Night Fright
By Mary Kate Nyland
At night we meet at the Outside World, a small-time, home-town, low-key type of amusement park. Kind of place that inspires thoughts of loose screws and shifty investors. Waiting for the coaster—wooden, ancient—we face each other, planting kisses all over, squash seeds under moonlight, until it gets to be about that time. We wipe away the hair and dead skin we left behind the night before. Crumbs, you call them. Feet dangling, chests locked, breath slowing, we strap ourselves in. Some pizza-faced pie in the sky throws us a thumbs up and ga-dunk, ga-dunk, good night. Soon enough the track splits, a tremendous cranking sound lifting and lowering us, respectively, and we wave goodbye, going elsewhere.
My eyes flit up to realize that night’s amusement, dirty memories outfitted in terror and candy-colored bulb lights, edging on adrenaline. Cotton-stuffed prizes, junk, drifting towards the surface. Sure, it’s aging, but this place has its charms, all things considered. Sometimes before the fall, I overhear conversations between my ears. Drum dreams already in progress, speaking babble, waiting for me to show up. You sleep like a corpse, arms crossed over your chest, fingers pressed into your skin so persistently that you frequently wake up with five pink burns. Wherever you go, it must be hot.
Two summers ago, at the Twilight of Consciousness—steel, twenty six—you heard me mumble.
“I thought I did a good job.”
“What?”
“I thought I did a good job.”
“Of what?”
“Of not asking questions of the outside world.”
“What questions?”
You said I got annoyed then, twisting my body and face away from you like, what’s so hard to understand about that?
This all made for a good laugh, fingering sand from each other’s eyes. Yours, black and rocky, picked up on the coastline of Maine by ways of the 1 train. Mine, glued shut with cosmic dust, having spent a few hours hovering above the planet. There, I unearthed the sacred questions and heard their many varied answers, whispered into my ear by a plastic Martian.
By morning the answers are gone and we stumble out the turnstiles, radically hungover, begrudgingly alive, and barely amused. We return to the Inside. Awake. A little hungry.
Mary Kate Nyland is an Irish American writer, currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from University College Dublin. She has forthcoming work in Beaver Magazine.