What’s this? Auctioneers. Trash heap. When fire? Who fire? Figures my life was burned to ash. Why must I learn of this new tragedy? I already have yesterday’s grief for all eternity.
Why must I feel or need or be?
Darling girl threw her weight into that drill. Her, I certainly felt—the frustration of her elbow grease, her sad, sad exertion. I woke up as she drove the screws clean through.
I woke up mute and paralyzed, if I can be paralyzed without a breathing body. Bit by bit, the scene came into being. First thing I noticed is she must be about my age, and pretty, even with that awful bobbed hairstyle. By the time she was finished and settled in to sleep, I could manage to knock. What a cheat. I can’t be back here just for knocking. I ought to be able to dance and wail again.
I ought to mention that I am dead, though not home and dry. If you ask me, heaven is hogwash. Least I haven’t seen any pearly gates.
Laugh in the Dark. Now there’s a place I sure have seen with my own two eyes. That ride was the mother of the amusement park. A mixed-up mother, part fun house, part haunted house, and part trolley ride. For fifty-three years, she took in an assortment of very odd children: the stunts. She gave each stunt equal affection. Each had their three seconds in which a dedicated light would buzz on as the trolley car approached, and each sprang up to frighten and delight her squealing patrons.
The first-born stunts were wartime cartoon characters: Maggie and Jiggs, Wimpy, Popeye shaking his bulbous Yankee fist—I yam what I yam. Hand painted on chipboard, like the stunt that now hangs on this young lady’s wall. Stunts were proxy for our great generation by their colour palette alone. Hopeful and heroic colours. Fantasia blue. Casablanca yellow.
During the 1950s, Laugh in the Dark prosperously adopted an ark’s worth of animal stunts: the dragon, the lion, mules, dogs, cats, swamp rats, the crocodile, and several unidentifiable critters that did more than simply spring up. They roared. They growled.
After the animals did it, every stunt had to make a racket of its own. Coffin lids creaked. Sirens rang. The skeletons danced to ragtime rhythm. The one true voice, the grandstand, was Laffing Sal, the papier maché mechanical lady clown who cackled through her oversized set of gap-teeth at grown men and girl children alike. We all thought Sal would die laughing. Guffaw herself into oblivion. She went cold even before the ride’s last run. I remember now. She was a sign of the end, like a stopped clock. I bet poor Sal never saw it coming.
No, Laugh in the Dark kept her children, her stunts, innocent. She held them all in her great labyrinthine arms of wires and ropes and pulleys, letting go just long enough for them to perform their perpetual spectacle. It was not for them to know about war or bank crises or moral panic. Without a clue or a care for the changes outside their black-painted walls, they shrieked and roared and sprang up and sprang up and sprang up.
Is that what I am now? A stunt, springing up from my dark hiding place, again and again like someone’s pulling my strings?
Now, if I say that Laugh in the Dark was the mother, then I likewise say The Cyclone coaster was the father. Vicious coaster. Cruel daddy.
I ought to mention that I am dead.
Not that anyone hears a word I say.