Speaker 1: Hullo. I welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. I woke to the taste of
iron and the cold press of seat belt webbing across
my chest. The world that found me was a rusting
roller coaster car midway, emptious bread beneath a thin teal
science sky Fog curled my boots like a living thing,
licking the seams of the car and swallowing the rails
behind us. The lights of was stuttered, breathless and inconsistent,
casting bend to shadows across my hands, and the ol
folded ticket in my pocket. My analog watch sat cracked
against my wrist, Its second hand jawned in place a tiny,
accurate accusation. I slipped my fingers along the leather of
a jacket I recognized without remembering, putting on the jacket's mell,
faintly of stale caught and candy, and the grace of
the rights. I understood two things with the curious immediate clarity.
I'd been brought to this place, and something would not
let me leave until it had been named. My hands
fumbled at the restraints the buckle gave with a thin
reluctant queal. There was no one tending the ride, no
booth light burning, only the echo of gears and a
patient mocking laughter far enough away to be a promise.
When my fingers traced the chain at my throat, I
found the silver ring topped under my shirt, on its
thin cable, A wedding band that rode like a secret
as coal weight told me there had been a life
that had put it there, a life I could count
like a ledger of small betrayals and even smaller merses.
Images rose behind my eyes the way sailors see land
through fog, quick tingential flashes that stung when they appeared,
and then slid under the surface again, a child's hand
slapping a slant door, a light hold as a kindness
in the quiet lutany of evenings I had spent not
answering the car shadder at the sensation the slow intake
of breath before something leaps. The track, which moments before
had been an inert skeleton of paint and rust, now
held a hungry motion. We moved forward with the kind
of inevitability gravity lens to certain truce. Neon lights cut
through the fog in slat's teel, and then a cruel
distant red in the midway behind us, narrowed until it
became a photograph that might tear. A present settled to
my left like cold cloth. It did not speak. It
applauded with the slow, deliberate clap that was more a measurement.
The sand rolled across metal and fog and landed in
my rips. I knew some were under shame and instinct
that the applause was not for entertainment. It was the
sound of accusation. As we clined, the first flash hit
with the first drop, not an ordinary memory, but a
hyper real doorway that forced me to live what I
had hidden. The car leaned forward and the lights fractured
into a corridor of faces. A moment, I saw my
own hands in someone else's life, a hand that had
stared it, and then a hand that had let go.
Tan did something dishonorable and compressed an iron into a
single heart beat. Each contraction of the coaster turned the
image into accusation. The scene did not ask for forgiveness,
It required recognition. When the car leveled, a warp window
along the side offered a reflection, and with it a
cruelty two versions of myself. One stood in the shallow
gloss of reflected lights, smiling with a thin practice warmth,
the kind of smile you were to keep grief from
speaking aloud. The other crouched in a doorways soaked with rain,
hair plastered her face that had learned to shut up
the world. The window split them like a scene being
forced apart. The ride wasn't is showing memory so much
as it would performing verdict. A small metallic key winked
in the lap of the one who had smiled, a
jack in the box key I recognized instead of the
one on my own chain. I felt the two cells
like both coin and wound. The ride wanted me to
name which had been true more often, or perhaps to
accept that both had been true in different kinds of weather.
The reflection demanded a word I didn't yet have. Without ceremony,
the laughing clown arrived in the way's nightmares of manners,
I tilt of haird a shadow that refused to obey
the lie. He did not approach as much as occupied space,
leaning around the rim of the car with lanky arms
that kept too much distance to be kind. His grim
look carved metal teeth set in a mouth that had
russ stains bleeding down. He wore a pocket watch at
wooden tick, and a bell tied or fray ribbon at
chamb once dissonant, And then when the clown moved, everything else,
the fog, the lights, the echoes of the midway moved
in a measured response. His presence was ritual, His patience
was the theater of torture. The first confession came because
the ride arranged it. We rose into a tight loop
and hung there a moment stretched over itself, and the
light slatted into an accused tory beam. In that suspended breath,
the ride produced an image so immediate and cruel I
could have sworn it had been planted in the hinges
of the car. I saw a small body in a doorway,
and beyond it the slow closing of a door I
had left and locked. I felt the heat of my hands,
as if I had left the house and never come back.
The image required naming, not explanation. The clowns grin narrowed
into a smile that meant hunger, and I found my
mouth making a sound that tasted like a removed tooth.
Apology that was more ledger than relief. Something inside me
tore open with that admission of ronis a quick pulley
of secretive fibers, and then the ride let me fall.
The fall did not bring absolution. The loops build a
stand into a brief hush that smelled like the end
of Billy of the Midway, all an old sugar in
a trace of something metallic like memory. In the paws
I scanned for exit, there were doors where they should
not have been, stairways that ended in fark. The more
I searched, the more the ride rearranged itself into a
gallery of what I had ignored. The artifact in my pocket.
The folded ticket felt less like a token and more
like a mat that the coaster could read. Each crease
was a sentence, each tier was punctuation. I thumbed it
as if it would open into a confessional. The car
clicked forward, as if a pease for the moment, and
the clown retreated into the fog with a wrinkled key
swinging at his head. He left a belt alling behind him.
The sound of it crawled crossed my teeth. A stub
of ticket had fluttered into my lap, and the motion
of his leaving The paper was damp with the residue
of some impossible do The air around me lightened like
sponge sugar, then turned cold again. The promise of stillness
that is always a trick, I told myself. The confession
should have been a door. It wasn't he It was
more like a wound that allowed erin and offered no
healing salve. We climbed again the ride ship, eachre sent
into a question. The second re enactment unfoled in a
wash of distorted carousel music slowed and then pitched down
until the notes sacked like exhausted bodies. I was thrown
into a scene set in a hospital corridor, fluorescent lights
buzzing with clinical indifference. I watched my own face in
another's hands, pale toad with the work of choosing not
to notice. I had chosen it small numbing increments to
look away, until looking away itself came a habit, the
cultivated harm. Each drop hammered the reality of those choices
into my bones. The coaster made me inhabited consequences with
the same intimacy I'd reserved previously for denial. At the
middle of the ride, the window against split to two sails.
But this time the mirror offered no gentle metaphor. It
offered a ledger the smiling self, the one who walked away,
was ledgered in small comforts and quiet civilities. The other
was ledgered in the end and things I owed to
people whose faces were now too fragile. The rides as
machinery would not let me file the ledger away a
force numeration, one sacramental tally after another, until the number
felt less like arithmetic and more like a sentence. The
clown of chains and the high a natural chine of
the clown as bell signaled the approach to the place
the ride had been lead into all alarm. The CAUs
ascent became a slow grind, each notch more deliberate than mercy.
The mid was shrunk into a wash of pale cyan
and crimson book, the firs will looming like a watchful pupil.
The laughing clown appeared as shoulder height and leaned over
me with an intimacy that as more surgical than theatrical.
The loop head was steep and angry. The light narrowed
into a single slit that cut across my face like
a blade. The clown's layered voice high walked last to
riding over an undertone of humphold at the edges of
my hearing. It was not asking, it was preparing. Spended
above the apex, the ride arranged the last scene into
a magnified image of the one truth I had avoided,
not merely that I had failed, but that in failing
I had led a pattern hold. I saw the faces
I had hurt. I saw the small decisions that, like
corrosive water, had eaten at whatever structure held us together.
In that bright, cold spotlight, the ride extracted the confession wanted,
with the delaxy of someone removing a rotten tooth, a
single sentence I had not spoken aloud for years. The
admission was not liberating. It split something inside me that
was both private and communal, and left a hollow where
memory used to sit, Like a full glass. The clown
clap once the sound reverberated through the car in the rails,
it felt like a verdict being written in whettink. When
a car dove, the release was not mercy but movement.
The rush of air carried away heat and nothing else.
The world blowed into teel and red streaks, and the
reflection in the window showed only a face that had
been stripped of some useless armor. The ride offered a
corrosive gift. I could see my truth clearly now, but
clarity had no bomb. The confession had been taken and cataloged,
and then placed on ashelf for right cold not finished.
There was an aftermath of deceptive com for a heartbeat.
The cost settled, ons were straight away, and my heartbeat
tried to sink to the rhythm of the track. Relief
arrived in a small knave, packaged the idea that confession
might have been enough. I reached for that idea like
a drowning person reaching for a boy. The med we
opened under a slight an empty ocean, washed out booths
and broke and prize racks lying in sleeping rows. But
even as the fog thin, the antias did not feel
like peace. It felt like the space left when something
vital has been removed. The roof of the mid we
seemed to telt inward ethie collapsing. Its stayed upon me.
The ticket in my pocket felt heavier. The crease had
deepened with some new punctuation. A crap belt hold suddenly,
and the clown silhouette slipped back into the fog. He
left the jackne the box key behind in such a
way that it landed precisely at my feet, gleaming with
the same bad promise, before the cock lay forward toward
another rise, as if the track had more to ask.
The sense of being compelled did not ease. It sharpened.
Whatever I had confessed had been observed in file, but
the ride's architecture suggested cataloging rather than mercy. The coaster
wanted more. The bell chined again in a way that
felt like a punctuation marked turning into an elepsis the
kind toward that next royes felt longer than previous assents.
The track fared me images in a rhythm like a
surgeon's steady incision, establish revealed demand. There was a thought
that perched in the back of my mind that absolution
was a state you errand and not one granted that
some punishments persist until the structure that allowed the harm
was dismantled. The ride did not allow for dismuggling. It
offered trial after trial, re enactment after re enactment, until
the person you were once comfortable being would either be
done or remade with a new kind of honesty. When
the car finally rolled to a stop, it was not
an ending. The track curved and fell away into a
distance that shimmered like heat. The midway below looked both
ancient and newly manufactured in its cruelty. In my pocket,
the ticket felt like a bookmark between chapters. I was
dimly leaved, a more acutely exhausted. I had been stripped
of illusions and not given anything assembling absolution. The laughing
clown's last smile was caught in my memory the way
photograph catch his motion, flat and undeniable. He had not
promised release, He had promised recognition. The distinction was small,
and furious, I stepped from the cars. The fog moved
around my boots like a tide. The cold air had
every exposed place on my face, and I became aware,
with a sharp and almost pleasant astonishment, that confession had
made space in meat that had not existed before. It
was not healing. It was room room to see the ledger,
room to make decisions that might overtime alter its total.
The ticket in my pocket was still folded, its ensmaged
into forms that no longer readers comfort. I pressed my
thumb over its crease, a private gesture, in a small vow.
Somewhere beyond the midway, the first wheel began to turn again,
in a slow, indifferent clap. I would not claim victory.
The ride had done what it was built to do,
to force me into a particular kind of scene. But
seeing as not the same as absolution, and the clown
had been precise in his cruelty, he had collected the
pronouncements and left me with the architecture of consequence. I
walked away from the car with the weight of that
knowledge pressing at my shoulders, and the midway hung around
me like a costume I could not remove. The tickets
stayed folded in my pocket, and the watch on my
wrist kept its single, stubborn stop beat. There was one
last small sand as I moved toward the shadows, a
thin belt hole, like a punctuation at the end of
an overheard sentence. The sound didn't e promise an end.
It hinted only that the ride was patient, that whatever
I had been excavated would be cataloged and returned tour
in time. The laughing clans laughter and furled behind me,
fat and slow, and satisfied, and the fog cot once
more around my feet, as if to greed an old friend.
I kept my hand over the ticket and let the
cold of the night settle into me compact of memory,
ready to carry forward. The Medway slights blinked in rhythm
was something like a pulse, and I made the promise
not of immediate redemption, but of facing the account when
it came to subscribed, to descend further. The though came
like an echo, and I folded that small modern compulsion
into the larger all the work to look to Nane
to act. The watch did not move, the ticket did
not unfold, The right continue to exist as a place
where truce were extracted under the indifferent clerk of her
clown's grin. When I turned away, the Ferris Wheelless solowet
lingered in the corner of my vision like a pupil watching.
The Midway exhaled and the fog swallowed the tracks we
had traversed. I walked into the damp night with my
pockets full of surrendered things, in the sense that the
next rise would demand more than my voice. The experience
lived in my joints, in the hollow behind my ribs.
It had become a ledger. I would carry that ledger
had weight, it would be opened again. The clown spell
chined faintly, as if to mark the moment. And the
last thing I felt before the Midway have served me
into its night was a small human need to know
whether I could be someone who counted differently from now on.
The answer, in the fog and under the teals on
in the red accent lights was not yet given. I
woke inside motion, without remembering that my eyes opened. There
was only the tactile certainty of a restrained biting into
my chest, the thin metal strap whispering a memory of
cold and salt, and the slow mechanical and hail of
the Midway wind. Teal and soarm lights hummed like distant lungs,
red accents punctured of the dark, like warnings. Fog curled
at my ankles, allow tied of mist that smelt of
stale caught and candy and rust, so or beyond my vision,
affairs well clicked in a patient, grinding turn. The urgent,
absurd flutter of a photograph's sliding free from an empty
pocket felt at first like the most ordinary misplacement, until
the face in it leaned back at me with recognition.
The photograph was older than I was willing to admit.
Its edges were softened by handling. There was a half
remembered crease where a thumb had once rested. The face
in the picture was mine and not mine younger round
The eyes are familiar till to the jaw, a flock
of pain near the temple that I had tried not
to notice for years. The image had the wrong clarity,
as if the camera had seen into a decision rather
than a moment. I felt wartched. I felt compulsion, as
if some slow, insistently mechanical thing had set its bearings
and would not be rerodded. The coaster shuddered and lurched forward,
and the world collapsed into movement. The first drop frum
through my teeth like an electrical confission. Light became narrative.
The car tummelt into a memory that smelt of dissop
and sunlight. The quiet kitchen were remark chipped at the
lip sat on account till like a punctuation mark. A
younger version of me moved silent and quicker round a space,
fingers skimming a folded ticket left in a jacket pocket
I washed from too close and not nearly close enough.
Details ancotine in the mug's chip, rim, the exact grain
of the wood table, the doll rain of my watch,
tap in the counter, each one a tether to a
decision I had made and then practiced forgetting. At the
edge of that kitchen memory, the laughing can manifested patient
and ornamental cataloging omission with a small ritual tilt of
its hair. It did not announce itself with thunder or violence.
It stood in the doorway as if it had always
belonged there as costume a ragged room master coat, and
the crack paint of its face catching the light like
a threat. Its curtain was a map of rust metal
teae s glinted whilip should be. It did not speak.
It did what the evening required. It kept perfect attendants.
It recorded my cowardice and filed it under my name.
When the car rose and the track leaned into the
evening sky, a warped window beside me turned into a
truth telling surface. It did not mirror my present, but
replayed an argument I had hope. Time was often the
pain showed two versions of me, one walking away with
shoulders sealed and the other remaining face slack with the
attempt to hold a responsibility. The frames overlapped and round,
like film for a machine that refused to skip. The
clown leaned with me in the reflection, impossibly close in
the glass. Its smile replicated, as if to remind me
that private acts become public when they are refracted enough times.
The sight forced a recognition I could no longer evade.
There had been a moment when both their sits were visible,
and I had chosen the less painful path. There is
a peculiar violence in being made to stand inside the
motion that burst consequence with each leap and dropped the
cost ditch memory to present over later ovolay. I fumbled
at the restraint on impulse, the cheap analog watch up
my wrist, scraping the metal with a noise like a
finger nail on bow, searching for an exit that would
not be there. The band hidden beneath my shirt, a
small silver took him more more often on a chain
than on a finger weighed like a counter argument. My
fingers found the leather of my jacket, felt the texture
of the worn edge, and the familiar crumpled tick in
a pocket, and each item became evidence that the past
had indeed been kept close enough to be called to count.
The laughing clown kept time with a ritualistic applause that
arrived not as sound at for as, but as pressure
tightening in a car, an arrow in of the air.
When the applaus broke into noise, it was MOLTI lay
a sickly high chuckle, braided with a low sign, and
that seemed terminate from the ride itself. The clown's eyes
glowed amber with flecks of red, Its pupils focused with
the patience so intense that it felt like physical suction.
It wandered the perimeter of the memory like a curator
at a gallery of my failings, cataloging each emission and
sorting them by severity. The more I pushed, the strict
of the inventory became. Drops are an enemy of eloquence.
They pulled the stomach into the throat and rearrange what
can be said and what must be felt. The first
flashback had been subtle, a gray morning in a kitchen.
The second tore open like a saw a rose side
confrontation beneath the menacing sky where rain had started, and
the world shortened into one violent, the fining decision. As
the cock climbed into a slow stomach ascent, the scene
around me solidified into the precise motions of the moment.
I turned away the angle of my shoulders, the way
my hand had avoided the one reach in for me,
the way Mud had accepted a small rain and kept it.
Confession was not tender here, it was alpal. I moved
through the re enactment exactly as my memory demanded, every
flinch and diversion observed by a presence that kept precise count.
The mip wind arrived not with a climax, but with
a mirror twist that refused softness. The warp window produced
a reflection that mirrored not just faces, but choices. Chief
versions of me replayed an argument in which I was
both actor and spectator, one face red with anger and accusation,
the other pale and composed with calculated departure. The clown
materialized in the glass between those faces and used the
space to amplify the decision. It turned my private misstep
into a public leisure, making the argument into an exhibit,
with me as the reluctant centerpiece. The knowledge that summoned.
Something was curating my worst moments made the whole ride ceremonial.
I found that shame grows in theaters. Attempts at escape
became grammatical errors in a story written in metal. I
rattled at bolts and fuss with litter. My fingers rubbed
at the scar along my jaw, as if the motion
could erase its history. The car offered illusions of exits,
a sideways gap in the railing, a rusted maintenance ladder,
at the impossible suggestion of a path descending into falk.
Each falsex ex closed as the ride moved on, replaced
by overlay images of a wedding band stuck in mud,
and a ghostly outline of the person I had ron
stepping across the road and passing through the car like
a cat at the laughing clan's applause accorded each failed
attempt with the position of a stenographer taking short end
of my panic. Prussia built slowly as the coastest chain
worked the car towore a higher crest. Sound dropped out,
until the only noises left for my pulse in the
faint sound of warped carnival music stretching like elastic. The
ascent was long enough for breathing to become a deliberate
act in hale, hold, register, release. Each breath framed a
piece of the path that I had not wanted to
say out loud. The ride made me act the moment
I had fled. I posed me on a small stage
where the lions were my gestures, and the audience was
a clown with a grin cut into its flesh. At
the apex, the world became affused image of then and now.
The memory overlaid on to the present with surgical clarity,
and I could no longer maintain the opacities of self justification.
The precise motion the turn of a key in a pocket,
small avoidance of eye contact, the way my hand tightened
on a steering whe apply laid forward in slow, accusing loops.
The naming of the sin arrived as a physical thing,
settled like a stone in my throat, and pushed until
the syllable of recognition wanted to leave me. There was
no external pronouncement, no voice that said the word for me. Instead,
truth rearranged sensation inside my body. It made disbelief implausible.
All the half formed excuses forded dimmwood, and the kernel
of what I had done sad, exposed and naked. The
laughing clowns stepped forward at the moment of that recognition.
Its eyes brightened, as if elimination were a personal pleasure.
It did not pity or judge in the human way. Exhibited,
the confession became a visible object, a smear in the air,
a demote that hung above my lap, impulsed with a
light like a heart on distress, the car refused to
release what it had produced. The confession became a currency
the ride would not refund. The plunge that followed was
a collapse of memory and consequence. Specters moved through the
car like projectors. The face of the betrayed person flashed
without dialog. A hand extended and then retracted, the cut
of a goodbye that was never spoken. The wedding band,
that small silver ringwore morphine, hid an undercloth, and on
a finger left visible wound in the palm of my
hand where abrasion had once been only psychological admission had
altered the landscape. It had not offered absolution. Instead, the
cost was recalculated, and the new balance sheet demanded additional tolls.
There is a peculiarity to being punished by truth. It
is both precise and unromantic. Confession did not absolve, if
re arranged what was owed. The ride made me see
consequences as multiplicative rather than singular. The Midway and froll,
beneath the descent and the ghost of the person I
had heard it, walked spectral and specific through stalls that
smelled of iron and sugar. The clown flanked the boulevard
like a master of ceremonies at a funeral. Its supplause
kept the pace of my panic and cataloged my failures
as if they were exhibit in a museum of my life.
As momentum blared away to cast sload in the world
congealed into a new shape, the midway grew empty, not
through absence, but by selection. Figures that had once orbited
my memory receded, leaving behind ottavaxpinned with small, invasive precision.
A single ticket found its way to my lap, as
if the ride had manufactured a souvenir to mark the transaction.
The laughing clown retreated with a subtle promising into its posture.
The way it turned its back suggested that the reckoning
had not been completed, but merely deferred. The clown' spell,
tied with a frayed ribbon, chimed like a closing argument,
small and inevitable. I sat there with the ticket in
my hands, the film grinson of the Midway leaking into
pre dawn, and felt a hollowing. I felt like a recalibration.
The car rested on a broken loop, a segment of
tracks suspended above a place that had once been festive
and was now only functional. I understood then, at survival
of a ride did not equal survival of the self.
The engine of the place had not sought to annihilate me.
It had sought to force a reckoning. If release was possible,
it would not be a matter of escape, but except
in some reconfiguration of what could be carried forward. I
checked the familiar items, as though that might anker met
a continuity not yet ruptured. The cheap analog watched with
its cracked face, the crumpledicket folded into pocket. The signature
small silver ring hid and beneath my shirt. Each object
kept its truth, each remained evidence. I rubbed my finger
tips together an old mannerism, and felt the residual tremor
of fear that had become almost a companion. My eyes
scanned for exits, as they always had, making the motion
of seeking a reflex. Nothing about the place allowed for
easy departures. That knowledge made a new kind of pressure,
the realization that the ride's goal was not punishment for
the moment, but education toward the next, more demanding trail.
The laughing clown's figure receded into the fog with measured,
poppet like steps. Its fractured face watched me until the
cave of the midway swallowed it. I could not tell
whether the retreat was a mercy. The ticket lay in
my palm, damped with my sweat and with the residue
of the ride's light. I folded it carefully and slid
it into the pocket, where it would sit, like a
vote of a small, undeniable record that something had been named.
When the car finally came to arrest, it offered no
ceremonies of release. The harness unlatched with a mechanical sigh,
and I moved with a slow guarantee of someone whose
muscle memory had been interrupted by shock. The world smelled
the same, stale sweets and rust, and the lingering hum
of a sound stage above me. The sky had thin
toward a pale, indifferent mourning. The midway was an empty stage.
I left with the ticket press between finger and thumb,
my hand smelling of cotton candy in metal. The small
private motion of placing the ring shaped relic into the
pocket of my jacket felt like an altar to continuity.
The things that identifies can both condemn and define us.
The laughing clwns applause still echoed in the seams of
my hearing, like a last measure. For a long time
after I would imagine it, keeping temper with my heartbeat.
The right taught me a terrible arithmetic that the naming
of since simplifies it into a thing that can be cataloged,
and that catalogging does not equate to forgiveness. The midway
had returned to its quiet. The decision had not been
arn The tickets sat in my pocket as a promise
in a threat. Somewhere down the track, the coaster prepared
other cars and other passengers, and I imagined then climbing
toward their own apexes in the same steady, inevitable way
I had. The laughing clown vanished into the fog, but
the ritual of its presence persisted. The handling of guilt
had become less about escape and more about learning how
to carry certain kinds of weight. I walked away with
the knowledge that survival was not absolution, and the confession,
while necessary, was not a currency that raised consequence. The
writer had given me clarity, as one gives a wound
a clean edge, precise, painful, and oddly helpful. The midway
receded behind me into fog and film green, and the
ferris wheel continued to turn like a quiet in different judge.
The ticket in my pocket burned with possibility. The coaster
had pulled my sins from their hiding places and displayed them.
It had not told me how to repair what I
had broken. For that I would need other work, other reckonings.
For that I would need time into. Perhaps the courage
the ride had shown me to practice outside the world
was a prayer dawn that smelled like metal and sugar.
I kept walking until the light thin and the fog
found new ground to rest on, carrying a memory of
the ride like a thin hure my chest. The laughing
clowns grin had receded into the middling dark but its
promise that the reckoning was not furnished followed like a quiet,
deckered tethered to my steps. The ticket, folded and heavy
in my pocket, became both a souvenir and a summons.
The car had not released me so much as it
had prepared me, and I understood that leaving would be
simple only in logistics. The deeper exit, the one that
required repair and restitution, remained ahead, and it would not
be a mechanical descent, but a slow work of hands
and will. The ride had remembered my sins and given
them names. How I answered them now would be the
next movement I could control. The fog arrives first, a
low tide that slides over the rails and claims the
ground between the coast as rotted ties. It moves like
something with patient and tent, culling around my buttes and
seeping under the strap that bites into my chest. There
is no tendant, no bright, cheery sign, only that damp
neon smeared haze, and the ferris wheel, slow, indifferent turning.
I fold my fingers until my knuckles whiten on the
material of the restraint grons in the warped metal I
catch a grin that does not belong to me. The grin,
as small as a reflection at first, then grows with
the distant distorder to laugh. The tugs at the edges
of my hearing. The compulsion is immediate and archaic. A
thing inside me levers as if to turn a ki
I have been carrying for years. The ride will not
let me down. The restraint locks like a mouth closing.
Heat flares across my colluburn were the metal presses, and
the cheap analog watch on my wrist thuds against my
palmet face, a spider web of hairline cracks. I breathe shallowly,
tasting a metallic tang that sharpens the memory of other metal,
a hospital tray, a dinner knife, a door handle. I
did not turn the passenger in the mirror of warped crumblinks,
and must is a composure that does not fit the
bruise in my chest. My fingers almost automatically rubbed together
at the edges, as if soothing a flare of raw skin.
There is a ticket folded in my pocket, damp with fog,
and older than I feel capable of being. The cop
pulls away with them at hat creek that sounds like
a lawn suffering fruit. Nat Broaden's overhead, a patchwork of
teal and siant on by the skeletal ferris wheel. Each
river passing under the cath rows a sliver of memory
at me, a kitchen table at ron, the hollow of
a bedroom, the sound of a life continuing elsewhere while
I looked away. Those visions arrive not as scraps, but
as fully dressed rooms, noise and smell, and the unwandered,
intimate details of things I had imagined I'd long buried.
This ascent is slow and surgical. A rivet, a flash,
the smell of stale coffee and burnt sugar. Another rivet,
a flash, a small face turned away that should have
been net. My chest tightens as we climb the lights
of the mid We stitch themselves into something like a
pattern across a film that has been overexposed. Cy un
bleach at the edges, red like the smear of a wound.
The laughing Cla stands at the side of the track
in a coat that is theatrical indicated hand on a
wopjack in a box ki. He appaudes with slow, meticulous palms.
Each clap of punctuation mark I did not darn. He
is patient as a ledger and as relentless as rust.
The smile painted on his face is a map of fractures.
The paint flakes like dry skin. When he tilts his head,
his eyes catched the ride lights and become poles of
orange brown fire. He is ritual in a moving form.
He orchestrates the memory like a conductor stepping through a dirge.
At the apex, the world unravels into a bed of
glassy reflections. The window beside me curves and warps the light,
until the one face I recognized splits into two. One
version of me sits stiff handsfolded, the practiced armor of
a person who answers late night calls with soft apologies
in the right home. The other version is a raveling neck,
exposed mouth, slack, ayes flooded. The reflection that smiles is
the one who managed the exit routes from blame and
kept the explanations tidy. The reflection that dissolves is the
ledger that names the debt. Those two faces do not reconcile.
They argue with this silence, and the mere presses evidence
against my teeth. I try to map where the memories
begin an end, but the ride pulls them through me
in a sequence that makes geography of guilt. A domestic
scene becomes a carnival tableau. My hands move in a
flash toward a stove knob left and watched, and the
fairest wheels lights take on the hallow of a child's
night light. The past is not a film running behind
the carnival. It is woven into the wood of the car,
into the bowls, into the ferriic taste at the back
of my throat. The laughing clown arranges these flashes like
trophies on a shelf. He lays them out with a
hand that is almost ender, and I feel the use
of a praistal titan. The climb is a slow disclosure.
I see the day I left the table empty, the
day I turned down a plea because I could not
carry another person's weight. Each reveal is intimate and immediate,
objects I could name with my eyes, hands that move
with me in them. There is no distance to these memories.
They are tact oil as a strap biting into my sternham.
The car breathes as if it to can remember each
ascent is an exposition on the coosa becomes a confessional
booth without a booth, an altar without a priest. The
laughing clown does not absolution, he catalogs. When the car
pauses at the summit, there is a larng held silence
that tastes like the paws before life changing nes. Overhead,
the ferris wheel cast a skeletal shadow that bleeds red
into the folk here suspended between ground and sky. The
most dangerous thing about the ride is not the height,
but the expectation, the knowledge that whatever I have been
avoiding will be named and await their demands a form
of payment. The warped window gives me two cells at once,
one who is practiced denial into a comfortable garment, and
one who cannot hold the scene together any longer. The
first drop tears out of the quite like a question
with no softening. Gravity becomes a confession in motion. As
the car tips in the world inverts. A memory that
have been a dully becomes a full body sensation. I
see the moment where I turned away. It is compressed
into a perfect sharp vignette, A figure at the threshold,
a small pleading hand, my foot, choosing the path that
left the other behind. The memory plays in the physical
space of the car, as if projected on to campus.
The laughing clown watches, setting small rusted bells around the
scene in a careful ritual placement. He smiles like a ledger,
finally balanced. The tunnel we slide through is frayed with
red accents to throw flung open. The projection of betrayal
is relentless. It re enacts choices as if I were
being judged in real time, showing MODI as I had
labeled with kinder words, and exposing the cruel practical reasons
beneath them. The sound of the car on the track
becomes a heartbeat that matches my own. An industrial echo
sinks with it until I cannot tell where the rise
mechanisms end on my pulse begins. The images are not metaphors,
they are records. There is no plea for mitigation. The
air in the tunnel taste of old theater, glue in
the faint, sickly sweet as of cotton candy. The laughing
clown walks the edges like a curator, insuring the displays perfect.
At the window, warp reflection shows me pressing my forehead
to cold glass. The two reflections continue to divide. One
reaches for the strap and the other covers its eyes.
The split becomes unbearable because both are true. The part
of me that spun stores about circumstance and bad timing
is present and articulate. The part of meat I've felt,
the small intimc croteer is tender and raw. The pattern
emerges a looper avoidance burst calamity, and the attempt to
avoid that futility multiplies the damage. The realization is not
a lightning bolt, but a slow corrosion that exposes to
final wire. I taste the iron of tears. The laughing
Clown's applause is a soft percussion beneath everything. The train
dies into the loop in the world narrows to a
point where the laughing clown stands closer than he ever has,
a cathedral of pain and rest. He leans over the
restraint with the grin carved as though with a tull
men for metal. The world condenses to the meeting of
his face in my chest. He does not speak. Speech
would be too clumsy. In steady presses in a deep
pocket watch into the hollow of a car between us.
Its second hand is stuck a sea strum beat that
measures only the space in which I must make a choice.
The demand is clear, without the need for syllables. Name
it or be swallowed. There's no heroism in the moment.
Only a row arithmetic confession offers a rat that looks
like relief. Silence promises a different transformation. The weight of
my silver chain against skin and the memory of what
I once saw in a commer room pressed together. Part
of me fashions a plausible future in silence, a life
without admission, an attempt to tap the ledger back into
his pocket. The other part knows the same ritual every time.
The laughing clown closes his hand round the memory like
a puppeteer, and I shrink. The car is suspended, a
bead of light at the center of the loop, and
the choice sits like a hock call. I name it
in a way that feels more like a mechanical movement
than an act of contrition. The sound of the admission
is less a word than a movement of my rib cage.
It slides out of me as if being exhaled by
the metal around my lungs. It is not a tidy pardon.
It is not even wholly accurate in the way I
wish memory could be amended. It is a naming, our
registration of the thing I did. The laughing clowns grinlidens
in that sick, delighted way of something that has expected
this for a long time. The watch is second hand,
tecks once more and begins to move. The aftermath is
not a cleansing. The car jerks as if to reject
the memory, and I feel myself thrown forward, as an
image of a ticket lists from the seat and pins
itself there like a math. The world rearranges the midwa
tilts into a version of mourning that is not mourning
and not quite night. There is a painful and beguous
easy that visits me like a phantom limb relief that
does not release. The track breaks ahead, as if the
worlds cannot tolerate the full opening of absolution, and gives
way into a damaged silence. I land on a slope
of room where the rails are broken and the carless,
like a confession half uttered. Falling afterward is different from fear.
It is smaller and more intimate. The feeling that follows
My surrendered is like the tightening of a muscle that
hath resisted motion for years and finally yields the breath
that comes a shaky and not necessarily clean. I notice
the ticket on the seat, damp and stamp for the
time I cannot recognize. When I reach for it, my
fingers come away cold, and there is a smear of
something that could be painted or could be blood. Across
the midway, the laughing clown falls into the crowd with
the perfect measured steps of a predator that knows his
haunt is not yet over. His smile remains an accusation
and a promise. On the ground. The midway is a
graveyard of shadows, and the ferris will sell wet limbs
like a ghost Don seeped him with pale teel sail
on that dilutes the red accents into something like an
old bruise. I move with the cautious tenderness, the way
a patient after a long operation, testing the world to
find whether it will follow its overalls. I find a
damp ticket pin to the seat where mercy should have been.
It flutters in my fingers, small and fragile and impossibly ordinary.
The laughing clan disappears into the crowd, and when I
look back, his crinspits there into the suggestion of repetition.
There is a Brital calm that comes after such a ritual.
It is not peace. It is a pause in a
rhythm that once felt relentless. The midway smells a freen
that has not yet fallen, a film of dawn fog
that leaves everything dampened and more honest looking for it.
I fold the ticket and tuck it into the place
where I keep the chain with my ring. It seems
at once like a talisman, and the scapegoat the wall
rearranges around the small object until it looks like ascendence
I have been assigned to carry. I walk the perimeter
of the ride, because leaving a car feels like abandoning
a confession. Mid utterance, the fairest wheel moves with the
slow patience, making its rounds as if indifferent to the
way I have been dismantled. People moved through the millway
like shadows of obligation, faces blurred by the film grain
of memory. The laughing clown moves within the crowd like
a mock of ordinary life, and his silhouette as the
last thing I see as a headway, a hand raised
in the slightest of waves that threatens the sense of
finality I crave. The easing that came after admission does
not absolve me of consequence. It is a different burden,
one that sits like a ledger left on a kitchen table,
need lines of ink that remain to be balanced. The
ticket in my pocket is a reminder that release is
conditional and that repetition is possible. The laughing clown's smile
was not cruelty without aim. It was ritual. He keeps
the midway open and waits for the next person with
a ledger. There is an inevitability to it that is
as old as regret itself. I leave the midway with
the dawn staining the fog pale tails I am. The
rails behind me are fractured and beautiful and arrangement of
metal and memory. The pain in my chest loosens just
enough to let me breathe, and in that small space,
I understand the terrible economy to ride and forces. Confession
may make the load shift, but it does not erase
what remains. The ticket in my pocket is damp and
warm from my hand. I fold it into the place
where I keep the small ring on its chain, and
feel for a moment both lightered and more exposed. The
sound of distant appall drifts back through the fog, deliberates
slow clapping that could be a memory of the laughing
clown tucking away another story. I step out of the
hallow of the midway and into a world that looks
as if it might hold other choices. The tears on
my face are cold, and I leave them to the morning.
The last leap taught me that confession is not an end,
but a different kind of weight. It taught me the
shape of the ledger I must carry. The laughing calm
melts into the crowd, and the ride sits like a
beast on old bones, waiting its patient, inevitable turn. I
move away, the ticket warm in my pocket, the fairest
wheel still turning, and the taste of cotton, candy and
rustlingering as a promise that the nightma may one day
leap again. The coosier stops with a grievance. It is
held like a secret. Metal teeth of chain and rust click,
and then stillness breads like a skin. The world tilts
into a silence so full it hums. It is the
silence of something that has been waiting its turn. At
the hinge of a long run out consequence, fog curls
at my ankles, and the midway below becomes an island
of lamps and shadows. I half remember from other lives
places my feet might once have known, and refuse to
tread again. I feel the roost train bite into my
collar bone. The leather strap are small, certain in fact,
against skin that has been slippery with avoidance for years.
Above the night breathers and teal cyan, and a thin
rim of red at the horizon promises nothing but spectacle somewhere,
vain and croquet. A lah filtered, distorted patient wraps itself
around the rails, as if to bind me tighter. I
have written roller coasters before I understand the mechanics of surrender.
I have leaned into momentum the way some people lean
on luck. I have led acceleration, desigh, handed myself over
to physics and the ache for a rush that makes
the world declare itself reel by moving too fast to
be doubted. This is not that, this is construction, masquerading
is thrill. This is a device that records. This is
a machine that remembers, cataloging more efficiently than I have
ever let myself. Compulsion is a different gravity. It pulls
without the mercy of speed or joy. Here, every ascent
promise is a recollection. Every dip re arranges what I
have chosen to keep under the bed of my life.
At the apex of car rocks like a throat clearing,
the laughing clown leans and avoid below, like a statue
poised to speak. His grin is not merely an expression,
but an accusation warped inter bone. There is something architectural
about the way he is placed, not incidental to the ride,
but an integral mechanical ornament, rigged to consume attention and
return altered. He is patient. He appauds without hands, even
in stillness. He exerts an attention that feels physical, as
if the air around him vibrates with small surgical instruments.
I search for a native from the attention, and my
eyes find none. The midway is an island of empty
booths and slatted games. The fairest wheel stands like a
polite giant eye, blinking in a slow lip. The fog
thickens at my ankles are mistress that I have been
late to my own reckoning. The car becomes a mirror
without introducing itself. The glass is not cold. It breathes
with light and memory, warming and cooling as if the
image is behind it. Exhale at first. Our reflections are
not mine alone. They are the weights I have worn,
like habitual clothes. A cheap leather jacket hands on my
shoulders with the same shape it has taken on for years,
seems softened into familiar folds. A wristwatch with a crack
faced ticks stubbornly, the hands stuttering around my excuses with
patient and partial rhythm. A crumpled ticket, folded in a
pocket like a taller against consequence, glows faintly in the reflection,
proof that some things have been kept on purpose. The
mirror shows my hands pale under the midway lamps, fingers
rubbing together in the way I always do when the
world requires a decision. I cannot give a nervous choreography
I have performed in countless interviews, in doorways, at bedsides.
Then the flashes begin. They arrive without warning, not as photographspers,
live moments amplified, hyper real, and unbeerbly intimate. They do
not stay at the surface. They invade the glass, and
the glass transmits them into my chest, as if the
riders become an axe ray for omissions. I watched myself
in other rooms and other lights, a parade of failures
and quiet betrayals that I set it shut with safe
half truths. There is a child's homework left and done
while I chose silence, the pencil lying crescent shaped on
a page the syllabus of priorities I wrote to exclude responsibility.
There is a bedside where a small apology never found
its way off my tongue, where the space between two
people became another country because I had not taken the ferry.
There is a window I closed on in other's pleadings,
thinking the act would preserve what remained of my comfort.
Which image is so direct it feels like pressure applied
to a bruise. Each one hums with the counterfactuals I
have not permitted myself to consider. One scene stretches longer
than the others, hangs like a photograph in water. It
is a kitchen at dawn, the light thin and a
sort of grade that is not yet day. The air
is heavy with the smell of stale coffee and broun
TOAs to two odors that between them can rude a memory.
In that frame, I am smaller than I am now.
My voice a domestic thing, and my moth is an honest,
dangerous thing. I did not open someone's I searched mine
for a saving word, and I fold inside myself like paper,
making myself as thin as the excuse that will not
be examined further. Relief at the time was a cold
hand withdrawing from responsibility. The seam repeats, and in the repetition,
I see not only the moment, but the subtle multiplication
of its cost of life. To pen quietly on a
hinge cause I chose to protect a fragile piece with silence.
When memory presses like that is not catharsis. It is
an indictment. The ride does not offer absolution as a
prize for endurance. It refuses the child's trick of stuffing
fingers and ears and pretending the stone will go on elsewhere.
The life, laughing clwn shadow arrives in the reflection as
if he were on becoming the world around him, and
stepping into the glass is a creature of both performance
and truth. He tilts his head in a curiosity I
feel in the marrow of my burns, the kind of
til the surgeon gives when deciding where to cut. The
track ahead is no longer a straight line, but a
tangle lipsnotted into impossible geometries that multiply the same mistake
into a pattern. I have been hiding from the sort
of topology where escape routes carve him. Were to become
more of the same, the restraint is a geography. My
hands slide along their leather and find the ticket in
my pocket, warm from the memory and from my body,
I have carried the rement like a pulse, something that
marks the fat of me, to a place that carlawise forget.
A car creaks as it begins to move again, not
with the breathless acceleration of amusement, but with the resolution
that tightens the muscles along my spine. The world narrows
until the only real things are the cadence of my
own heart beat and the way the laughing clowns grin
is getting closer, as if proximity itself were a lever.
There is an edge, a piece of right architecture that
knows how to separate thought from air. We climb toward it,
and every cliff feels like a metronum, counting parts of
a life that added up to the shape. Each metallic
ratchet is allege a line. The lights blur into streaks
of teal and red film grain, curting memory with the
texture that makes everything feel older and nearer. At once,
I hold my breath because my body has rehearsed the
gesture for years. The breath is not for survival, but
for this sliver of control it might grant me before
the confessions demanded in stillness. At the top, the night
seems to thicken with possibility, in dread like syrup waiting
to run. At the peak, the world suspends, as if
it cannot decide whether to punish or to forgive. The
car tilts, and that tilt is an arithmetic, a question
rendered its geometry. The laughing clan leans over the edge
of the reflection. Now amberize bright, like embers that have
kept the same small hostility burning through decades of sure
His laughter is a college, a thin high Overlaida, cuts
through the low resonant hum under it. It falls around
the space and mikes e eighties mesalic. In its suspended instant,
I see not only the consequences of particular acts, but
the architecture of avoidance itself, the way a life can
be scaffolded by a hundred smaller missions. The shape of
the decision comes not as a thunderclap, but as a
fire pressure of inevitability. There is, for a single suspended
measure of time an access of choice to swallow the
truth again or let it loose. I have tried swallowing before.
Swallowing keeps a stain inside. It sustains the brittle piece
I have learned to call safety. Letting it loose promise
is a wound, perhaps a clean one, perhaps a ruin.
The difference is moral and corporeal, and small and enormous
old ponds. Both options carry baggage nearer off a shelter.
I unbent to ward honesty in a way I have
never managed before. The confession is not theatrical. It is
not a strain of dramatic words built for an audience.
It is a small, precise admission that feels like a
key turning in a lock. I name the omission withheld worrid,
the way I withdrew when someone needed me. Saying it
does not wash the slate clean, fractures it. The sound
of the admission is private, though its effects allowed in
the synapses of my life. The laughing clown inhales as
if testing something. His grin flexes into an expression that
almost approaches pity, and then retreats, the way practice cruelty
softens and reinvents itself to maintain its function. The drop
the follows the admission is an animal. It takes the
weight of the spoken truth and translates it into motion.
First suspended, Second, I become weightless, and all my regrets
are arranged around me as if on a carousel, each
one brilliant in detail, each one small and undeniable. The
car dives in a curve that is brilliant in the
way old machinery is precise, deliberate, without haste. A stomach
lurch is my body's On this response, theo Knott recoiled
that conscience will not let me deny. My hands clenched
the restraint until the leather strings was supurproduced. A small
streak of blood appears were cut from early life had
already left its mark the ride, reopening traces and allowed
to remain raw. There is no sudden forgiveness at the
bottom of the drop. Instead, the carnival shifts its stagecraft.
Mirrors shatter in slow emotion along the walls beside the track,
light shards fall and scatter, rowing fractured images of me
into new angles, multiplying the ways my life can be read.
The laughing clowns staggers, and in a brief break in
its movement, there is something human sized and terrible, a
glimpse of fatigue behind the ritual of patient stripped or
raw nerve parts of the stage memory peel away and
expose consequence of table overturned, a voice gunn still, a
door that never reopened. The ceremonial artfist that had turned
failing into spectacle loses a seam, and the thing beneath
becomes visible, not tidy, not redeemed, only exposed. I walk
through a corridor of cracked glass that smells of dust
and old candy. It is the smell of promises kept
in wrappers and of things left still. The sound is
a chorus of tiny metallic creaks and distant applause that
has the wrong rhythm for joy. The error is colder prey.
Dawn suggests a new day, but does not yet promise mercy.
My hands find a ticket in my lap, and it
is both the claim and a invoice. The laughing clown
watches from a slit of shadow, a silhouette that refuses
to approach and yet refuses to leave. Release, I realize,
is always conditional. The price is not measured in absolutes,
but in the perpetual witness of having spoken the truth
and still living inside the shape of its consequences. A
single ticket flutters to the wooden planks beneath my feet,
as if it had been waiting for me to notice.
It lands face up the prin dull, where my fingers
had smoothed it a hundred times. I folded back into
my fingers. Because some currencies are physical and immediate, it
is ought to feel an object contained moral weight. Yet
here in the way the paper takes the creases of
my hands, I recognize the economy of accountability. I step
onto the midway, and the world holds its breath. The
midway is empty except for the feigned outline of the
track and the distant ferris While that continues its polite turning.
The laughing clown remains in the architecture of shadow. He
is not gone, but he is shifted. His smile is smaller,
now contained, and in the smallest mile there is a
promise that he will observe ntsmother. He watches not with triumph,
but with the lingering attention of an entity who has
served as function. There is a strange kind of liberation
in knowing absolution is not a neat package. Some wounds
keep a permanence. Silhouette scours are not always tender in
their diminished form. The confession opens a door, yes, but
on the other side, the layout of life remains. I
am not unburdened. I am recalibrated to my own weight.
Whatever relief I feels edged with the knowledge that consequences
are not always reparable, that some doors do not swing
back open simply because truth has been spoken. I carry
a ticket like a ledger, and do not know whether
it will prove I have paid yourself. As a reminder
that payment is ongoing, Dawn creeps cross the midway with
a pale, teal haze and a distant to satisfied red
At the horizon. The lamps click as their ghosts blink out,
I fold a ticket into my palm and begin to
walk away. The boards creak under a practice calm. They
have been walked by reckless feet and cautious ones, and
they remember both. The sound of laughter threads the air
behind me, But it is thinner now, like a ribbon
that will not quite snap. It follows a thin for
red Thatton, says son being noticed, that promises the corridor
has not finished with me. I do not run. Running
would be familiar, a flight of refex Instead, I walk
with the small dignity of the person who has said
a truth and accepts its weight. There is a steadiness
to my steps that feels like an after taste of courage.
The carnival does not roar me back in. It leaves
me with a ticket, a memory reconfigured, and the laughter
that lingers like an after image. My hands smell faintly
of cotton, candy and old metal. My watch face is
cracked and still counts the moments forward. The leather jacket
on my shoulders is the same as before, but my
fingers no ho to fold the ticket differently. Now I
will live with the shape of what I have done.
I will not pretend it is gone. A quiet acceptance
settles that is not joyful, but authentic. I recognition that
I can carry, consequence and move. I think of the
work ahead in practical terms that feel almost mercantile. Beside
the high drama of the rye. There will be phone
calls that make me small, in the kind of apologies
that are clumsy of first words, testing old wounds for size.
There will be sentences I will have to form from
an unfamiliar vocabulary, stennness, availability, listening. I will have to
practice being present in ways that will feel tedious and
wholly at once. Repairs do not consist of a single
grand gesture the other patient ground in a labor of small,
repeated acts. Stitches fall not from a single suture, but
from steadiness, respect, in the willingness to keep paying the cost.
I do not imagine forgive us as a need arrival.
I imagine instead a series of afternoons cephasis sounded, a
conversation resumed, the slow return of trust as a wicked
house comes back to life under careful maintenance. The ticket
remains an oddly beautiful object, both the seat and a map.
I fold it into the crack near my watch, and
the metal warms against the paper, as if recognizing kinjip.
The mixture of the mechanical and the organic feels right
in this limill iro. When at last I look back,
the midway is quiet, a stage after the show, somewhere
beyond the ferris, while the sky is cleared enough to
shure a thin strip of pale blue. The laughing clown
is still there, applauding in a way that could be
habit or an acknowledgment that I had finally given him
the confession he had been waiting for. He remains a
punctuation mark, strict perhaps than comfort, but less absolute than doom.
I walk until my footsteps become my only metronome, the
rest of the world reduced to a steady beat beneath
the soles of my shoes. The last latter threads into
the wind, and the fog curls away from my feet
like a tide slipping back. There is no triumphant close,
no trump is to mark the moral turn. There is
a small, stubborn forwardness. That is all an honest life
can ask for. The corridor has not been kind, It's
been true. I keep the fold a ticket, and with
one last glance at the receding midway, I breathe and
move into a day that will be measured in the
patient accumulation of small, necessary acts. And that is the end.
Thank you for listening, and I will see you in
the next one.