Circles

After she dropped out of high school she got a job with a traveling carnival working the carousel. Chipped horses with glossy dead eyes. Round they went under the snapping white lights that illuminated happy strange faces. Round they went through the years, spinning like a faded roulette table, like a top. Winter. Summer. 1961. 1978. She gathered tickets, ripped them, and tossed them into a scuffed bucket that followed her around the country like her shadow. At night she sometimes dreamt that the horses took flight, torn from the rusted metal ride and gliding to a place that had no name.

“But they just go in circles,” she wrote a friend in looping handwriting. “Circles.”

Among the sounds of joyous screams, heavy metallic clanking, and the smell of hot popcorn and corn dogs, she watched the horses go round and round going through small towns and big cities. Spokane. Shawnee. Phoenix. Greensboro. No husband. No children. No car. No home. She ripped the tickets and dropped them into the bucket. Somewhere in Texas a little girl gave her a ticket and sat on a horse that was blazed in faded gold. She was the only rider.

“Make it go fast like the other rides,” the little girl begged. Her face was young, fresh, small freckles sprinkled her nose.

She watched the girl go round and round laughing and twirling her head around, taking in the haunting lights of the carnival.

“Faster, faster,” the little girl yelled.

It was a humid night, the sticky weather, gluing the season to skin and the perpetual orbit of memory. The ride came to a slow stop and the little girl got off the horse and handed her a ticket.

“That’s for you,” she said, and disappeared into the small crowd. She looked at the ticket, looked at the collection of numbers that were stamped on it.

“Lock it up,” her boss said, walking up behind her. “The carousel is dead tonight. Stop the horses. Work the funhouse. Tomorrow is another day.”

But she didn't. Instead she ripped the ticket, dropped it in the bucket and got on the carousel, wrapping her thin legs over the horse the little girl just rode. And round she went. Spinning through the weather, spinning through the years, under the flickering white lights and the smells of stale cotton candy and flat soda.

“Circles,” she said and closed her eyes.