I don’t know how we count as fun, us guessers. It isn’t a game. There’s no clown to shoot with a water pistol and there’s no ring to toss. The prizes are shitty and the truth is nobody’s friend. And tonight smells like candy corn and puke, and this town is like every other.
Patty, 48, 287 pounds, will die of complications from an amputated foot. She leaves with her face in a twist and goes straight to the cotton candy man. I never know when, but I suspect for her that it will be soon.
Bill, 36, 215 pounds, will die in an industrial accident involving molten metal. His face when I say that to him. Jesus.
Alex, 23, 117 pounds, will die of an autoimmune disorder. Does not seem surprised.
Gus, 14, 98 pounds, will drown. God, I hate it when kids walk in here.
On and on, every night, their dazed faces all blurring into one.
Except.
Except the carnival is heading south as the summer ends. We’re chasing the heat and barreling toward our stopping point in Galveston. I’m working a cruise ship when we get there.
The age guy changed his accent to sound Southern as soon as we hit the Mason-Dixon Line. The weight guy is gearing up for Southern women who don’t ever wanna play at all, and most certainly don’t want to hear the truth when they’re made to.
And I can’t do accents and I can’t lie, so the last few weeks on the road have been real weird for me. Ever since Tulsa, I’m stuck.
Shirley, 56, 186 pounds, will die of thirst.
Caiden, 21, 125 pounds, will die of thirst.
Evan, 28, 146 pounds, will die of thirst.
My line dries up right away. They think I’m being an asshole. I can feel sweat collecting in the small of my back and rolling down. The night is way too warm. My mouth feels sticky like cotton candy.
Oklahoma City and it’s midnight and still above ninety degrees.
Lorna, 39, 159 pounds, thirst.
Jake, 47, 180 pounds, thirst.
Bobby, 5, 41 pounds, thirst.
This crowd is drunker and thinks I’m joking. They drink more, they suggest I drink more. I am beginning to think we should drink all there is while we still can.
Galveston is where I figure it out. I haven’t kept up with the news while we’ve been on the road, and when I get it, it’s almost too hysterical to figure out. All the papers are saying the same thing. The bill is coming due. We’ve been putting off doing something about this for years and now it’s too late.
I look up at the seagulls at the marina and I know what they’ll all die of. Thirst.
I never make it to the cruise ship. Some asshole sees me doing my act at our last stop and he finds me. Tells me he’s too smart to die of thirst, and he’s right. He says he knows what I am. He says I need to come with him and he says a number that makes up my mind for me.
I’ve been on this ship now for six months and I don’t think I’ll ever get off it. They have some of the best dew-collecting and condensing machines in the world. The ship is comfortable. The food is fresh; there are hydroponics on board and they know what they’re doing. But I never see them. The man who brought me here keeps me locked up in my room and visits me once a day. He won’t let anyone else in here. He says I’m his surety against the inevitable end.
Knowing might be a comfort, but it isn’t a surety. And there still might be time to change this. But I know what I know, and I and everyone on this ship will die of a gunshot wound. Soon.
The man who brought me here is named Chris. He’s about forty-five and I’d say a buck thirty soaking wet. And he’s going to die after drinking a poison that is neither as painless nor as quick as he was told it would be.
I am never wrong.
Rearview
SAMANTHA HUNT
Starlings loop overhead. It’s a cloud of birds. Part of the flock disappears as light on light. The other part blackens the pale sky like a finger reversing velvet.
A mother and daughter, humans, watch the birds’ rigid coordination. The flock makes a low rumbling sound as if the birds, taken together, are one thing rather than many. A hive. A body. A mind. If the humans knew the word for this flock, a murmuration of starlings, they’d understand now how these birds got the name. But these humans know very little. Their mobile devices are not working. There’s no connection.
“They never collide?” the daughter asks.
Her mother shrugs.
Birds twist. It’s dangerous, wonderful. It’s fearfully unanimous, or just plain fearful, when many think and act like one.
“Maybe a falcon’s near and they’re scared shitless.” The mother doesn’t usually swear in front of her daughter. “Poopless, I mean.” The birds are directly over their heads. Poopless could be a good thing.
Earlier: Mother and daughter drive through the night. The mother breathes audibly to calm herself, but she’s not calm. The mother checks to see what might be following them. She catches sight of her daughter asleep in the backseat. All that’s precious; life, sleep, breathing. The rear window is a square of darkness, a black screen. There’s much the mother doesn’t remember, dark squares in her own brain. Anything at all might be following them.
At a rest stop the mother destroys her mobile phone in the toilet.
Back on the road she tunes the radio. Announcers banter. They say so many dumb things, scripts that follow
