face or whisper against my cheek like
a name I could not bring myself to say. The
carnival receded into tel fog and red room light, but
the pressure it left behind remained. The name would not
stay bared. That knowledge settled over me like a cloak, heavy, inevitable,
waiting for me to decide whether I would lift it
and wear it or let it smoder me. The midway's
lights guttered, and the laughter threaded away into distance, and
I walked on with the photograph folded against my chest
as if it were a beating thing. The decision had
been sharpened. The next confrontation glowed somewhere ahead like a
distant bulb. The night did not promise absolution, It promised drackening.
The fog kept its tendencies to fall to hide, never
to forget. I walked until the edges of the carnival
bl into a prodontill haze, and the world no longer
felt like it belonged to the day. The brass key
in my pocket warned again, as if impatient. Somewhere beyond
the carousel, the clown's laughter dissolved into whispers and then
into silence. The name would not stay buried, and the
choice speak and reclaim or remain and be erased. Hung
with the gravity of a coin balanced on a rim.
The maize claims a sound for itself, long before I
understand what it wants. I step in under a marquis
that remembers the weight of old light, and the glass
a round me learns the rhythm of my breath. Fog
coils at my ankles like a slow animal, pressing cool
and damp against the cuss of my coat. Every pin
holds some version of my face, as a taxi or
miss would hold a specimens kewed, re arranged, cataloged with
the patient cruelty of some one who has time to fuss.
The strongest took things early. A pressure in the ribs
that sets my shoulders tight and keeps my hands inside
their pockets. In first reflected step, there is a torn
badge pinned to a collar that is not mine, a
scrap of fabric with rugged letters that took like a
loose tooth at the seam of a memory which one
of these faces remembers the name I left behind. That
question sits between my ribs and will not let let
me go. The entrance narrows like a throat. Timbered plyoid
splintered from other lives forms the arch. The wood smells
faintly of varnish and old rain. Mirrors festu in the walls,
their frames wearing peeling varnish like old bark, each glass
bearing the pimples and streaks of age I have always
kept as since from my own reflection. There is something
in faces that mix demands, that measures leniency and holds
a ledger. Now the mirrors multiplied the accounting. A flash
of teal catches at the edge of each pain and
war rim light that slices sheetbone and jaw into hard shadow,
red accent, slip stain, or dried pain bleed into corners
and make the glass look as if a wound were
reflected back at me. The lighting is cinematic cinematic and cruel,
A key light that seems to come from nowhere and
everywhere at once, A thin back light that draws hallows
on falk, and fills that plunge the well beyond the
midline into ambiguity. I keep my hands in my pockets
because movement out of habit feels safer than the stillness
of being seen. The floor boards creak with a metallic echo,
somewhere a Baltics and evenly stainless and wrong, and I
expect the laughing clown to answer with that familiarity. At first,
the mirrors reveal thefts of posture. One shows me younger shoulders, loser,
and arrogant in a way my current body did not dare.
Another show is a ham I had slipping a photograph
into a pocket I do not currently occupy a scarce
Daggers across a cheek in one reflection wereb on my
actual face. It runs along the left eyebrow like a
faint ledger, a thin white line that some days feels
like a scene between versions of me. Small difference is
a cruel like interest, until the collection of faces adds
up to accusation. I reach into my pocket as if
to prove absence, nothing but land in the folded photograph.
I always refuse to open the fracture of reflections. Do
not speak. That would be too literal. Instead, the eyes, ever,
their mouths, tighten, their shoulders angle into gestures that red
as reproach. They do what carnival mirrors do at midnight.
They show not what is, but what could be arranged
to look like truth. My distance from myself has always
been a practice. Names have been easy to let go of,
easier than the tying off of memory. I have walked
away from signifiers the way someone shares a coat on
a hot day, Convinced the fabric could be abandoned on
the back of a chair and never missed. The coat
of a name can be left hanging. I believe I
could close the door and step out lighter. But this
place keeps records the wayfungi keeps boors. Patients spread under
the surface, waiting the mirrors gather the flotsam of choices
and press it back into the shape of a person
who has been trying over years to be less him
and more blank. A greater cruelty waits farther in, in
a shadowed alcohol between a fake peeler and a pain
mottled with age. One reflection is not mine. At first,
I think it a trick of fallible light, a painted
smile too wide, cheek, buns exaggerated under pancake white. The
laughing clown tilts its head in thirds. The movement poppet
true and slow, as if some invisible puppeteers taking crooked
pleasure and calibrating it. Its paint is cracked and hungry,
crimson escored into skin, as if the grin were permanent
and unwilling. One pupil is a dull black hole. The
other glows sam with a light that seems smuggled up
from beneath the carnival. That face watches me. It stutters
me with a gaze that is not reflective, but a
value to it, as if the glass were a doorway
the clown had practiced peering through for years. I find
my eyes drawn to it, the way moths to low
constant hum. Every time I meet my own eyes in
another pain, the clown smile. It is nearer closer to
my right than to my left, always hovering in my
peripheral vision, like the promise of a touch. It feels
carefully intimate the way shame often is not violent a first,
but small and close, a breath over a wrist. The
presence in the glass is predatory in a curated way.
It does not need to reach across the glass to
settle me. The suggestion is enough. I walk the corridors
in a direction that feels less like choice and more
like following a thin magnetic pull embedded somewhere under the
soles of my shoes. Mirrors fold the space into themselves.
Reflection becomes architecture. Here, angles that logically should dissolve instead
semble into rooms I did not enter, and faces that
ought to shout a hold together. Like stubborn testimony. The
halways throwed back on themselves. A term reveals another passage,
as where I did not take my hands, want to
touch the glass to gather whatever memory clings there. When
my fingers meet the surface, there is a slick, cold
give of condensation. The glass, breathing like a living skin.
Breath fogs a tiny square between my thumb and index finger.
A single word blurs into being. It is a fragment,
a shard of a name's called in the fog with
a finger tip, the way a child traces letters on
a steam window. I do not say it aloud. The
word has weighed enough, warming the roof of my mouth,
like something you taste before you can name it. Confrontation
shifts the room. The part of meat that has lived
in careful denial take stock and finds itself poor. The
mirrors begin to accuse with gestures instead of speech. A
reflection runs its hand through hair. I no longer keep
that way. Another folds a hand around something. I used
to carry, a worn brass key. It edges smooth by
repeated fingers, and the tiny scratches that tell of years
in the paint to glow is faintly warm. I remember
burying that key in the pocket of a coat. I
stopped weir in the winter. I decided to share my name.
I had convinced myself names could be left like coats
on a chair, and that you could simply walk away.
I had told myself. Leaving a thing behind made it
less true. The glass is unfaithful to that allergy. It
keeps the record with a cruel forencipatience that insist memory.
It is not a thing you can hang up and ignore.
It gets worse at the heart of the maze, reflections
become an audience. The mirrors multiply into windows where bodies
do not exist, only gazes that pin me like butterflies
fixed to the backing of a collector's board. They do
not blink, they only look. The air feels denser here,
heavy with the residue of other people's confessions. The laughing
clown steps through one of those panes, as if a
scene between wells were an unlocked door. It carries a
rust stained named tac chained like a relic. Whoever fashion
this tag has garbed away the letters until only rugged
impressions remain, but the shape itself as a summons. The
clown offers it with a slow, ritualized motion. The brass watch,
at it risk, takes out of sync with the rest
of the carnival. The vell onet scuff gives a small
metallic cancer that seems to translate accusation into sound. Time
slows as the central chamber falls inward. Mirrors angle like
cathedral windows. The roof seems distant and made of black glass,
absorbs a light rut out and reflecting it. A thin
course of distorted carnival music threads through the air in
a record scatch version of celebration, whispers undulatal on the
edges of the pane's forces, without tongues. The kind of
sund that reads is memory rather than information. Each whisper
is a finger tapping morse on a glass that refuses
to remain silent. The clowns told is more than indulgent.
Now it is a soul pulling a splinter of luminance
from the haze. It does not have to speak my
name aloud. The name uncoils and warms on the inside
of my mouth like a tongue I did not know
I still possessed. For a suspended moment, a chos to
say it or to choke it back, becomes physical, a
decision between letting a wound breathe or pressing my ponder
it until the pulse dolls. The mirror peels open like celluloid,
the surface separating from its frame in a slow flay
doc that smells faintly of ald, adhesive and iron. Where
my face should be the laughing cland stands instead, close
enough that I can count the rust in the corners
of its mirrored teeth, and sea tiny tickets wound about
its wrists like rosary beads. It holds the tour name
tagged by a coroner, an offering or a threat. The
gesture is the same either way. The torn ladders goest
in the space half formed, the negative of the name.
The sensation of the name brushing the roof of my
mouth is a physical pressure. Now, a thing that might
be spat out or swallowed. My all moves on its own,
a reflexive mechanism older than shame. And the key at
my foregrows sudden warmth against the cord I have kept
hidden beneath my coat. Whether I let the syllables pass
my lips or clamp them between teeth, the axis of
the night tilts. If there is a decision to be made,
it does not come with melodrama. There is instead a granular,
intimate recognition, the fact that the name exists as an
not in the throat, that the key will not call
until some bone of honesty is rearranged. The carnival is
a court room. The mirrors are jures, and the clana
prosecutor who delights in theatrical timing. I feel the blood
in my ears, the little rush, as if the small
room of the heart is being examined under a lamp,
and the choice becomes the simplest kind of physics. A
name said aloud demands consequences. A name swallow is a
sea planted in darkness. Either route is a true thing
with unspoiling consequences. I think, for a long, thin minute
of all the practicalities that will fall on, the petty
complicities of people who had loved me by an old name,
the awkward reintroductions, the emails left unread because they belong
to some one else. I imagine the small kindnesses that
might evaporate the caause. Language is the scaffolding of intimacy.
The thought is humiliating and banal and real, and then
alongside it comes memory is a tactile map. I remember
closing my fingers around ahead of that Brasky in a
colder year. Finger is pale and trembling, the metal warmers
protest against a fist that could not keep still. I
remember pressing it into a pocket and then shoving the
pocket into the dark of a tote bag that smelt
of vinegar and red wool. I remember telling myself stories
about walking away, about how leaving a name like a
coup would make mornings easier, how waking without an old
syllable would feel like conchattling. I had believed the narrative
of newness because it promised the illusion of control. The
laugh at the edges of the music changes tone. It
is not a triumphal help, but annoy exhale, like the
sound a person makes when they watched someone else do
a small, inevitable thing. The clown dangles the tech, and
in the turning glint of the rusted brass, I see
not just letters burnt away, but the outline of choices
and the indentations where other people's finger prints had once pressed.
The tag seems to weigh up by answers, but by
moments the torn letters look like wounds that refuse to scab.
There is no one to ask for permission. The decision
belongs to me, in the place that keeps reckers of
what I thought I had left behind. For a breath,
I consider the other option. Refusal is defiance. Even refusal,
the maze tells me, is a kind of consent, a
way of acknowledging the thing offered while still holding distance.
If I do not take the tag, the clown's hand
will still have been extended. The mirror has already recorded
the motion. Even in denial, I would be participating. The
thought of complicity makes something in my chest tighten. I
move without the atrix. My hand goes out as if
following an old motor memory, and my palmcos is a
round at tag. The brass is colder than I expected,
its gaged letter sending a sting up through the skin.
Holding it feels like touching a bruise. The code around
my neck. The thin string that holds the brass key
on which I have kept headen for years, warms beneath
my shirt, the metal responding to the small action with
literal heat under skin. The warm slides up like a
map to memory, and my thumb finds in my pocket
the photograph I have not opened. I feel the familiar
crease under the face of someone I once knew in
a different life, folded like something pressed between pages to
keep from curling. The carnival's gaze shifts. It's oftens in
a way that is ambiguous but not unkind, like the
look you get from a house whose owner has come
and to watch you and pack, and has found something
interesting on your table. The mirrors do not close like doors.
They sacrifice nothing they've only offered direction. The clown steps
back to the pane as if being sut back into
another world, its mile creasing with the satisfaction of the
job done. The bell on its cuff gives a small
metallic trip that translates accusation into a note of curiosity.
In that sound, there is no judgment so much as
an inventory being ticked off. The central chamber tilts under
the weight of what has been acknowledged, and in the
tilt something settles. Whether I have spoken the name aloud
or only allowed myself to feel it. The carnival registers
the fact it does not release me so much as
fold me and its catalog. At the exit of the maze,
a slid of red light splits teal fog and opens
to a narrow stair. While descending under the rides, a
laughing clown watches my shoulder from a reflection on a
pain by the door. Its bell is chained to its
cuffin gives a small tentative jingle, like a question asked
quietly to itself. The torrent TACs slipped into my palm,
as if gravity it's alf for a conspirator. I do
not remember reaching for it. The ladders are gaged and raw,
and when I press them between forefinger and thumb, the
memory of a name sits like a seed against the
soft tissue of my palm. Touching it feels like touching
a bruise, and like touching the bruise of a bad
decision with the flat of a finger nail. The stairwell
mouth breeds downwards with colder air. The carnival demands one
more answer. That elliptical demand hangs in the prodonne, like
the last burro of a son that insists on repeating itself.
I stand at the lip of the stairs and feel
the world compressed the size of a thought. The rides
beyond the maize are distant, silwits, various wheels turning like slowmoons,
a rusted carousel that spins with a patient beyond reason.
Light poles and teal and blood roud and our taste
of metal and old cotton candy ascent that always made
me think of a child to stall with too many secrets.
The smell is equal parts nostalgia and rot. In a distance,
a child lasts, and the sound disintegrates before it reaches
my ears, as if the carnival keeps even joy at
a practice distance. The brass keyworms then calls, as if
reacting to how honest I have been with myself, or
perhaps reacting to the fact it has been moved and acknowledged.
The tone tag lies heavy in my hand, the negative
of my own name biting like a promise. I could leave.
I could walk back into the fog and pretend the
mirrors were broken, that the clown was only painted in
false teeth, that I had never felt the key grow
hot against skin. I could tuck the photograph back into
the dark and let the crease be what it is,
a mark of a life folded and put away. That
the knowledge of the name has altered something fundamental. Even
leaving will not return me to the same person who
arrived with an absence to protect. I carry the tag
like a scar before the wound, a presses through fabric
and imprint that cannot quite be faked away. There is
a peculiar mercy in not resolving the ledger. The carnival
off was no absolution, only inventory. Whether the name is spoken,
allowed into the cavern of the right, or kept secret
and redoubled. The act of acknowledgment as something it creates
a hinge where there had been only a scene. Walking
away is no longer simply a physical act. It will.
I found the ticket after my hands had grown cold
from the glass. The booth smelt like a old glue
and raincort in a burl up scene. And when I
brushed away the thin film of dust, a smear of ink,
and a torn edge stared back at me like a
small accusation. It lay where Cloak's finger tips might have
rested once under the ground of an absent handed life.
The letters were smudged, half eaten by time, when the
humidity of the carnival's breath, but the shape of them
tugged at the muscles around my throat the way and
name can when it remembers you, even if you have
not remembered it. In return, fog coiled thicker than it
had before, pulling at the base of the booth like
an unwilling audience. The lights beyond the glass hey keeped
heel and static, then red, then the thin say on
of some internal filament, shivering as if with laughter. There
is no one at the counter. The small bell that
used to announce tickets sold and promises made hung mute,
And yet the impression of a hand had been pressed
where my fingers faltered. I did not want to know
why a name I had bird had been slid beneath
the class at proof proof the carnival seemed to say
that a pass keeps receipts. I turned the slip between
my fingers. Taper is a strange kind of memory. It
holds impression the way face holds expression. The ink bob
like a heartbeat. I could not read. I could not
bring myself to strip the letters clean. Doing so felt
like prying at a scap that would be more truth
than I could bear. Instead, I let the ticker curl
against my pum, while the midway opened like a mouth
ahead as teeth ferris, wheel spokes and carousel poles, its breath,
the sore caught and candy rot, and the metallic tang
of coins. I stayed where I was rooted to a
single precedent of shame. My shoulders kept tight, my breath
a shallow drum beneath the collar of my thrifty coat.
The laughing clan waited at the edge of the lights,
not a figure so much as a distortion in the air,
the suggestion of orange hair and cracked white paint, a
laugh that braided itself into the falk. It did not
move forward at first. It existed at the peripheral, like
some skin. I had not yet pulled away when it
tilted its head in that precise third. Though small theatrical
angles it used like punctuation. My roupcage cinched. Its eyes
did not match. One sank black as an absent people.
The other glowed of faincy on like a board star
that a morgaz held. Catalogs jokes I had once laughed at,
dates I had never paid faces I had turned from.
The clown's presence was not an interruption. It was an
explanation that arrived late, a compulsion that had nothing to
do with footsteps dug me along the midway. I told
myself the world could be indifferent to me, and yet
my feet abyed some ordinance older than my reasons. Each
doll I passed was a portrait of a memory. Prizes
hung like missing teeth, their ribbons desaturated, a ringed horse
where the rings had fallen into varnished lips of regret.
I distorted tuned blood from a collube, a melody that
had been rued and by rain and rust. I kept
my head down. My fingers traced the seam of my
leather jacket, feeling the torn collar as if it were map.
I was insisting on anonymity. The crowd, these shadow spectators,
were insisting on my unmasking. I slipped into the fun
house corridor because the midway funnel d inevitable. Behind the
warped glass, reflections greeted me as if I were a
new arrival, masquer roading beneath an old name. Mirrors are
patient converts of truth. They will take any image and
return it back at you. Multiplied and altered. My face
came apart into dozens of fragments, some gone, some yonder,
one with an easiage, all that remembered other smiles in
the angled glass. One sharred fog was someone else's breath,
and a hand had traced letters into the condensation. The
white stroke spelled a half foreigned syllable, and then faltered
into a smear. I watched as the steam and coiled
from the mirror and left the coast of an inscription.
A memory hung like laundry to dry, and an available
for retrieval. The laughing clam was never exactly at my shoulder.
It erated between reflections and appear in frames where physics
should have objected. It perched at the junction of a
maze were pass folded into themselves, and offered me no
riddle that I could solve with logic. It offered and
stead the old motions of exposure, the small theatrical gesture
as a stage for the mixed before the curtain drops.
Its fingers were long and paint flaked. It moved like
a puppet whose puppeteered the patience of a guillotine. Each
crack in its make up read like a geography of
harm lest stains of the teeth, a permanent scort smell
that did not belong to skin. When it drew near
the sound of its laughter cut around me, high and tinking,
with a low underturne that vibrated against the ribs of
my world. I saw the name for the first time,
where dozens of my faces stared back. It was not
pronounced aloud, There were no voices calling. Instead, the idea
of the name made the mirrors till the angles, catching
a syllable I recognized and tried to set aside. The
name was not an accusation. It was an old instrument
that had played me into shape. I had sculpted myself
away from its new clothes, different streets, the slow, civicy
risure of smallacs that formed bad reputations. And yet the
letters existed like a scar somewhere in the mirror. Taller
hand had written and raised the words so many times
the glass had thinned. There was a small center in
the maze of room, where every mirror was angle to
focus inwards, to magnify fault lines until they became entire landscapes.
The laughing clans stood there with a small name tack
cut between two small fingers. It was a sort of
tact that once announced performers and employees alike. A rectangle
of laminated card bore edges softened by touch. The clown's
finger nails craped the surface, and were letters had been
gorged away, A pale impression remained, like the memory of
a wound. It presented the blankness as if offering a
map without a destination. It was an erasure that looked
like a memory that refused to heal. Outside the mirrors,
the night somehow grew heavier, as if the stall lights
inhaled and held their glow the laughing clan leaned forward ward,
stillness concentrated into a tiny theatrical movement. Its other hand
produced a pocket watch that tacked in a rhythm not
quite the same as the world's time. The sound was
small and intimate. I'm this match of heartbeats and clockwork.
The carnival, insisting that the past was punctual and inescapable
under that watch under itself killed her metronome. The impression
of the erased letters seemed to throw I realized then
that avoidance had been an economy. Every refusal to name
had been currency paid. Every suppress memory at all the
tax blankness pressed at me, and the pressure was neither
physical nor kind. I did not understand how my feet
obeyed the small compulsion. I only knew they did. The
midway pockets to allow passage, and the rustic carousel awaited,
like a stage that had missed its cue and cat
spinning anyway. The platform was softened by falk, and a
single spot like cut a harsh circle into the gloom.
Shadow spectators leaned in the dark, heads tilting with the
painstaking attention of an audience that reads private letters allowed
in libraries. The horses on the carousel were gogged, their
paint chipped, and mouths forever open windows for the hollow
of my life. The clown guided me to the from
us one might lead a thief to the gallows, arms
that were both coaxing and corrosive. The air on the
carousel was an aggregate sensation, the metallic taste of fear,
the cobwoard, perfume of cotton, candy wrot, the thinness of
breath from too many lungs hell at once. Spotlights made
halos that sharpen the features of the crowd in smudges.
Their faces anonymous, but their gaze, precise eyes can label
you even when a name is not spoken. The index
identity through conterra imposture, the weight of those eyes became
literal and invisible. Hand pressing my sternum into the grain
of the wooden platform at the center of the light,
the clans stopped and turned the name to Haag, so
that the blankness faced me like a mirror of absence.
It was not a shut, not a taut hynotoplea. The
choice was arranged neatly like prope stage for the final act,
call the name. The carnival offered through its orchestration, and
you will become the owner of what he wants. Were
refuse and your anonymity will be kept, but it will
be a cage. The pressure of the clan applied was
not physical. There were no ropes or knives, but the
existential kind that demands a decision about the shape of
the self. Standing there under a single harsh light, with
the crowd's gaze making exposure literal, the name ceased to
be an external label and became an access upon which
all the rests won. My hands were in my pockets.
My jacket's torn collar made a small sound as I shifted.
I felt the worn brass keyedo, where I had hidden
for reasons that had seemed sensible to pursuve distance, to
keep doors unopened. The key is a small thing with
ethical health. To have a key is to hold permission
and secrecy. Simultaneously, I thought of all the ways I
had lived around that seemed things kept locked, names avoided identities,
soon into the lining of daily life, like counterband. To
speak the name would be to unlock something I had
not intended to release. To keep my mouth closed would
be to maintain a quiet safety. That was also a
mission of responsibility. The two options pulled the same way
on my chest. The carnival held its breath with me.
The clown extended a hand and from its cover produced
a key brass poked the shape a twin to my own,
their teeth different as though they matched separate locks of
the same mind. It placed the key in the platform
with the slow precision of Adela's sliding cards. The gesture
reframed the choice memory as currency. Name is legal tend
The key and its patterner caught the light and threw
back something like an answer. It suggested that either the name,
once spoken, would unlock an old door and I would
step through, or if I refuse, the price of remaining
anonymous would be paid in a thicker bond that a
carnival would collect in time. The decision did not arrive
like a thunderclap. It came in small inclinations and wood rolls,
in the tug of muscle memory, and in a flash
of a younger face in a mirror, the one that
still knew the simple version of me. For a long
heart beat, nothing happened for the tick of the clown's
watch in the soft extail of spectators. Time here did
not flow it condensed. My hand went to my pocket
and felt the old brass of my own key. They
were small, ordinary things, and yet they bore the weight
of some moral account I had avoided balancing. I thought
of the photograph folded in my coat at such a
soft with handling. I thought of the scarb of my
brow on the way I had trained my eyes to stay.
I read it. The name existed like a seam in cloth.
One pull and the fabric would reconfigure. When at last
the motion I made came. It was not a pronouncement
so much as an acceptance of gravity. I did not
call the name into the belt clear air of performance.
I llwed the shape of it to breathe inside may
and take its place. The carnival did not errupt. The
clown's laugh was a wet little sound that creased the
fog and slid away. The crowd did not cheer. Their
heads tilted as if to catch a sound that had
not been meant for them, and then turned away with
the deferential cruelty of witnesses who respect their own distance.
The erased tag remained blank into clown's hand, but the
impression in its surface now seemed less like a refusal,
and more like evidence of a knack performed in private.
The clown set its own key upon the platform, as
if offering change. We exchanged tokens without words, the small
brass of my pocket against the pock twin on the stage.
It was a trade that did not simplify the ledger
as much as alter its entries. The key was a
retrieval and a relinquishment. I slaid my hand back into
my jacket and brushed the fold of photograph, as if
to reassure myself that it was real. The weight of
thus more recting gland could me more firmly than any
anonymity had. When I stepped off the carousel, the fog
had turned to a dawn of cyan, and then made
the medway stretched away with less menace, but the gaze
of the crowd remained like a residue in the air.
I walked toward a ticket outch that promised to anake,
but the arch was only a suggestion. It opened onto
more fog, and another set of lights, and another booth
with its own and sweat glass. The laughing clown drifted
back to the shadows, its laughter a thread that braided
into the mechanism of the carnival. It had not struck
me free or lock me in. It had only altered
where the boundaries held. I had answered a question that
had been more mine than any one else's, and found
the answers a rarely liberation so much as clarifications. The
rass key band cold in my pocket, as if that
metal remembered other bodies that had held it. The photograph
in my hand was softer at its creases. I thought
of the life that the abandoned name might reopen, Faces
that would tell to old recognition, streets that had felt unfamiliar,
the small awkwardness of letters addressed to a person I
used to be. I imagined reclaiming certain things and losing others.
Identity is a ledger that requires both confession and accountability.
The name I had said was both cause and cure.
I had not been granted absolution. The clown watched me
go as a dealer watches a pitcher and leave the table.
Its smile was still scored into skin. I walked away
from the platform and felt the carnival fold itself around me,
the way a town folds around its river. The key
was a weight and a promise. The tags godged absence
remained like a map of old harm. The laughing clowns
larder traced me like a line in the margin of
a page, a notation that the story was not finished,
only paused between chapters. When I crossed the threshold of
the midway instept into light a fog, the shape of
what I had done took its place in me, neither
penance nor celebration, but a movement toward a different account.
The crowd's gaze did not stop following entirely. It suggested
that the reckoning would return in drifts and small demands.
The ticket in my pocket had no ink left to
give me, but a new set of impressions lived in
a crease of my palm. I had been given currency
and change. I had traded anonymity for the brute fact
of my own name. The carnival did not leave me
with clarity, so much as a quiet ache acknowledged that
the decision had been recorded somewhere in its architecture, filed
away between the rust and the colliered broken note. The
laughing clown's parting laugh was not cruelty so much as
a condition that guild wants recognition like a wound wants cleaning,
and that recognition, once offered, will alter the way the
world looks back at you. I moved towards the fogged
exit and did not look back. My shoulders, once held
tight like a bar across a collarbone of secrecy, had
a new weight to support. The key lay warm in
my pocket, as if it had found as ecosystem. The
photograph brushed only once against my palm before I slid
it back and let the dawn. Then the carnival shrank
behind me into its teel and red puzzle pieces. The
laughter lingered not as triumph, but as a reminder that
in the architecture of the mine, some rooms never stop
asking to be ended. I walked, and the sound of
the midway folded into the soft static of a day
that had not yet decided what to make of me.
Down so I had given, would settle like dust, not
wiped away by the choice, but rearranged outside. The air
was colder and carried the distance out of ordinary streets,
wet asphalt and engines. The world that had once been
enough for anonymity demanded different things, now names on forms,
eyes that would know me into perhaps expect explanation. I
had stepped into the place where shame could be named,
and that naming had shifted the gravity of my life.
Whether it would free me or buying me more tightly,
I could not say. The carnival had not promised liberation.
It had only demanded honesty and given me back one
of its keys. The laughter that followed was patient, and
patient with the economy of human reckoning. I kept the
brass key close and walked home toward daylight that was
then and honest, the collar of cold cyan and a
smear of red in the horizon, like an old bruce
Lawly waking to memory, I found the ticket booth before
I remembered how I had arrived. The shuttered glass wore
the same film of cold dud con to everything here,
and a torn nanet had clung to a nail at
the window, like a small obscene flag. Only a strip
of fabric remained ragged at one end. The remnants of
letters bent into a shape I had thought flattened and buried.
The edge of the tag braided the air, trembling in
a wind that tasted faintly of cotton candy gun sore.
My feet were called through my shoes. The fog wrapped
itself to my cows and thickened the sound of the
midway into a muffled, distant pulse. For a long moment,
as simply watched the tag, the shape it left at
the center of my vision was not a word so
much as a blank with teeth in it, a place
where something had been ripped. Free, chest tightened that wade
always had when something private was named in public. A
part of me recoiled from answering the question that taught
torn strip asked. Another part of me, older and more certain,
felt the ache of recognition, like a scar being traced.
I kept my hands in my pockets, fingers closed around
a warm brass key that sat like a small, terrible
promise against the palm. That key had always been there,
and I had hidden it like a secret until it
had become a second, unfamiliar weight. The carnival hum with
the skeleton of life, distant gears and metallic creek that
could have been a gate o'er the throat of a ride.
Lights blinked, teal and blood read each dutter at heartbeat
in a chest that was not mine. A scratch of
distorted music rolled the fog in loops, familiar and wrong,
as if the melody had been sad upon and left
gasping behind me. The midway stretched into a haze of
indistinct forms. Booth gone to sleep, PRA's head slumped and
dusted in blue, A ferrous wheel that turned like an
eye unwilling to close. The laughing clan was nowhere and
everywhere in impression. First, then a thrum of breath at
my shoulder. I moved, because movement dissolves the world into
comprehensible pieces. The smear of condensation that led from the
ticket booth was a thumb sized arc on a mirrored
chiosk glass. It beckoned like a bruised, dull, precise intimate.
I followed, and a great and under foot change from
plant wood to lined, wobbling tile. The may smile swallowed
the light and replaced it with splint of reflections. Mirrors
bent me into multiples, thin squad elongated. Each reflection held
the same half turned face, the hollow cheek bones, the
faint scar over the left. I browt the perpetual shadow
of five o'clock's double. I watched an echo of my
hand traces seam on a coat in a hundred separate frames.
The act of being multiplied made to memory less a
thing and more pressure. The laughing clown kept time from
some way deeper in the labyrinth. The laugh began as
a belt, then layered into a thin, almost private whisper
that dreaded through the glass. The maze did not merely
reflect light. It refracted secrets caught in the hollow, fractured images.
I felt pieces of myself were they no longer belonged.
A photograph folded at the corner, a name reten in
scrub on the back of a ticket, the ghost trace
of handwriting on condensation that blurred into a smudge. Whenever
I slowed to regard it, the mirrors refused to let
the pass be flat. It tilted toward me, and I
felt my pulse respond into their tilt. Then, as if
through a keyhole, I saw at a skull of condensation
on wat glass, letters blurred, pulled by the breath of
the carnival, the shape of a name that should not
have been here. I could not make the vowels resolve.
I could only feel the recognition as a tidening in
my throat, the sensation of a river being turned in
an old wound. The name was a stitch that had
been cut, and there knotted again. I pressed my pomp
to her pane, and for a flaring instant, my breath
joined a pattern. The letters skittered into puppet collar. In
a corner of my vision, where marionettes hung with painted
smiles and ross scenes exposed, the puppet horse mailed the
varnish and old strings. The marionettes balanced on stands like memories,
dressed in costumes that were almost truthful. One wore a
jacket that matched my own, frey leather collar and shape
an age. Its painted eyes caught a light that was
not natural and reflected back the name stitched into its collar.
The sight of it, fabric and fed and careful handwriting,
collapsed a distance I had thought her recoverable, between present
and past. A scrap of a photograph lay play beneath
the puppet foot fray folded a face half hidden by
a thumper end of dust. When I reached down to
lift it, the paper trembled, like something still alive. There
was no audible voice. The cown did not yet speak
what it wanted me to speak. Its presence folded the
space around me like a hand I turned on the
back stage corridor thickened with shadow. The laughing clown appeared
at the edge of a pool of low light. A
bel chain took cough that blink like a small, cruel
heart beat. The tramp of a crack rubber horn punctuated
its arrival, not a fanfare, but a punctuation. It moved
in a slow, precise gait, tilted in thirds, each rotation
of its hed ametronyum, counting down to a reckoning. It
had Innaine type too, but this one had been erased
until only smudges of ink remained between the clown and me.
On a battle locker bench lay in arrangement so deliberate,
a felt ceremonious photographs laid in a fan, an old
brusk y placed with the teeth pointing like a sentence,
and a ticket with a corner chewed away by time.
The tableau was a question set out with cruelty, each
object a stonebeitive with memory. I recognized the photographs. Hans
younger than mine arrested with a string of faded paper tickets,
a laugh that did not belong to the person in
the mirror. I had been avoiding the laughing clown did
not touch the objects. Instead, it arranged the air around them,
set in the space like a stage, and giving me
a roll without permission. The small pocket watched at its rist,
ticked off time in a rhythm that made the walls
feel like they were leaning in It. Spell chimed softly.
The sound threaded through the corridor, embraided with my breath.
I felt the old cheme a pocket, like a small accusation.
It led me, and I obeyed, because rebellion would have
required a clearer self than the one I had on offer.
The corridor opened onto the carousel platform. The carousel smelt
of oil and old paint and the phantom puffume of
a woman I could not place. Horses and painted beasts
rotated in slow, terrible grace, their painted eyes reflecting distorted
versions of my face. Above them, a ring of painted
faces turned former cels, some kids, some strangers, some faces
that felt like mine when seen from the corner of
a dream. The platform was rusted, each step up skirtched
like a complaint. The clowns yet pulled me to the
center like a marionett, tugged back to its strings. From
below the carousel's room, the lights were a wash of
tea and red, a diagnostic calumination that exposed every worns
ditch and every small shameful repair. Rising brought vertigo. I
could have stepped off and fallen away into uncomplicated silence.
Or I could climb to the highest painted horse and
let the well reveal itself. The decision felt like deciding
whether to fold off a clifful climb into a remembered
skin near their option promised yease. The clown tilted its head,
and the bellbang was a punctuation that made the breath
in my lungs a visible thing. When the spotlight found me,
the mirrors around the carousel fractured the light into a
thousand hungry glimpses. I was suddenly inside a chamber of
ice that new angles of me I had cut away.
The rings of glass did not merely reflect, They asked
the name waited in that brightness, with the terrible patience
of the earth in which something buried roots. To speaker
would be to let air into a musty box. To
withhold it would be to keep some weight lodged on
his skin. The chores compressed into a single thurative awareness.
There was no vanfail when I decided it was not
a shoudo or a plea. It was a simple animal
act of exhaling and letting the shape slip. The sound
was not a voice, but a thing that moved through
my chest and out into the mirror of light. In
that instant, the world tilted, glass bided like frost cross
a window. The marionette stowed as if a wind had
passed through their bellies. The clans Lay had laughed high
and tinkling over a lowest boat wound into the watch
soft beat to control the two became a single mechanical cord.
If I have kept the name quiet, the wall would
have stilled itself differently. Silence has a gravity all its own,
heavy and implacable. But I did not keep it. The
small word, one that tasted like old paper in a
child's handwriting, left my lips like a key dropping into
a lock. For a moment, there was a luminous lackening
in the air, like a scene finding a new age.
The mirrors paneled around me did not break so much
as re arranged themselves, and a series of images fell
through the fractures with the slowness of film strip running
on an old projector glass did not merely shatter, It
surrendered fragments of the world I had been living in.
The neat careful excuses and evasion, slid away the marionette
and threaded the choreography that had kept them boised. The
photographs on the locker bench flushed like pages turned fast.
Somewher bell tinkled, and then the sound was hollow, an
echo of its former cruelty. The carousel as painted horses
in their wooden mouth, seemed to speak in a language
of absence. The brass key in my pocket warmed and
and then grew cold. It was either closing a lock
or being carried away. I felt the weight of history
re arrange itself around the space where the name had been.
The immediate consequence was not mercy. It was consequence, an
alternation of relief and lost, laid on top of each other,
like two photographs that refused to lie flat. Something left me,
but something else replaced it, a clarity that was not comfort.
I noticed, with the strange acuity the small things the
carnival had kept, the trophy, strips of paper, tickets, stuck
and seams, the way the clown spell had any. Exactly
when my thumb had once murdered in a photograph I
had not remembered taken. The price of answering was a
particular private exposure. The earlier versions of myself re arranged
into a visible chronology. I stepped down from the carousel
platform with the ticket clinched in my hand. The midway
had emptied by degrees while I had been up there.
The lights burned low, as if they were exhausted. The
laughing clown watched me with a smile that might have
been satisfaction or appetite. It did not follow it let
the stage be. The tour nane tag remained in the
booth window, but the ragged fabric had shifted our nerve.
It hung loose, like a jaw left open. Foe to
oat was missing from the fine on the locker bench.
My pocket felt lighter, like a pocket with an absence
inside it. As I moved toward the ticket booth again,
the air had the thinnest of early morning. Seal falk
clung to the ground in a low tether. My reflection
in the booth glass was stranger than before, less an
image and more map. There were indentations where my fingers
had always been, and a small crease where a photograph
had been folded. A ticket, now limp and folded, fit
into my palm, like a promise that might or might
not be honored. I left a photograph behind, without meaning
to you, or perhaps because I had meant to. The
midwakes hailed behind me. The laughing clown Slaughter threaded after me,
soft and yielding, and I could not tell whether it
was congratulation or sentence. I spared the coin operated binocular
and the ticket booth. A glance through at the ferris
weel looked less like an eye and more like a
wheel that had winded itself with names. I held the
brass key briefly against the ton tack and felt the
teeth steady in my skin. I reminded that locks exists
both to keep things out and to hold things in place.
I walked away from the Midway with a changed weight.
The name had not made everything, nor had it fully remained.
Me answers we rarely due. Some things had been excised,
other things had found new purchase. The ticket in my
hand had a corner bitten away at a smear of condensation.
It was both proof and riddle. The photograph that remained
folded in a pocket was lighter, as if the weight
of the world had been redistributed to compensate. I kept
moving because standing still seen an indulgence the carnival would
not allow. Fog held around my feet and tuggered at
the hems of my coat. The midway receded like a
bruise that would not entirely fade. There was a quietness
behind me, the felt orchestrated, deliberate silence. At the edge
of a stage. The laughing clam melted into shadow and
then into light, as if the world preferred to keep
its torment sculpture precisely where it could be admired. The
cost of letting the name go into the air was
immediate and intimate. It made room for certain small graces,
and ability to recognize the photograph in my pocket without flinching,
the knowledge that the key my pumpits something even now.
But it also left the question of freedom open. The
carnival had not released me so much as exchanged one
binding or another, A burden transferred from secrecy to acknowledgment.
The difference is significant, but not always lighter. On the
path away from the ticket booth, I found a torn
ticket in the planks. It was crease, its number half born.
I folded it into a small, careful square, and that
it rist between my fingers. The world head was not
hospitable to certainty. The fog still called around my feet,
the laughing clown's ladder persistent, as t had made the
back of my neck prickle. I kept the brass key
in my pocket because habit had given it to me,
and because I could not yet tell if a keyed
at once open cages might also open doors. If the
carnival was a place that fed on silence, then answering
the name had given it a new curiosity. It would not,
I knew, be the last time its light started in
my head. The tag that had hung on the booth
window was torn, but not destroyed. A photograph in my
pocket was creased but not eligible. I had stepped down
from the carousel with a change weight, which is another
way of saying the story had shifted, the punctuation of
my life had been altered. I would go on carrying
pieces ticket stubbs, a brusquy, a photograph of the corner affolded.
But I would also carry the memory of the twist itself,
how it felt to let something name leave my mouth
and find its rhythm outside of me. The midway narrowed
to the single lane of fog and planks. Behind me,
somewhere in the roobs of the carnival, the Laughing Clan
arranged its bell and brushed at its painted smile. The
world continued to turn its wheels, and I continued to walk.
The question of whether I had reclaimed what I had
lost or simply invented a new form of honesty remained unresolved.
Answers are rarely tidy. I had done one thing, I
had let the name out into the air, and accepted
the consequence of that exposure. The rest of the day's
truth would come with its own, small, necessary pains. I
kept my shoulders tut and my fingers tracing the seam
of my jacket until the jacket itself felt like an old,
trusted map. The path ahead was uncertain, edged in teel
and red in the tint of film grain. The Carnival's
breadth thin behind me. I walked until the fog thinned
and missed, and then to a pale morning that smelled
of rain and metal and something like possibility. The Laughing
clowns laughter are still harn in the distance, but its
echo became part of the air rather than the architecture
of my boat. Yes, I did not know if I
had been released. I knew only that the name no
longer lived only in a hidden box. It had been spoken,
It had shifted the stage. Whatever freedom the carnival had
promised was not a deliverance, but a re arrangement, and
it would take time to see the shape of what remained.
For now, with a folded diket and a photograph lighted
by a coroner, I left the midway and moved toward
a horizon tinted and teel, carrying the small precise knowledge
that names, once out, did not so much disappear as
become part of the weather. And that is the end.
Thank you for listening, and I will see you in
the next one.