The roller coaster was the fair’s main attraction. Dead Man’s Fall was its popular name. It derived from a trio of loop-de-loops in quick succession, followed by the slow, so slow, considered climb, giving you plenty of time to count your sins, to a terrifying height, a seeming pause at the pinnacle, where the spindly structure swaying sings in the impossible air like a nest of misplaced sticks packed incoherently by some fuddled bird. Your tearful pleas unheeded, you plunge in your wheeled sheet-metal pod, leaving your internal organs somewhere behind, they won’t be needed, a blind wind-stripped screaming fall, to certain death, to a receiving pool that you knew from the start was there, shattered with an explosive splash. Shouts of red-tinged laughter all round. But the pod inexplicably falters then, stops unscheduled, sitting squat with a mechanical dullness in the stilling water.

Not meant for prolonged immersion, the insistent liquid invades the cracks, seeps around the rivets. The chilling reaches your shins, gropes for your knees.

The flat cracked leather restraining belt has no release that you can find. It’s tight, too tight. You look, you look everywhere but no. Your jerking, tangled tugs, rattling the pod like shaking a box of tools (is someone still laughing?) send tiny ripples across the now calm surface of the cold oily pool.

The back of your head… the hairs on the back of your head strain like the tentative apprehending hairs of an insect, sensing, before you hear. Then you hear: you hear the steady clanking chain spooling behind and above, far above, thin laughter and screaming; that pink cotton candy screaming, belly screaming from a full open throat that was always the very best part of this cheap paper ticket back alley puppet show.

2/21/2023