Carnival

As a kid, I might have seen a traveling carnival in passing, its lone ferris wheel towering over the frenetically flashing lights and screaming children, and I might wonder if it was as romantic as it seemed. I’d never been to a mini carnival before and as such my only frames of reference were the movies or stories of the world’s fair from quaint-er days.

Now I am grown and I live in a place where the waterfront has a carnival every other weekend in the summer. Last week, we had forgotten it was parade season and went down to walk down along the water, which runs along the backside of the carnival. The eight foot tall hookers were out, waiting for the sailors to dock. We saw seventeen year old uniformed ride operators, sitting glumly chin-in-hand behind the chain link, waiting for shifts to end. I noticed that the rides all rest on rebar jacks placed seemingly precariously on stacks of wooden planks, much like the wads of napkin we shove under table legs to steady them. We saw four year olds sitting in the painfully slow moving plastic canoes looking perplexed as parents made high pitched cooing noises from behind camera lenses. We saw all the things you would expect to see. We even saw the albino kid regaling his fellow carny workers with stories on a smoke break.

What I saw that I hadn’t expected was the seedy underbelly of the carny world. The darker side of traveling carnival life. It seems the carnival workers have a taste for blood. And they’re not very good at hiding the bodies.