Speaker 1: I woke to the taste of iron and the coal
press of seat belt webbing across my chest. The world
that found me was a rusting roller coaster car, midw
emptiness bred beneath a thin teal sigh, and sky fog
curled at my boots like a living thing, licking the
seams of the car and swallowing the rails behind us.
The lights of us stuttered, breathless and inconsistent, casting banded
shadows across my hands, and the old folded dick in
my pocket. My analog watch sat cracked against my wrist,
its second hand jammed in place a tiny, accurate accusation.
I slid my fingers along the letter of a jacket
I recognized, without remembering putting on the jacket, smell faintly
of stale cought and candy, and the graze of the rides.
I understood two things with a curious, immediate clarity. I
had 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 squeal. There was no one tending the ride, no
with light burning, only the echo of gears and a
patient mocking lefter far enough way to be a promise.
When my fingers traced the chain at my throat, I
found the sill of a ring tucked under my shirt,
on its thin cable wedding band that rode like a
secret as coal weight told me there would be a
life that had put it there, a life I could
count like a ledger of small betrayals and even smaller mouses.
Images rose behind my eyes the way sailor sea lant
through vargue, quick tuendential flashes that stung when they appeared,
and then slid under the surface again, a child's hand
slipping a sand door, a light hold as a kindness,
and the quiet litany of evenings I had spent not answering.
The car shudder at the sensation, the slow intake of
breath before something leaps. The track, which moments before it
had been in a notees skeleton of paint and rust,
now held a hungry motion. We move forward with a
kind of inevitability. Gravity lends to certain truths. Neon lights
cut through the fog in slat's teel, and then a
cruel distant red and 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 a slow, deliberate clap that was more measurement.
The sound rolled across metal and fog and landed in
my rips. I knew, some more, under shame and instinct,
that the applause was not for entertainment. It was the
sound of accusation. As we climbed the first flashy 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 and moments. I saw my own hands
in some one else's life, a hand that had staid it,
and then a hand that had let go. Time did
something dishonorable and compress an iron into a single heart beat.
Each contraction of the coaster tenned image into accusation. The
scene did not ask for forgiveness, It required recognition. When
the car leveled, a warp, winol on the side offered
a reflection, and with it a cruelty. Two versions of
myself once did 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 door whisoaked with rain, held plastered to
a face that had learnt to shut out the world.
The window split them like a scene being forced apart.
The rive wasn't he showing memory do so much as
it was 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 clan arrived in the ways nightmares of manners,
But Tilt' had a shadow that refused to obey the light.
He did not approach as much as occupied space, leaning
around the rim of the cart with lunky arms that
kept too much distance to be kind. His grim look,
carved metal teeth set in a mouth that had rustaines
bleeding down. He wore a pocket watch that wouldn't tick,
and a bell tied to afraid ribbon that chimed once dissonant,
and then when the clown moved everything else, the fark,
the lights, the echoes of the mid we move 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
slaughtered into an accused tory bean in the suspended breath
of right produced an image so immediate and cruel I
could have sworn it have been planted in the hinges
of the car. I saw a small body in a doorway,
and beyond it the slow closing over 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 men 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 rawness a quick pully
of secretive fibers, and then the ride let me fall.
The fall did not bring absolution. The looks build us
down into brief hush that smelt like the under billy
of the midway, all an old sugar in a trace
of something metallic like memory. In the pores I scanned
for exit, there were doors where they should not have been,
stairways that ended in fog. 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
map that the coaster could read. Each crease was a sentence,
Each tear was punctuation. I thumbed it as if it
would open into a confessional. The cow clicked forward, as
if appeased for the moment, and the clown retreated into
the fog with a wrinkled key swinging at his hip.
He left a bell tolling behind him. The sound of
a crawled across my tea a stub of ticket. It
fluttered into my lap in the motion of his leaving.
The paper was damp with the residue of some impossible
do the air around me lightened like spun sugar, then
turn 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
wind that llowed air in and offered no healing salve.
We climbed again. The ride shaped, each just sent into
a question. The second re enactment unfold in a wash
of distorted carousel music slowed and then pitched down until
the notes sat like exhausted bodies. I was thrown into
a scene set in a hospital corridor for recent lights,
buzzing or clinical indifference. I watched my own face and
another's hands paled. How over the work of choosing not
to notice. I had chosen a small numbing incomans to
look away, until looking away itself became a habit that
cult a vigid harm. Each drop pammered the reality of
those choices into my bone. The coaster made me inhabit
consequences with the same intimacy had reserved previously for denial.
At the middle of the ride, to window again split
the two cells, 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 legered in the undone things
I owed to people whose faces were now too fragile.
The rider's machinery would not let me file the ledger
away if false numeration one sacramental tally after another, until
the number felt less like arithmetic and more like a sentence.
The clang of changed under high, a natural chime of
the clown as bell signaled the approach to the police.
The ride had been leading to all on. The Cau's
ascent became a slow grind, each notch more deliberate than mercy.
The mid was shrunk into a wash of pale cyron
and crimson book, the fairous will looming like a watchful people.
The laughing clown appeared to shoulder height and leaned over
me with an intimacy that was more surgical than theatrical.
The loop ahead was steep and angry. The light narrowed
into a single slit that cut across my face like
a blade. The clowns lay a voice high warpedlufter ride
over an undertone of humpoled 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 warn 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 it wanted, with
the delicacy 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 clapped once.
The sound of roberated through the car and the rails.
It felt like a verdict being written in Whittink. When
the car dove, the release was not mercy but movement.
The rush of air carried away heat and nothing else.
The world blowed into tail in red streaks, and the
reflection in a window showed only a face that had
been stripped of some USUS 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 a shelf. The ride coal not finished.
There was an aftermath of deceptive calm for a heartbeat.
The car settled on to straightaway, and my heart beat
tried to sink to the rhythm of the track. Relief
arrived in a small nave, packaged the idea the confession
might have been enough. I reached for that idea like
a drowning puss in reaching for a boy. The midway
opened under a slight, an empty ocean, washed out boosts
and broken prize racks lying in sleeping rows. But even
as the fog then, the emptiness did not feel like peace.
It felt like the space left when something vital has
been removed. The roof of the midway seemed to tilt inward,
atheater collapsing its stage upon me. The ticket in my
pocket felt heavier. The cruise had deepened with some new punctuation.
The crack beltled suddenly, and the cland silhouette slipped back
into the fog. He left the jack in the box
key behind in such a way that it landed precisely
at my feet, gleaming with the same bad promise as before.
The cock clicked 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 and filed, but the ride's architecture suggested a
cataloging rather than mercy. The coaster wanted more the belchand
again in a way that felt like a punctuation marked
turning internal egis. The clan toward that next rise felt
longer than previous assents. The track fed me images in
a rythen like a surge, AND's steady incision establish revealed demand.
There was a thought approached in the back of my
mind at absolution was a statu errand and not when
granted that some punishments persist until the structure that allowed
the harm is dismantled. The ride did not allow for
dismantling at off a trial after trial, re enactment after
re enactment, until the person you were once comfortable being
would either be undone or remade with a new kind
of honesty. When the car finally rolled to a stop.
It was not an ending truck. Curve then fell away
into a distance that shimmered like heat. The midward below
looked both ancient and newly manufactured in its cruelty. In
my pocket, the ticket felt like a bookmark between chapters.
I was dimly relieved and more acutely exhausted. I had
been stripped of volutions and not given anything resembling absolution.
The laughing clam's last smile was caught in my memory
the way of photograph catches motion, flat and undeniable. He
had not promised release, He had promised recognition. The distinction
was small and furious. I stepped from the car as
the fog moved around my boots like a tide. The
cold air had ever exposed place on my face, and
I became aware, with a sharp and almost pleasant astonishment,
that confession had made its base in me 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 turtle. The ticket in my pocket
was still folded. It seemed mudged into forms that no
longer readers comfort. I pressed my thumb over its crease.
A private gesture and a small vow. Somewhere beyond the midway,
the ferris 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 seeing, but seeing as not
the same as absolution, and the clan 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 ticket stayed folded in my pocket,
and the watch on my wristk kept it single, stubborn
stop beat. There was one last small sound as I
moved toward the shadows, a thin bell hole, like a
punctuation at the end of an overheard sentence. The sound
didn't you promise an end? It hinted only that the
ryet was patient, that whatever had been excavated would be
cataloged and returned to in time. The laughing clowns laughter
unfolled behind me, fat and slow and satisfied, and the
fog curled once more round my feet, as if to
greet an old friend. I kept my hand over the
diket and let the cold of the night settle into
me a compact of memory ready to carry forward. The
midway slights blinked in rhythm with 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 thought came like an echo, and I
folded that small modern compulsion into the larger, older work
to look to naintact. The watch did not move, the
ticket did not infall. The Rye continued to exist as
a place wit tress were extracted under the indifferent clerk
of a clown's grin. When I turned away, the first
wheel less solhwet lingered in the corner of my vision
like a pupil watching. The midwa exhaled and the fog
swallowed the tracks we had traversed. I walked into the
damp night with my pockets full or 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 spow chimed faintly, as if to mark the moment.
And the last thing I felt before the midwave sworbed
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 a fogin under the teal
sun and the red accent lights, was not yet given.
I woke inside motion, without remembering that my eyes opened,
though was only the dactile certainty of the restrained biting
into my chest, the thin metal strap whispering a memory
of cold and salt, and the slow mechanical in hail
of the midway wind. Teal and yon light hummed like
distant lungs. Red accents punctured the dark, like warnings fog
killed at my ankles, or low tide of miss us,
melt of stale cotton, candy and rust somewhere beyond my vision.
Affairs will clicked in a patient, grinding turn. The urgent,
absurd flutter of a photograph 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 was often 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, tilt to the jaw, a fleck
of paint 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 watched. I felt compulsion, as
if some slow, insistently mechanical thing had set its bearings
and would not be rotted. The koaster shuddered and lurched forward,
and the world collapsed into movement. The first drop from
through my teeth, like an electrical confision. Light became narrative.
The car tunnult into a memory that smelt of dish,
soap and sunlight. A quiet kitchen where a mug chipped
at the lip, sat on a counter like a punctuation mark.
A young avert of me moved silent and quicker round
that space, fingers skimming a folded ticket left in a
jacket pocket. I watched from too close and not nearly
close enough. Details anchored time. The munk's chip for rim,
the exact grain of a wood table, the dull ring
of my wash tap in the counter, each one a
tether to a decision I had made and then practiced forgetting.
At the edge of the kitchen memory, the laughing clime
manifested patient and ornamental catalog in omission with a small
rich atult of its head. It did not announce itself
with thunder or violence. It stood in the doorway as
if it had always belonged there, its costume a rugged
ring estra coat, and the crack paint of its face
catching the light like a threat. Its grin was a
map of rust. Metal teeth glinted where lip should be.
It did not speak. It did what the evening require.
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 warp window beside
me turned into a truth telling surface. It did not
mirror my present, but reapled in argument. I took timewards often.
The pain showed two versions of me, one walking away
with shoulders sealed, and the other remaining face lack with
the attempt to hold to responsibility. The frames overlapped and
ran 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 our private acts become public when they are reflected
enough times. The sight forced a recognition I could no
longer evade. There had been a moment when both atits
were visible, and I had chosen the less painful path.
There was a peculiar violence in being made to stand
inside the motion at birth, the consequence with each loop
and trop the costish memory to present, overlay to overlay.
I fumbled at the restrained on impulse, the cheap analog
watch at my wrist, scraping the metal with a noise
like a finger nail on bone, searching for an eggsit
that would not be there. The band hidden beneath my shirt,
a small silver took in more and more of phenoochaen
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 crumpletick in a pocket,
and each item became evidence that the past had indeed
been kept close enough to be called to ac count.
The laughing clown kept time with the ritualistic applause that arrived,
not a sound at first, but as pressure tidening in
the co anern of the air. When the applause broke
into noise, it was multi laid, a sickly hid chuck
upbraided with a low sign hum that seemed to terminate
from the rider'sself. The clown's eyes glowed amber with flicks
of red at people's focused with the patience so intense
that it felt like physical suction. It wandered the perimit
of the memory, like a curator at a gallery of
my feelings, cataloging each omission 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 opened
like a saw, a roadside confrontation beneath the menacing sky
where rained started, and the world shortened into one violent
defining decision. As the car climbed into a slow, stomach
sick 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
reaching for me, the way mud had accepted a small
ring and kept it. Confession was not tender here, it
was a scalpel. I moved through the reenactment, and exactly
as my memory demanded, every flinch and devosion observed by
presents that kept precise cant. The midpoint 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. Two versions of me replayed an argument in
which I was both actor and spectator. One face read
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 ledger, making the
argument into an exhibit, with me as the reluctant centerpiece.
The knowledge that someone, something was curating my worst moments
made the whole rise cerremonel I found their shame grows
in theaters. Attempts at escape became grammatical errors in a
story written in metal. I rattled a bolt, some fussed
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, the sideways, gap in the railing,
a rusted maintenance ladder, at the impossible suggestion of a
path descending into fog. Each false exit closed as the
ride moved on, replaced by overlay images of all wedding
band stuck in mud, and the ghostly outline of the
person I had ron stepping across the road and passing
through the car like a cut at The laughing clowns
of polls recorded each frailed attempt with the precision of
a stenographer, taking short end of my panic. Pressure bells slowly,
as the coaster's chain worked the car toward a higher crest,
sound dropped out, until the only noises left were my
pulse and the faint sound of warped corn, of all
music stretching like elastic. The ascent was long enough for
breathing to become a deliberate act inhale, hold, register, release.
Each breath framed a piece of the past that I
had not wanted to say out loud. The ride made
me act the moment I had flirt. It posed me
on a small stage where the lines were my gestures,
and the audience was a clam with a grin cut
into its flesh. At the apex, the world became a
fused image of then and now. The memory overlaid onto
the prison 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, the small avoidance
of eye contact, the way my hand tight and on
a steering wheel, played forward and slow, accusing lops. The
naming of this in arrived as a physical thing. It
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 from
me Instead true for re arranged sensation inside my body
and made disbelief implausible. All the half formed excuses folded inward,
and the kernel of what I had done sat exposed
and naked. The laughing clowns stepped forward. At the moment
of that recognition is as brightened as if elimination were
a personal pleasure. It did not pity or judge in
the human way it exhibited. The confession became a visible object,
a smear in the air, a dimmer that hung above
my lap, and pulse with a light like a heart. Understress,
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 carl like projectors. The face of
the betrayed person flashed without dialogue. A hand extended and
then retracted, a cut of vigodbye that was never spoken.
The wedding band, it small silver ring worn more often
hidden undercloth than on a finger, left a visible wound
in the palm of my hand. And 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, it re arranged what
was owed. The ride made me see consequences as multiplicative
rather than singular. The midway unfurled beneath the descent, and
a ghost of the person I had heart walked spectral
and specific through stalls that smelled of viron and jugar.
The clown flanked the boulevard like a master of ceremonies
at a funeral. Its applause kept the pace of my
panic and catalog my failures as if they were exhibits
in a meseum of my life. As momentum led away,
the cost looad in the world congealed into a new shape.
The midway grew emptied, not through absence, but by selection.
Figures that had once orbited my memory receded, leaving behind
ARTIFACTX pinned with small, invasive precision. A single ticket found
its weight to my lap, as if the ride had
manufactured a souvenir to marketer transaction. The laughing clown retreated
with a sob promise. Soon into its posture, the way
it turned its back suggested that the reckoning had not
been completed, but merely divert The clown spelt tied with
a frayed ribbon, chimed like a closing argument, small and inevitable.
I sat there with the ticket in my hands, the
film grained sun of the midway leaking into pray dawn,
and felt hollowing that felt like a recalibration. The car
rested on a broken loop, a segment of trucks, suspended
above a place that had once been festive and was
now only functional. I understood then that survival of a
ride did not equal survival of the self. The engine
of the police 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 me.
Took continuity, not yet ruptured. The cheap analog watched with
its cracked face, the crumpled ticket folded into a pocket,
the signature small silver ring hidden 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
eye scanned for exits, as they always had, making the
motion of seeking a refex 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 Kan's figure receded into the fog with measured,
poppet like steps, which fratchured face watched me until the
curve of the midway swallowed it. I could not tell
whether the retreat was a mercy. The ticket lay in
my palm, damp 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 votive,
a small, undeniable record that something had been named. When
a car finally came to arrest, it offered no ceremonies
of release. The hardness unlatched of the mechanical sigh, and
I moved with the slow guarantee of someone whose muscle
memory had been interrupted by shark. 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 in different morning. The midway was an empty stage.
I left it, the ticket pressed 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 identify as can both condemn and define us.
The laughing clown to pause still echoed in the seams
of my hearing, like a last measure. For a long
time after, I would imagine at keeping temper with my heartbeat.
The ride taught me a terrible arithmetic, that the naming
of us and simplifies it into a thing that can
be cataloged, and that cattle logging does not equate to forgiveness.
The midway had returned to it quiet. The decision had
not been undone. The ticket sat in my pocket is
a promise in the threat. Some were done the track,
the coaster prepared other cars and other passengers, and I
imagine them climbing toward their owneveexes 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 their confession,
while necessary, was not a currency that raised consequence. The
rider had given me clerity, as one gives a wound
clean edge, precise, painful, and oddly helpful. The midway receded
behind me in fog and film grain, and the virus
will continue to turn like a quiet in different judge.
The ticket in my pocket burned with possibility. The ghoster
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 and perhaps the courage
the ride had shown me to practice. Outside the world
was a prayer dawn that smelt like metal and sugar.
I kept walking until the light stained and the fog
found new ground to rest on, carrying the memory of
the ride like thin nature my chest. The laughing clowns
grin had receded into the midting dark, but its promise
that the reckoning was not finished followed like a quiet
decker teathered 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 deep breaks are 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 rise first,
a low tide that slides over the rails and claims
the ground between the coaster's rotted ties. It moves like
something of patient intent, curling around my butts and seeping
under the strap that bites into my chest. There is
no tendon, no bright cheery sign, only that dam neons
mered haze, and the ferros wheel slow, indifferent turning. I
fold my fingers until my knuckle whiten and the material
of the restraint groans in the warp metal. I catch
a grin that does not belong to me. The grin
small as a reflection at first then grows with the distant,
distorted lafa tugs at the edges of my hearing. The
compulsion is immediate and archaic. A thing inside me levers
as if to turn a key I have been carrying
for years. The ride will not let me down. The
restraint locks like a mouth closing. Heat flares across my
collar bone where the metal presses and the cheap analg
watch while my wrist stud against my palmmet's face. A
spider web of hairline cracks. I breed shallowly tasting a
metallic turn 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 warp chrome
blinks and musters are 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. A
car pulls away with a metallic creek that sounds like
a lawn suffering frut net Broaden's overhead, a patchwork of
teal and cyan torn by the skeletal furroush wheel. Each
rivet passing under the car froze as sliver of memory
at me, a kitchen table, lit ron, the hollow of
a bedroom, the sound of a life continuing elsewhere while
I looked away. Those visions arrived not as scraps, but
as fully dressed rooms, noise and smell, and the unwonted
intimate details of things I had imagined. Id lawn beared.
This scent is slow and surgical. A rivet a flash,
the smell of stale coffee in burnt sugar. Another rivet,
a flash, a small face turned away that she had
been met. 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 over exposed, silin
bleach at the edges, red like the smear of a wound.
The laughing clown stands at the side of the track
in a coat that is theatrical and decayed, hand on
a warp jack in the box key. He applauds with slow,
mediculous palms, each clap a punctuation mark I did not ern.
He is patient as a ledger and as relentless as rust.
The smile painted on his face as a map of fractures.
The pain flakes like dry skin. When he tilts his head,
his eyes catch the red lights and become poles of
orange brown fire. He is ritual in a moving form.
He oxtrates the memory like a conductor stepping through a dirge.
At the apex to weld unravels into a bed of
glassy reflections. The window beside me curves and warps the
light until the one facer recognized splits into two. One
version of me sits stiff hands, folded, the practiced armor
of a person who answers late night calls with soft
apologies in the right tone. The other version is unraveling,
neck exposed, malt s lack as flooded. The reflection that
smiles is the one who managed the eggs. It routs
from blame and kept the explanations tidy. The reflection that
dissolves is the ledger that names a debt. Those two
faces do not reconcile. They argue with their silence, and
the mirror presses evidence against my teeth. I try to
map where the memories begins in an end, but the
ride pulls him through me in a sequence that makes
geography of guilt. A domestic scene becomes a carnival tabou.
My hands move in a flash toward a stove knob
left and watched, and the ferris wheels lights taken the
hallow of a child's ned light. The past is not
a film running behind the carnival. It is woven into
the wood of the car, into the bolts, into the
ferriic tastes at the back of my throat. The laughing
clan arranges these flashes like trophies on a shelf. He
lays them out with a hand that is almost tender,
and I feel the use of a praisal titan. The
climb is a slow disclosure. I see the day I
left a table empty, the day I turned down a
pleap because I could not carry another person's weight. Each
reveal is intimate and immediate object. I could name with
my eyes hands that moved with me and them. There
is no distance to these memories. They are tactile, as
the strap biting into my sternum. The car breeze as
if it too can remember. Each assent is an exposition,
and the coaster becomes a confessional booth without a booth,
an altar without a priest. The laughing clan does not
offer absolution. He catalogs when the car pauses at the
sum of those along out silence, their tastes like the
path before life changing news. Overhead, the fairess wheel cast
a skeletal shadow that bleeds red into the fog here
spended 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
in a way that demands a form of payment. The
warp window gives me two selves at once, one who
has practiced denial into a comfortable garment, and one who
cannot hold the scene together any longer. The first drop
tears out of the quiet like a question of nurse softening.
Gravity becomes a confession in motion. As the car tips
in the world in verts. A memory that had been
a dolly becomes a full body sensation. I see the
moment where I turned away. It is compressed into a
perfect sharpen, yet a figure at the threshold, a small
pleading hand, my foot choosing a path that left the
other behind. The memory plays in the physical space of
the car as if projected onto canvas. The laughing clown watches,
setting small rusted bells around the scene in a careful
ritual placement. He smiles like a ledger, finally balanced. A
tunnel we slide through is frayed with red accents, a
throat flung open. The projection of a trail is relentless.
It reenacts choices as if I were being judged in
real time, showing motives I had labeled with kind of
words and exposing the cruel practical reasons beneath them. The
sound of a car on the track becomes a heartbeat
that matches my own. An industry echo syncs with it
until I cannot tell where the ride mechanisms end and
my pulse begins. The images are not metaphors, They are records.
There is no plea for mitigation. The air in the
tal tastes of all theater glue and the faint, sickly
sweetness of cotton candy. The laughing Clown walks the edges
like a curator, ensuring the displays perfect. At the window
or warp, reflection shows me pressing my forehead to coal 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 spons
stores about circumstance and by a timing is present and articulate.
The part of me that felt the small, intimate cruelty
is tender and raw. The battern emerges a loopoor avoidance,
brush calamity, and the attempt to avoid that futility multiplies
the damage. The realization is not a lightning bolt, but
a slow corrosion that exposes the final wire. I taste
the iron of tears. The laughing Clown's applause is a
soft percussion beneath everything. The train dives into the loop
in the world narrows to a point where the Laughing
Clan stands closer than he ever has, a cathedral of
pain unburst. He leans over to restraint with a grin
coved as though with a till men for metal. The
world condenses to the meeting of his face in my chest.
He does not speak. Speech would be too clumsy. Instead,
he presses in antique pocket watch into the hollow of
the car between us. Its second hand is stuck a
seized drum meat that measures only the space in which
I must make a choice. The demand is clear, without
the need for syllables name it would be swallowed. There
is no heroism in a moment. Only a raw 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 common room, pressed together pard at me fashions a
plausible future in silence, a life without admission, an attempt
to tuck the ledger back into it pocket. The other
part knows the same ritual every time. The laughing clown
closes his hand around 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 hot coal. 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 ahaled by the metal
around my lungs. It is not a tidy paton. 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 clans grin widens
in that sick, delighted way is something that has expected
this for a long time. The watch's second hand takes
once more and begins to move. The aftermath is not cleanting.
The car jerks as if to eject the memory, and
I feel myself thrown forward as an image of a
ticket lifts from the seat and pins itself there like
a math. The world rearranges the midway tilts into a
version of mourning that is not morning and not quite night.
There is a painful, ambiguous easing that visits me, like
a phantom lim relief that is not release. The track
breaks ahead, as if the world cannot tolerate the full
opening of absolution, and gives way into a damaged silence.
I land on the slope of ruin, where the rails
are broken and the car less, like a confession half
at it. Falling afterward is different from fear. It is
smaller and more intimate. The feeling that follows my surrender
is like the tightening of a muscle that had resisted
motion for years, and finally yields the breath that comes
as 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. Cross the midway,
the Laughing Clam folds into the crowd of the perfect
measured steps of a predator that knows his hunt 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 wheel soil. It looms like a ghost.
Dawn seeps in with pale teel see on that diluts
the red accents into something like an old bruise. I
move with a cautious tenderness, the way a patient moves
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, as grin splits the air into the suggestion
of repetition. There is a brittleclm that comes after such
a ritual. It is not peace. It is a pause
in a rhythm that once felt relentless. The midway smells
of rain that has not yet fallen, a film of
dawn fog that leaves everything damp 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 a scapegoat.
The world rearranges around the small object until it looks
like a sentence I have been assigned to carry. I
walk the perimeter of the ride, because leaving the 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 move
through the midb like shadows of obligation, faces blurred by
the film grain of memory. The laughing clime moves within
the crud like a mockery of ordinary life and his soul.
Wet is the last thing I see as I head away.
At 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, neat 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 wait for
the next person with the ledger. There is an inevitability
to it that is as old as regret itself. I
leave the midway with the dawn staining the fagged, pale
tail cyan. The rails behind me are fractured and beautiful,
an arrangement of metal and memory. The pain in my
chest loosens just enough to let me breathe, and in
the small space I understand the terrible economy. The ride
in 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 folded into
the place where I keep the small ring honest Jane,
and feel for a moment both lighter and more exposed.
The sound of distant applause drifts back through the fog,
deliberate slow clapping that could be a memory of the
laughing clown tucking away another story. I step out of
the hallow the midway, and into a welt 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 loop 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 clown
melts into the crowd, and the ride sits like a
beast on all bones, waiting its patient, inevitable turn. I
move away, the ticket warm in my pocket, the Ferris
wheels still turning, and the taste of cod and candy
and rust lingering is a promise that the night may
may one day loop again. The coaster stops with a
grievance it has held like a secret metal teeth of
chain and russ clake. And then stillness spreads like a skin.
The world tilts into a silence so full it harms.
It is a silence of something that has been waiting
its turn. At the hinge of along run out consequence,
fog curls at my ankles, and the midway below becomes
an island of lamps and shadows are half remember from
other lives, places my feet might once have known, and
refuse to tread again. I feel the restrained bite into
my collar bone, the leather strap, a small certain 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,
faint and crooked. A laugh, filtered, distorted patient wraps itself
around the rails, as if to bind me tighter. I
have ridden roller coasters before, I understand the mechanics of surrender.
I have leaned into momentum the way some people lean
on luck. I have let exhilaration decide, handed myself over
to physics and the ache for a rush that makes
the world declare itself real 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 at every
assent promises a recollection. Every dep rearranges what I have
chosen to keep under the bed of my life. At
the apex, the cur rocks like a throat clearing. The
laughing clown leans in the void below like a statue
poised speak. His grin is not merely an expression, but
an accusation worked in the bone. There is something architectural
about the way he is placed, not incidental to the ride,
but an integral mechanical ornament, ricked to conceal ume attention
and return it altered. He is patient. He applauds without hands,
Even in stillness. He exerts an attention that feels physical,
as if the are around him vibrates with small surgical instruments.
I search for an exit from the attention, and my
eyes find none. The Medway is an island of empty
booths and slatted games. The ferris wheel stands like a
polite giant eye, blinking in a sloop. The fog thickens
at my ankles and whispers 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,
a memory, warming and cooling, as if the image is
behind it. Exhale at first of reflections are not mine alone.
There are the weights I have worn, like habitual clothes.
A cheap leather jacket hangs on my shoulders with the
same shape it has taken on for years, seems softened
into familiar folds. A wristwatch with a cracked fastick stubbornly,
the hands stuttering around excuses with patient and partial rhythm.
A crumple ticket folded in a pocket like a talisman
against consequence, closed 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 the nervous choreography I have performed in
countless interviews, in doorways, at bedsides. Then the flashes begin.
They arrive without warning, not as photographs, but as lived moments, amplified,
hyper real and unbearably 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 emissions. I watch myself in other rooms
and other lights, a parade of failures and quiet betrayals
that I suture shop with safe half truths. There is
a child's homework left undone while I chose silence. The
pencil lion crescent shaped in the 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.
With a space between two people became another country because
I had not taken the ferry. There is a window
I closed on another's pleadings, thinking the act would preserve
what remained of my comfort. Each image is so direct
it feels like pressure applied to a bruise. Each one
hums with the count of actuals I have not permitted
myself to concent. One scene stretches longer than the others,
hangs like a fur of graphin water. It is a
kitchen at down. The light then and a sort of
grade that is not yet day. The air is heavy
with the smell of stale coffee and burned toast. Two
odors that between them can rude memory. In that frame,
I am smaller than I am now. My voice a
domestic thing, and my mouth is an honest, dangerous thing.
I did not open someone's eyes search 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
with drawing from responsibility. The scene repeats, and in the repetition,
I see not only the moment, but the subtle multiplication
of its cost of life. Tipping quietly on a hinge
calls I chose to protect a fragile piece with silence.
When memory presses like that, it is not catharsays, 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 storm will go
on elsewhere. The laughing clown shadow arrives in the reflection
as if he were in becoming the world around him
and stepping into the glass as a creature of both
before Mormans and truth. He tilts his head in a
curiosity I feel in the marrow of my bones, the
kind of tilt surgeon gives when deciding where to cut
the TRACKA heade is no longer a straight line, but
a tangle loopsnotted into impossible geometries that multiply the same
mistake into a pattern. I have been hiding from, the
sort of topology where escape route's curve in are to
become more of the same. The restraint is a geography.
My hands slide along the leather and find a ticket
in my pocket. Warm from the memory and from my body.
I have carried that rennant like a pulse, something that
marks the fact of me to a place that could
otherwise forget. The 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 weight of laughing Clown's
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 thawt from there. We climb toward it,
and every click feels like imaginum, counting parts of a
life that added up to the shape. Each metallic ratchet
is a ledger line. The lights blur into streaks of
teal and red film, gray and coating memory with a
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 the sliver of control it might grant me before
the confession is demanded. In a 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 cartelts, and that tilt is an arithmetic, a question
rendered as geometry. The laughing clan leans over the edge
of the reflection, now ambrose bright like embers that have
kept the same small hostility burning three decades of show.
His laughter is a college, a thin high overlay. The
cuts through the low resonant homonderit. It folds around the
space and makes the ATase metallic. In that suspended instant,
I see not only the consequences of particular acts, but
the architecture of avoidance itself. The why alive can be
scaffolded by a hundred small emissions. The shape of the
decision comes not as a thunderclap, but is the fine
pressure of inevitability. There is for a single, suspended measure
of time and axis of choice to swallow the truth again,
I'll let it loose. I have tried swallowing before. Swallowing
keeps the 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 ol
at once. Both options carry baggage. Neither offers shelter. I
am bend toward honesty in a way I have never
managed before. The confession is not theatrical. It is not
a strain of traumatic words spilled for an oudience. It
is a small, besize admission that feels like a key
turning in a lock. I name the omission, but withheld
word the way I withdrew when someone needed me. Saying
it does not wash the sleigh clean. It fractures it.
The sound of the admission is private thoughts effects so
loud in the synapses of my life. The laughing clown
inhales as if tasting 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 that follows the admission is an animal. It
takes the weight of the spoken truth and translates it
into motion. For suspended second, I become witless, and all
my regrets are arranged around me as if on a carousel,
each one brilliant in detail, each once more and undeniable.
The car dives in a curve that is brilliant in
the way of machinery, is precise, deliberate, without haste. A
stumbach cloach is my body's honest response. The knot it
recoil that conscience will not let me deny. My hands
clinch the restraint until the leather strings whisper produced. A
small streak of blood appears where a cut from earlier
life had already left it to mark the ride, reopening
traces I had allowed to remain raw. There is no
sudden forgiveness at the bottom of the drop. Instead, the
carnival shifts its stage craft mirrors shatter and slow motion
along the walls beside the track, light, charge, fall and scatter,
vurring fractured images of me into new angles, multiplying the
ways my life can be read. The laughing clan staggers,
and in a brief break in his movement, there is
something human, size and terrible, a glimpse of fatigue behind
the ritual of patient stripped to a raw nerve. Parts
of the stage memory peel away and expose consequence of
table overturned, a voice gun still, a door that never reopened.
The ceremonial artifice 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 stale. The sound is a course of tiny
metallic creaks and distant applause that has the wrong rhythm
for joy. The error is colder. Pray Dawln suggests a
new day, but does not yet promise mercy. My hands
find a ticket in my lap, and it is both
a claim and an invoice. The Laughing Clan watches from
a slight of shadow, a silhouette that refuses to approach,
and the 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 that 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. Land's face up,
the print dull, where my fingers had smithed a hundred times.
I fold it back into my fingers. Because some currencies
are physical and immediate. It is odd to feel an
object contain moral weight. Yet here in the way to
paper takes the creases of my hands, I recognize the
economy of accountability. I step on to the midway, and
the world holds its breath. The midweight is anti except
for the faint outline of the track and the distant
fairest will that continues its polite turning. The Laughing come
remains in the architecture of shadow. He is not gone.
But he has shifted. His smile is smaller, now contained,
and in the small smile there is a promise that
he will observe nott smother. 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 any package. Some winds keep
a permanence, ill wet scours are not always tender in
their diminished form. The confession opens the door, yes, but
on the other side, the layout of life remains. I
am not unburdened. I am recalibrated to my own weight.
Whatever a really for feel is edterate to knowledge the consequences,
and not always reparable that some doors do not swing
back open simply because truth has been spoken. I carry
the ticket like a ledger and do not know whether
it will prove I have paid or serve as a
reminder that payment is ongoing. Dawn creeps across the midway
with a pale, til haze and a distant to satisfied
red At the horizon, the lamp's click as a ghost
blink out. I fold the 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
thread that insists on being noticed, that promises the corridor
has not finished with me. I do not run. Running
would be familiar a flight of refects. Instead, I walk
with the small dignity of a 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 a 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 jack
on my shoulders is the same as before, but my
fingers know how 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 except
in 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 ride. There will be
phone calls that make me small, in the kind of
apologies that are clumsy at first, words testing old winds
for size. There will be sentences I will have to
form from an unfamiliar vocabulary steadness, 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. They are the patient, granular labor
of small, repeated acts. Stitches fall not from a single suture,
but from steadness, respect, in the willingness to keep paying
the cost. I do not imagine forgiveness as a neat arrival.
I imagine stared a series of athenines, surfaces sanded, a
conversation resumed, the slow return of trust as a weathered
house comes back to life under careful maintenance. The ticket
remains an oddly beautiful object, both a receipt and a map.
I fold it into the crack near my watch in
the metal warms against a paper as a recognizing kinship.
The mixture of the mechanical in the organic, feels right
in this liminal ire. When at last I look back,
the midway is quiet, a stage after the shore, somewhere
beyond the ferris while the sky has cleared enough to
show 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 have finally given him
the confession he had been waiting for. He remains a
punctuation mark, strict or perhaps in 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 throwds
into the wind, and the fog curls away from my
feet like a tad 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
has been true. I keep the folder ticket, and with
one last glance at the receding midway, I breed and
move into a data will be measured in a patient,
Accumulation of small necessary acts