By Leslie Pietrzyk
May 1971: the year before Donna disappears
Donna and I clamor side-by-side onto the bench of the Ferris wheel gondola (probably the fanciest word I know!). I’m eagle-eying the scrawny man, making sure he latches the safety bar correctly. “Sure that’s tight?” I ask. His too-close breath smells like peppermint covering cigarettes mixed with leftover morning mouth.
“Don’t worry kid.” He gives the bar a wiggle, and it stays put. Everyone knows I think too much. His feet perch on a narrow metal beam at our side, and from there, he stretches taut to adjust a blue lever, slowly sending our gondola one slot upwards as the high school girls behind us in line board. They giggle when he asks if they’re movie stars.
“This is my favorite part,” Donna says. “Inching to the top. Like climbing a mountain.”
Not that there are mountains in Iowa. And did the bar click down solid? I wrap every finger around it and rattle for real.
“Stop it, Krista.” Donna presses her palm to my hands. Her skin’s sticky because earlier we shared a pillow of cotton candy. She says, “Nothing bad’s happening to us.” I could believe her. She has richly-red, fairy-tale hair that makes people happy, and pale skin that practically glows. Not blue eyes but turquoise. She could be anyone’s best friend and she’s mine.
We glide up another slot. People aren’t small-small, but they’re not normal people-size. They’re animals in a zoo, and I’m staring at them from outside, not inside. A cluster of laughing girls, two boys socking each other’s bellies, a mom dragging her fat kid fast by the arm, probably to a bathroom. Same dumb stuff going on, but from here, it’s interesting. This Ferris wheel sweeps us right out of our regular life.
I have to say all this to Donna, so I swivel to look at her. But her eyes are squinched shut! We each paid three tickets for this ride, so what’s wrong with her?
I nudge her ribs with my bony elbow that my mom complains won’t scrub clean and say, “Your eyes are closed.” May’s early for tank tops, but I’m wearing one and so’s she. Both of us love summer the best and can’t wait for it to be here. That’s one of a thousand things tying us together in the pretty bow of being best friends for the rest of our lives.
“I’m just thinking,” she says.
Our gondola rises. Any minute we’ll dangle at the tiptop. That’s the best, the moment of glorious, perfect perfection.
Unless the best is after everyone’s loaded on, the blue lever pushed to max, and we swashbuckle across the sky, swooping and swirling, waiting to spin free of whatever’s holding us here, like gravity and every bit of science we learned last spring at Twain Elementary. We’re birds! Butterflies! Falling leaves! Molecules or rainbows or a ball flung into the sky by the strongest man in the world! But better than all those things put together, is being two Iowa girls at the carnival, certain we’ve escaped something tonight, though we don’t know yet what two kids might need to escape.
I’m dying to explain this to Donna but I’m so bugged that her eyes are shut. I say, “I see your house. I see mine.” I point a vague direction, believing my lie.
“No, you don’t,” she says. “We live too far away.”
“Do too,” I say. “How can you know if you don’t look?”
She turns her head to not-look straight at me with her creepy, still-closed eyes.
“You’re being weird,” I say, though maybe I’m the weird one. I shift and lean, rocking our gondola so it squeaks and clunks. No rocking, warns the mean sign I read a million times while we stood in line. But rocking’s exciting. Everyone rocks. The sign’s so no one gets sued, a zitty high school boy ahead of us explained to the giggling girls, who ignored him. “They could care less about kids falling off Ferris wheels as long as our parents don’t sue. Lawyers and money rule the world.” I don’t know if I should believe him.
Donna’s face still not-stares at me, so I rattle the bar more, like I’m a horse in a corral or a prisoner in a dark dungeon. “You’re missing it all,” I say. “I’m begging! We’re practically at the top.” This carnival comes only once a year. I can’t stand if she misses even one thing.
Donna’s oceans away from me, though at the same time we’re squeezed so close I feel the golden hairs on her arm rising to prickle my skin as a high-up breeze slides across us.
The carnival below’s also far away, farther than our houses on Brookside Drive. It shrieks and flashes and tumbles aside those zoo people I watched earlier, replacing them with same-but-different-but-same people, like a haunted kaleidoscope spinning nonstop. In a quick moment Donna’s a stranger and I’m a stranger and so’s this carnival I’ve been to practically every year of my life and so’s the town I was born in. Everything I know angles oddly, into jagged reminders of what was familiar. Everything I think about my life and myself can’t be comfortable again.
I shiver because, yes, May’s way too early to wear tank tops. Also because that’s crazy talk. Crazy talk makes people not like you. When my brain makes crazy talk, I crank up some real talk to drown it out. I tell Donna, “I can’t wait for summer, can’t wait to go swimming at Mercer pool. My mom’s buying me a new one-piece.”
Silence. I say her name six times, but Donna doesn’t open her eyes. Her face is blanker than blankness. Finally she turns her closed-eyes forward so I can ignore her, which is exactly what she deserves. All I want is for my best friend to see and feel everything that I see and feel, and how’s that wrong?
The Ferris wheel notches, putting us as high as we can go. Maybe miles and miles. No more greasy carnival air. The evening breeze lifts, sending my hair into my open mouth, blowing strands of Donna’s red hair against my cheek. For sure Donna will open her eyes, but she doesn’t, and she doesn’t. I clutch the safety bar and shake it a little, then shake it a lot, making a ton of rattly commotion. Then I tug and yank until the safety latch snaps loose like I knew all along it would. See, I imagine saying, see?
“Did you do that?” Donna asks.
“By accident,” I say.
Donna and I hang at this pinnacle, suspended in the absolute highest seat, as the carnival rushes around us. Below there’s a tangle of confused and angry shouting. I carefully lean over the front of our gondola, watching the skinny guy fiddle with then yank at the blue lever, watching him run into a booth, watching him tear back to the lever.
We sit and sit.
It’s possible actual time stops because I unsnapped the safety bar. I hope I did all this, me, Krista Robinson. Those dinky, forgotten people on the ground huddle and point, shading their eyes though the sky’s paling into pinky-dusk, into violet-blue, into colors without names. As the sky steadily darkens, carnival lights sharpen into a complicated, rhythmic dance. Fire engine sirens hover in the distance, closing in.
Iowa City glitters the way magical places do. I see my house on Brookside Drive and Donna’s, too, right across the street from mine. Porch lights glow, and sprinklers arc across front lawns. Soon it’ll be warm enough to run barefoot through those falling diamonds of water; to catch lightning bugs we’ll secretly let loose in our bedrooms; to flame marshmallows over the grill’s embers; to shout, “Not It!” No way do lawyers and money rule this world.
That same breeze goosebumples my arms and legs, wanting my attention. The safety bar flops free, but I understand I’ve never been safer in my life, right then or still now. Finally, finally I close my eyes, and the exact instant I do, Donna says, “Isn’t this the greatest? Let’s stay here forever.”
Leslie Pietrzyk’s recent collection of linked stories is set in DC, Admit This to No One. This Angel on My Chest won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Short stories/essays in: Ploughshares, Story, Hudson Review, Southern Review, Iowa Review, The Sun, Cincinnati Review, LitHub, Okay Donkey, Pithead Chapel, and Split Lip Magazine. Awards include a Pushcart Prize.
Amy Hsu is a multidisciplinary artist transitioning into the digital space under the name P0cketPortals. Combining her Asian American experience with modern media and pop culture through two-dimensional art, her goal is to reframe nostalgia through a new lens. She currently works directly with clients to create personalized commissions, toy designs, and other physical products.