Flor
We buckled into two metal swings. Randy sat on the outside edge, and I chose the spot right next to her. Metal chains creaked and clanged as other passengers barreled around the ride to claim their seats. Just in front of us, a mom lifted her small daughter into a chair and tightened the safety belt before sitting down too.
“Don’t look so nervous,” she said, reaching over and tousling the girl’s hair. “This was my favorite when I was your age. You are going to love it.”
Our shadows stretched long onto the patchy brown grass. The heat had broken, but the fairgrounds still felt warm and sunbaked. It was the best part of the day, or would have been if that knot in my stomach hadn’t been so twisted up and tangled.
Randy kicked her legs forward and pulled them back. Kicked forward, pulled back. Her chair swung lazily as we waited for all the seats to fill. She glanced over her shoulder as if she were looking for someone. The little girl in front of us clung tightly to the chains on either side of her swing. “Relax,” her mom said. “You’ll be fine.”
It was the kind of thing parents said a little too easily, if you asked me. They wanted you to be fine. They thought you probably would be in the end. But all you could do was hang on tight until you knew for sure.
“Please buckle your seat belts and remain seated until the ride has come to a full and complete stop.”
The swings jerked upward a few inches, and the little girl yelped.
“Whoa!” Randy said, giggling. She pulled her hat off and held it in her lap, then shook her hair out and leaned backward in the swing.
The soles of my shoes just skimmed the ground. Then only the very tips of my toes were touching, and the space between the ground and me kept growing.
The ride had been running well, Dave had said. No problems all weekend. Everything would probably be fine. The Cloud Chaser would rotate, just like it was supposed to. Two or three minutes later—too soon for some riders—it would slow, then stop, then bring us back down. Then, just like she was supposed to, Miranda would find her way to the main stage, look out at the audience, tip her cowboy hat, tap her boots, and sing.
The tower at the center of the ride stretched taller, hoisted us higher, and finally began to turn, flinging our swings outward like the edges of a twirling dance skirt.
Still leaning back in her chair, Randy closed her eyes and threw her arms out on either side of her. She looked like a kite that had escaped its string.
I held on. The breeze whisked the hair out of my eyes. From above, the whole fair—from the golden top of the carousel to the red-striped tents of the midway games, all lined up like peppermint sticks—looked small enough to bundle up and hold in my arms. Someone near the Cantaloupe Growers Association demonstration garden let go of a pink helium balloon. I watched it float over the Log Jammer and above the telephone wires until I lost track of it in the evening sky, the same milky orange as a Creamsicle.
The girl in front of us leaned forward and peered over the edge of her seat. She loosened her grip on the chains and uncurled her fingers one at a time until she wasn’t holding on at all anymore. She lifted her hands up over her head for one daring moment. Then she pulled them right back in again.
I closed one eye and held out my finger to trace the map of every place I had been that long afternoon. From Rancho Maldonado—near the entrance, by the ticket booths—to the Family Side Stage right in the middle. Folding chairs under a white sailcloth tent.
From the midway, where softballs were still knocking down milk bottles and squirt guns were still missing their targets, to the Gravitron, to the churro cart, to the livestock barns way out at the muddy edges of the fairgrounds. The auctions were over. The stalls would be empty by now. The kids would have cleaned them and gone home with their ribbons, or just their broken hearts.
Under the lights of the Cloud Chaser, I knew exactly where I was.
I looked farther, past the exit, past the parking lots, where people did not always look out for one another, and guardrails did not always keep you from getting hurt. I didn’t want to have to find my way through that world again. In that world, I was as lost as a stray balloon. But every turn of the Cloud Chaser brought me closer to it.
After a few minutes, before I was ready, the ride slowed and stopped. The chains on the swings hung straight and still.
“What’s happening?” the little girl in front of us asked her mom.
“That’s it,” the mom said. “The ride is over, that’s all. We’ll have to get off now. Didn’t you like it, though? Didn’t we have fun?”
The Cloud Chaser began to lower us back to the ground.
But then something deep inside it grumbled and groaned, and the ride didn’t budge another inch.