Speaker 1: Hollo. I molkned stories all the time. Glad you are here,
Let's get into it. I came to with sugar on
my lips, in a fog so cold it felt like memory.
The air was lacquered in tea and sand. Light thined
into film. Grain, taste and color arranged themselves into something
like a map. I had once followed, and then mislaid.
I had a ticket stub folded into the palm of
my coat, the paper's fibers softened by a thumb I
did not remember using. For a long, dizzy breath, I
listened for a heartbeat that belonged to a world outside
that miston found only the distant, metallic song of a
wheel turning. Somewhere beyond the haze, A cotton candy cut
sat where a dozen other cuts might have been, all
of them swallowed by that harsh It belonged to me
and did not. The first thing the cut did was
offer itself, like an apology. A single bolt burned above it,
hallowed in fog, and the vendors shadow fell across jaws
that glinted like trapman's. Each jar held something different, a
sliver of laughter, perhaps by the smell of a kitchen
that no longer existed, and they caught the light and
multiplied it into thin, private constellations. My hand went to
the ticket without asking. The stubb was warm and smelled
faintly of sponge, sugar, and something metallic beneath it, an
eye and tang I could not place. I rubbed the
stub between thumb and finger in emotion I had practiced
for years, the small lettergy to convince me I knew
the route, even when the streets re arranged themselves. There
was an urge in a resistible motion that pulled me forward,
like tides brin cliffs to themselves. The bulb hummed with
the low drone that seemed to make the fog vibrate,
and the vendor tilted his head in a way that
mixed patients with calculation. He wore painted along the jaw
like a smile that would not stop. His coat was
a faded pageant teal cyan trimes, acid pink smears, theatrical
read the kind of color that looked better from a distance.
He moved with the slow economy of someone accustomed to small,
deliberate presentations. He proffered a toft of sponge sugar as
if offering a lit candle to a muff. I reached
up before I could wait whither I wanted to. The
sugar was warm when it touched my finger tips, as
for its compressing sweet into the space between thumb and forefinger.
The first strand a pinch tasted like childhood waxwooden falls,
and a sun that lay heavy on an old porch
I could no longer find on any map. It melted
into an image I could not yet name, an outline
of something small and precise, folding itself into a shape
that tightened my throat. The vendor watched, He did not speak,
He did not have to. The first taste opened a
door that had been fitted to measure my avoidance. The
spongehow got dissolved into memory like salt, into a wound.
Not a full room, not a full voice, just a small,
particular gesture, a child's hand, a scrape of tiny shoes
on a threshold, some light striking a freckled cheek, and
making the dust in the air look like a private snowfull.
The image sharpent and then blurred, always a fragment, always
with edges. I kept trying to soften. I chewed as
if shoe might make the edge less. Cutting the motion
only slews more detail into place. The vendor tilted his head,
and the clock in his pocket ticked too slowly. Later,
soft oscillating came and went like a tide. It was
not long before the cutten ferdge yielded more than texture
from the sugar. Something could dance smaller than me, smaller
than the life I had thought mine. The echo child
to mavel from the spun fibers, as if pulled from
the center of a spool, ale and precise distowed with
a weightless gravity near the tarnished sugar bowl, a half
melted lollopop clutched in one fist, hair cut blunt, and
an even across a brow that somehow remembered tenderness I
felt unworthy of. Their eyes were wide and liquid, a
pale blue rimpink, and their face was a face that
name would he refused to name for yourself, for presence
of the echoed child was not a trick of light.
It had the awkward geometry of a child learning how
to stand on an adult's sower. It did not speak,
but it did something worse. It watch for the patience
that felt like accusation. The cart's bulbs reflected off those eyes.
Every time I touched another throat of sugar to my tarm,
another sharpened image flashed at the edge of my vision.
A pocket too shallow to hide keys, a bow of
a ribbon nottage, or so the faint stained, the color
of old rust at the hem of a coat. The
vendors jars rattled in a sound like a thousand small
private facts being said on the counter. Each muffer pulled
me deeper into a sequence that moved like a thumbstrip
being developed by hand, click, turn, wear, weight, watch, a
hand closing, a child's muffled protest that my body recognized
as something I had muffled before. A fan voice. The
sugar sweetness curdled into some thing eye untinged and thick.
My stomach rolled as the memories poured out, stick imprecise,
forming tablelocs that belond in family albums I had never
allowed myself to open. The more I tasted, the more
the carnivals stopped being a place and started being a
mirror whose hinge was the vender. I tried denial, like
a coat to shrug off the coal. I blinked hope
in the face would dissipate into fog. But fog only
rearranges itself. It does not forget. The echo child stepped
closer whenever my mind staged. Rehearsals are forgetting. The small,
deliberate reach that asked for acknowledgment, not with sound, but
with insistence, set my teeth on edge. At times, the
sugar showed me small evidence that anchored memory and indigo.
Ribbon noted just so, a scarabney I had dressed and clean,
but now saw as a greedy map of time, A
scrape thumb and away. The light had caught a tear
I had wiped away too quickly. Once the cotton yielded
the glint of metal, my mother's small silver locket swallowed
and then repurposed within the threads. Its face blowed, as
if the memory that owned it refused recognition. Recognition is
its own violence. I felt it like a slow unraveling
imma chest, like a scene being undone that had been
stitch clar those years. The ticket in my pocket became
heavier with every bite. The thumb rubbing it turned into
an involuntary chant. The venders grin softened into something like
contentment that might have been hunger. He turned a pocket
watch between cracked fingers. It ticked out the whirl's seconds
and made everything else wrong. If you had watched closely,
you would have seen me tilt into a scene that
had been skirting the edges of my mind. A short
maybe afternoon, children pressed close a decision small enough to
seem negligible and large enough to steer the rest of
my life like a keel. The carnival's rhythm shifted, bulbs
stuttered like hal breaths. For a while, time tails guped
into a single, unbearable instant. The sponge sugar that had
been a child's loud congealed in my mouth into cartilage,
in bonatiny, skeletal hand, cold with accusation. The texture was wrong.
It was the texture of truth that insists on itself.
I'd been tasting allegory and found anatomy. The little hand
reached from the mound of cotton toward me, as if
pulling me back across ears. It had been fabricated by
sugar and memory, and yet it carried the precise cruelty
of something real. There in the sterile gris green blue light,
I understood with the clarity that blinked like a projector's bulb.
Remembrance was not an abstract age. There was admission or
another kind of living lie. The choice spread in me
like cold oil. Confess and let the echo child fall
into something merciful, or swallow and bury the truth under
another layer of spun sugar and denial. My throat worked.
The ticket step had been in my pocket since before
I woke. The locko's blood image had been in the
sugar since the first bite. The vendors grin widened, and
the jars behind him shone like a pantry of kept secrets.
For a breath, for a life. I hovered above the
cart like a muff over flame. My fingers trembled towards
the skeletal hand that now lay in the countertop, donated
from spun sugar, but bearing the geometry of accusation. The
echoed child stood across from me, small and precise. A quiet,
four shaped prop opened my eyes until they would not
close again. The vendor leaned forward, his pocket watch, taking
in a temper that insulted me. His laughter hung first,
then then echoing, like a spool of tape, wearing grainy edges.
I could not left an honest admission into the air.
Some part of me braided steel into my tongue, un
hid the confession behind a reheaticorm. Hot air rose into
my face and then fell into a hollow I had
carried for years. My hands closed around the locket and
the stub. The letter of my satchel whispered, as if
freeding through the motions I'd taken a thousand times to
become some one else. Behind the carts, the faire as
weel turned with the deliberation, as patient as hunger. Its
lights cast a sheen of teal and a flare of
red on the vendor's cheek. In the reflection of a
dull jar, I saw the shape of my own face,
with its new scar and an old, permanent shadow beneath
the eyes. Memory is not only images, It is a
sequence of small, tactile betrayals. I remembered the heft of
the locket in my palm the first time I held it,
the cooleest between my fingers, the way child's thum that
traced the initials on its face until the letter is blurred.
I remembered promising myself, freezing's explanations that looped back and
softened into half truths. I remembered learning to set the
room alike with other people's stories, some my own would
call into acceptable dust. But those rehearsed stores don't sit
well with sugar. They can jeal into something sticky. The
vendor's jaws rattled, and each sound felt like a page
turning toward me. When I stagger back, the well did
not forgive me. I clutched the ticket to my chest,
like a talisman that could hold a memory at bay.
The vendor smiled as if fed his fingers dipped into
a jar and came out sticky with a syrup that
could have been mercy or more memory. He wiped it
on the counter with the casual efficiency of someone who
has dealt in absolutions and debts long enough to know
they are interchangeable. The echo child's outline wavered like something
half remembered and not yet named. For a moment, I
thought I might step away from the cart and leave
the carnival to its own machinery. But the fog had
weight on the fair ground her teeth. The Knight had
already booked a seat for me in its audience. More
detail came, and came with each tiny indulgence. A kitchen
table I had avoided revisiting its varnish nick nearer one leg,
an indelible ring where a cup had sat too long,
arranged itself into the scene. A high chair that had
cough marked the wallpaper, my mother's hands, one steady at
the oven knot, the other small and catching a drop
of something. The sugar gave me not only images, but
the small, ignoble logic behind them. How a look can
harden into habit, How withheld sentence can become a sea
wall that keeps up rescue and turns its build her
into someone else. I tasted the way once more. All
emission can bloom into a life of aftershocks. By the
time the horizon showed the first ill promise of dawn,
the cart felt like a pressus, both behind me and
inside me. The sponge sugar had offered me evidence, as
if in proof of action. A small indigo ribbon, the locket,
the ticket. There were objects that fitted like keys into
a door I had been refusing to open. The vendor's
grins rued into something like satisfaction. He tucked his slowtick
into the inside of his coat like a private heartbeat,
and tipped his hat. The echo child's small hand reached
once more toward me, and I did not take it.
I only let my fingers brush the stub until the
paper popped under my nail, as if be degrading the proof.
I could agree the truth. Walking away did not lighten me.
I walked with the ticket warm against my palm and
a taste in my mouth that did not sweeten. The
carnival did not shrink behind me. It folded itself into
the same shape I had carried for years, patient ritual,
a stick, a place where things are offered and then counted.
Each step took me further from the cart physically, and
no inch closer to peace. I told myself how I
had learned something that night, how fragile memory could be,
how tenacious, I promised myself I would carry the locket
to a place where it would be examined, where the
truth might be named in full, and maybe perhaps be
laid down. The fog did not clear all at once.
It loosened around my ankles and left the residue of
spun sugar on my tongue, a memory that was also
a wound. When I reached a street that had the
cutesy to feel like home. I found the stot still
warm in my palm, and a crater of a choice
hollowed out where a confession might have lived. I thought
of calling some one of the logistics of admission, of
where you would go with a thing like that, But
the call would require names, and names have teeth. The
vendors laughed and threaded itself through the morning air, as
if practicing for later. I turned once, and in the
thin wave of distance I could make out a single
bulb from the cot steady as a blinking chastisement. Afterward,
the small objects became mankers and accusations alike. I kept
the ribbon in the inside pocket of my coat, and
would catch myself smoothing its leap with a finger when
the knights were less impatient. The locket lived against my
ribs like a small private can. If I pressed it
there hard enough, the metal rowed itself into my skin,
and the weight made me steady. Sometimes I took it
out and held it to the light, trying to glean
faces from its tarness, face, trying to decide if I
could bear to know. Sometimes I told myself the truth
would be a release. Other times I feared it would
be a slow, neat dissection. The vendor had been efficient,
the sugar had re arranged me into a new grammar
of responsibility. The echo of the child's look followed me
into the banalities of daylight. At the grocery, the cashier's
daughter tugged a sleeve and pressed a fist into a mouth,
and the gesture landed like a hand slapped to a berry.
Place on quiet buses, the pale blue room, or some passengers,
I found mine, and I imagined the echo in nez.
The first wheels off distant conking became my own pulse.
I walked past store from windows and felt the cots
bulbs wink across the glass. I rubbed the creased edge
of the ticket and felt the memory scab under my fingers.
Once in a sleep that cycled like a dented reel,
I dreamed the echo of child at the foot of
my bed, not as accusation, but as negotiation, offering me
a piece of cordon candy in exchange for an in
the dawn truth, I work with the taste of sugar
and iron in my mouth. There are practicalities I rehearsed
in the waking hours, were to take the locket to
be opened. What legal language might soften the edges of
my half truths, whether to speak at the kitchen table
or the foot of a hospital bed. There are moralities
I reread like bad weather. But the Carnival had taught
me something stubborn. Acknowledgment is a small surgical thing, and
you cannot perform it halfway without creating new wounds. The
vendor's drawers held more than objects. The hell choice is
in tiny, tidy jars, each labeled with a single verb.
Some of those verbes were merciful, others chewed at the
seams of intent. I do not know where that my
reluctance was cowd as more complex than simple fear, or
an instinct for self preservation so hard it had become
a form of artistry. I know only that the taste
of the truth is bitter sweet enough to make refusal seductive,
and confession is a work of a known mercy. The
Carnival did not want to punish. It wanted acknowledgment that pursuiticipatient.
It will weigh to the edge of the world with
its teel light and red flustoms until one admits or
continues to build finer and finer palaces of nothing. Sometimes
in the quipered rhineerrans, I feel the echo child small
accused tory stale like a current at my collar. Sometimes
the texture of the cotton returns in dreams, not as comfort,
but as evidence. I ran my thumb along the tickets
fold and imagine a thousand lithel vendors waiting in vog,
each with their taking time piece and their jaws of truths.
I imagine myself folder at such a car, at a stranger,
with my own jars, and I wonder whether I would
offer the sane, grudging smile the vendor offered me, the
one that thanked me for my honesty, whether I gave
it or not. The fog deigned at the horizon, in stages,
like a cut and being drawn with theatrical slowness. The
carnival did not leave, It only stepped into some one's reflection.
The laugh followed me like a neighbor. I could not
stop hearing. I fold the memory into my coat and
pressed the locket against my ribs to feel its weight.
It is heavy enough to make me. Fog curled round
my feet, and a scrap a ticket warned the hollow
of my palm, as if remembering me before I did.
I did not know how I had returned to the
shallow glow of the cotton candy cart, a fair ground
around ahead, the anatomy of dead bulbs, and in steady shadows,
a fairis wheel sighe in the knot quite distant, silhouetted
slow gear behind a vell of teal Cyan Hayes. Somewhere
beyond the cots, a distorted Collier pickkeeped and folded into
the night, like a bad memory trying to cough itself awake.
I only knew that the cot stood where it had
always stood, in the margin of my thoughts, and that
the vendor, toll lanky, a crack in the grin, watched
me with an impatience that read like weather. His top
hat caught the street light and made a hard silverl line.
He did not move to greet me. His patience was
an accusation worn like a glove. The stall smelled of
stale sugar and something copper leaning beneath it, ascent that
sat on the tongue like rumor. I eased up to
the counter, because my feet obeyed the shape of the place.
I pressed the ticket stuck between thumb and pad until
its edge is bit into my skin. In the COT's glass,
my face was an uneasy scrawl washed up by film
brain a man who had learned how to flatten confession
into polite silences. The vendor's laugh leaped under his smile,
smaller than a laugh and larger than a whisper, something
that promised discovery would be painless if I agreed. He
presented a corn of spung sugar with the casual care
of some one offering a key. The threads gleamed like
wet skin. I recognized the motion, the tilt of the cone,
the practice rasd the spunce weakness into the shape of childhood,
but the sugar itself held in impatience I had not expected.
Close up, it was not innocent fluff. Under the warm
howlow of a dying bull. The threads resolved into impossible
micro features, a loop that suggested an eye, a curl
that set itself like a lip. When I reached forward,
breath fogging in the strip of light, those culs twitched
with the suggestion of motion, as if the sugar had
the memory of hands shaped into it. A knlve refux
rose in me to clutch experience into tidy boxes, to
name it in shelve it. And I tried to file
the scene into anecdote. Instead, my fingers brushed the spun
threads and came awaysticky. They left a faint map on
my skin, a sugary smear that read like a sentence
written in betrayal. The vendor tilted his head at an
angle that was intentionally wrong, the sort of physicality that
suggested the world could be bent into confessions. Behind him,
a wall of jars winked like small prisoners. The syrupic
glints trapped in glass. Each jar held some ambered suggestion,
a smerror, like a fingerprint, a loop thread, something coaculated
into the shape of a child's thumb. I thought of
the locket in my pocket, the cheap watch with the
cracked face. Everything had a weight to night and insistence.
My first mouthful was hestant at test to see whether
memory would arrive like a newsreel or a wound. The
sugar folded onto my tongue and detonated into it, a
massic moment that was both perfect and wrong. A small
laugh sunlight on a kitchen tow that I could both
place and refuse. The thudding powder of a toy bouncing
once against plaster. It was the smell of nail varnish,
the taste of rust on the rim of a soda can,
the soreness left on breath after a long afternoon, for
a breath. The echo child, small solemn, a wash of
faded pink and stained teel on a day to dres
stood at the edge of my vision. She did not speak.
Her face was a coin held to the light, thin
enough that every surface underneath gleaned through acqusition. In her
expression was not a shout. It was a measurement, precise
and unrelenting. The sugar changed as I watched. A carl
sighed and became the suggestion of a tiny hand. Another
ribbon of pink lick fired into a tableau. Two small figures,
one bent and one still, a scene assembled and sticky miniature,
and presented like evidence. The fender's fingers moved an economy,
arranging and reconfiguring the strands with the choreography of some
one who had done this a long time. I wanted
to tell myself, we make our stories into palatable forms,
because that is how we survive. I reached for more,
as if de Vron would die all the knife of Rico.
Between bites, I flicked sugar from my fingers, trying to
erase what I had seen. I ate faster then, not
to taste, but to keep images from settling. Each wallow
was a small ritual. I forced down a thread, and
the sugar delivered a micro memory, a sunlight afternoon, and
a hand that found another hand and altered the angle
of things, a scrape and a surprised nose, too small
to be grief, yet exacting enough to be guilt. Sometimes
the sugar offered sins impossible to reconcile what the person
I had told myself I was. Other times served nothing
but small, precise proofs that something had been shifted because
of my hands. The vendor watched every motion with the
patience of someone who knew the economy of shame. When
I closed my fingers around the cone again, he tilted
his head and laughed, a sound that starred it thin
and wind imered like a spring. He moved his hands
in slow, surgical gestures, spinning sugar that leaned into particular shapes,
as though arranging a display of the past. His coat
caught highlights of teal cyan and deep theatrical red. His
hair was a friz crimson hallow. He handled the sugar
as though it were a grammar of accusation. Make the shapes,
present the scenes, See which nouns the mouth will accept.
The echo childish closer between the exchanges. She did not speak,
but she reached with a small, deliberate movement that made
the air between us taut. Her eyes, pale blue rimmed
with red, solemn, found mine every time the sugar offered
a new image. She carried a half melted lollipop who
sticked trips like a time stained pointer. Seeing her near
the cart made the whole world shrink to a table
of small items, a ticket stubb, a tarnished pocket watch,
a child's freckle. There was a particular intim cruelty to
how the sugar refused to be metaphor alone. It insisted
on exactness, demanded particulars. The cat's mirrored surfaces caught warp
reflections in one pain My face and the eched child's
turned into the same elongated oval. The child's small freckle
matched the thin scar along my left eyebrow in a
madness of symmetry that denied coincidence. My mouth went dry.
I tried to tell myself this was an artist trick,
a vendor slate born of glass and bobs and the
fatigue of midnight. Instead, the sugar presented another tableau, a
child's hand, tiny fingers curled against upon that look too familiar,
the curve of ane that echoed a bruise I could
have remember. I found myself toggling between two responses, like
a pully tuned radio to nile an appetite. The nile
came as distance. I could write the scenes into allegory,
softened edges into acceptable abstractions. Appetite came as consumption. The
more I ate, the more the sugar fed me at
the exact things my denial had masked. I catched small
threads from a cone and shoved them in my mouth.
When the impulse to look away grew too loud. Each
bite made the vendors grin moder minutely at the corner,
as if my compliance seasoned the next ship he would spin.
Sometimes the sugar simply smashed on my palms, leaving marks
that refused to explain themselves. The smear could look like
a child's tiny palm, or a burned thread, or an
old ticket soet through with memory. The jars behind a
vendor caught thus mirrors in the reflected light and multiplied
them lanterns overhead through churscua across the scene. Deep shadows
swallowed the edges of the cut, while thin rim lights
catched the venice profile and teel saw an in faint,
theatrical red. The world felt deliberately staged. Being there felt
like the admission price to an arch confessional, the kind
that asks for coin and returns some thing heavier. Time
lost its usual architecture. Bulbs blinked, no longer in sequence,
but in response to something inside my chest. When I
allowed my hands to still, the echo child stepped even closer.
She lifted the half melted lollopop and toned it, offering
its sticky surface to the light. Her narrow mouth was
a small, precise gesture that read like a question without words,
do you remember the sugar on ha lollopop clusson? Exactly
like the spun cone at the vendor's hand. It was
an echo of the same accusation the card offered in
different timbers. The cart's mirrored interior assembled fragments into panoramic accusations.
One instant, I saw a small tableau that matched to
memory I had filed away under childish mischief. Her RaSE
knocked a muffled thud, an arm gone wrong in its reach.
The next sugar sculpture was more explicit, a tiny set
of hands with a smaller one mirror of the motion
I had once made, an indift finger placed with the
care that implies agency, a tilt of wrist at nudge's consequence,
The vendor's laugh tucked itself into the corner of his
mouth like a pet. The jaws behind him, full of
syrupy glints, looked like receptacles of consequence, each sealed and
lay by implication. Then the sugar did something I had
not prepared for. A stretch of spun pink sided into
the form of a child's hand that was the same
size and shape as this mirror on my palm. As
it folded, the echoed child's face lay with an awful,
soft logic into my reflection. For it beat. The glass
held both of us in the same frame, the adult's
mouth in the child's mouth, occupying the same space, the
frickle aligning with the scar. The scene collapsed into a single,
unbearable convergence. In that instant, the world narrowed to one
impossible decision. The vendor's eyes moved to my throat, as
if he were reading a pulse. His tarnished pocket wash
tacked on an impossibly slow rhythm that felt like the
sound of a conscience measuring its depths. The cart seemed
to inhale. I imagined two outcomes, like doors in a corridor,
one where I swallowed the whole truth and felt something
unknotted and raw in me. The other were I tightened
and hardened, learning instead to live in a better polished lie.
I thought of the cheap watch in my bag and
the silver locket that held an indistinct, imature relic I
had kept, like an offering to forgetfulness. I forced my
hands to move, whether I reached to lift the kune
higher or to drop it away. My motion felt heavy
with consequence, as though the world would rearrange itself around
the single domestic choice. The sugar, as if since in
the hesitation folded into a more explicit shape, a child's
size hand that massed the motion I had once made.
The echo child's eyes widened though she still did not speak.
I swallowed soft and spun sugar, and the metallic tang
of something hid and washed my mouth. The scene inside
my skull opened like a wound that let a shape
walk out of it. The memory arrived in a spasm
of clarity that was clinical and terrible. A summer afternoon,
a spill of juice across anoleum, a small figure standing
where a small figure should bee, and my hand, younger Clumson,
moving in a way that altered the course of something brittle.
It was not theatrical, It was the precise, awful geometry
of one action re arranging another life. The sugar in
my throat seemed to carry an image of the child's
small hand culling, exactly as it did in my memory.
My face felt stripped away, as if lace had been
removed in the rawness underneath. Exposed to night air. Paine
arrived as understanding more than sorrow. The vendors grin split
at the corner, and for a breath I considered whether
his happiness was my punishment or my libration. The echo
child folded on herself, as though shrinking from something she
had always known. In the glass, my reflected mouth had
the slackness of someone who had surrendered something and not
known whether the cost would be eternal or temporary. I
touched my lips and felt sugar, and beneath it the
press of a new fact. The night had done a knot.
I had been living around for years, but the choice
betrayed me. Even as if freed me, swallowing had not
absolved me. It had enlatched a new hunger. The Sugar's
narrative did not stop with confession. It demanded reckoning. The
vendor smiles sharpened into something almost like hunger. The jars
behind him seemed to harm, each holding a different possible aftermath,
a different small instrument of consequence. The echo child's features
for the first time were as with something like expectation.
It was not enough to know the knowledge wanted reply, action, payment.
There were other possible reactions. I could have spat the
sugar out and stamped my heel and left the cart
to its light and its jaws and its patient vender.
I could have pretended nothing happened, and walked under the
ferre's wheel, where the bulbs blink like in different stars.
But I had already tasted the exact geometry of my action,
and it would not dull easily. Whatever I chose. The
world made visible marks, A sticky smear shaped like a pump,
clinging to my fingers, a bent fred to the concept,
the ticket stubb warm and oddly heavy in my pocket.
These little proofs were the dealers accounting the carnival demanded
a receipt. I staggered from the stoll with my hands marked.
The sugar on my fingers looked in a grotesque echo,
like the child's pom I had seen in memory. My
steps were uneven, the midway scene to tilt, as if
the whole fair ground were breathing to the rhythm of
the vendors. Slow watch. The laughing clown followed with his eyes,
not stepping out into my path, but keeping me measured
in his regard. As the fog thin and on flirted
with the horizon. The first wheelsow. It was a slow
bruise against the sky teal. So I am bleeding into
faint red lawn the room. The coup preceded, and with
it the immediate pressure of confession, but a new appetit
had begun to sit in my chest, A wind and
hunger braided together the world beyond carnival had not changed
my internal geography had I felt as though I had
been issue a small private proof that an inemoral accounting
had been adjusted. The echo of the Claud's laugh threaded
itself through my ribs and anchored there. I found the
locket in my hand, it's image still obscured, and realized
its blood had nothing to do with forgetting and everything
to do with self preservation. I had kept that little
hays for years because clarity was attacks. I did not
know how to pay. Now, as the pale wash of
pro dawns mudged the sky, I understood something else. The
carnival did not end with my leaving. The vendor's patience
was long, and the jars in his store were not empty.
Whatever I had consumed that night would return in small increments,
a smell, a sound, the way Charles laughed. My pull
on the edge of a sweater I thought safely folded.
The stain on my fingers would fade, but leave a
memory like a scar. The ticket's stub would go back
into its pocket and warm itself against my palm like
an ember. Small things would act as satellites to that night,
tugging at me in ways that might feel like a
torment were torment. I walked past the ferrist wheel and
felt the lust of the fog cal up my uncle's
The medway's lets were thinning into the clarity of mourning,
but the colors remained teal cyan in the deep hollows,
harsh theatrical red at the edges, film grain on everything.
Laughing clowns, slow self luff rolled behind me like distant thunder.
I had come looking for understanding and found instead a
question that had teeth. I had swallowed the truth and
said immerged a hunger or I did not know if
I could feed. The taste of truth lingered. It hung
like spunched sugar in the back of my throat. Each
time I touched my lips. In the days have followed,
the memory came back in fragments, the precise angle of
a small hand, the sound of a toy's bounce muffled
like a pulse, the vendor's grin, and the slow tick
of his watch. Sometimes at night I could feel the
echoed child's eyes on me, patient and unblinking, and I
would rub my thumb along the old tickets stub until
the paper is sotened under my skin. It was a
small private barometer, how often I felt the itch to return,
how often the stub warmed like an ember in my pocket.
If I have learned anything since that night, it is
the acknowledgment is not an end point, but a hinge.
You can swallow a fact and yet discover that swallowing
rearrange the room. You can leave with stained fingers and
a ticket. That stove remembers the moment you were called back.
The vengeance jars do not empty. They wait with patient hunger. Sometimes,
when the wind shifts, my breath fogs. In the narrow
places of memory, I can still hear the laughing clown,
soft echoing laugh. It is not an evil that leaves
when you ask it to. It is a lesson that
keeps giving itself. And that is the end. Thank you
for listening, and I will see you in the next one.