the blueshift journal

            I bounced down the Scrambler’s metal steps and yielded at the bottom, sandals blinking dim pink in the fairground dust. My father’s hand draped over my shoulder directing me to the periphery, toward the games of strategy. The whirling gambling games drew a throng that cried out as the weighted wheel’s clicking slowed. Their illusions of fatal victory enthralled us. I paused. The bend in my father’s elbow deepened. I asked, Daddy, aren’t you going to play that one?

He said, No. You can’t win at that. It’s a gaff.

What’s a gaff?

It means you can’t win. Nobody wins.

            My father steered me away. He held my neck like I carried my new stuffed dog by the scruff. I watched my father as he watched the carney demonstrate: the carney slid cattycorner to the Highstriker’s pad and we watched as he landed the mallet, our eyes following until it connected rather than waiting for the puck to fly into and sound the bell. After more carnivalgoers tried without success, and we watched them fail, my father paid to play, he won, and then I got another toy.

          Two booths down a carney in a lollypop jumpsuit climbed a rope ladder, wedging his footarches and fists into the knots. My father watched him and I watched my father. He stood aside as a fat man in a sweaty baseball cap swore and fell off the second rung onto a yellowed mattress. The next man’s shirt came up and showed his hairy belly. My dad paid his money and climbed to the top. He bounced off the mattress and asked me which toy I wanted.

          At the shooting range he did the same routine. I came away with the paper star he’d shot out of its backing, connecting the horseshoe around the star one BB at a time, until it fluttered to the floor of the lane, and I put it in my pocket.

          After his several victories I convinced my dad to ride the swings with me, but he waited with the prizes while I spun in the Gravitron. Centrifuge he could handle because of its predictability, but he never glanced twice at the rides with torque and drops at random—he discounted them the way he discounted the gaffs.

           I scuffed off the ride through the patchy grass in the fairground. My father’s hand came to the back of my neck again as we passed a painted façade that was fading into chalk. When I touched it the paint came away on my clothes and fingers. Latex balloons hung stapled to a bulletin board inside. On either side of the board Styrofoam-stuffed animals and inflatable furniture dangled. Posters of cartoons and muscle cars clung to the sideboards, peeling up at the corners. In a low hung pinup a woman in white and black perched one palm on her hip, pressed her shoulders forward, tipped her neck back. Her dark lips parted as if to laugh and exhale. She wore almost nothing, lingerie made of pale blue rhinestones. Ropes of pearls fell past her waist. She rolled them between the painted fingertips of her other hand and looked directly into the camera.

          The beams on the wooden roller coaster strained as the crowded cars cranked uphill and slung themselves down. Bungee cords tightened with dropped couples and flung them back into the sky. Glee at the unprecedented stomachs in throats fanned their shrieks. I wanted that poster. I wanted to be her. I wanted people to feel like they were falling when they saw me. I said, I want to play that.

           Darts? my father stopped beside me. His hand slid off my shoulder. Because he gestured to the booth with the prize that I wanted inside it, I nodded. An unshaven carney smoking and leaning in the booth reanimated and moved toward us. When a couple walked up at the same time I let them go first. She wore a baby tee and jeans that squeezed her waist like an open can of biscuit dough. He had cut the sleeves off his faded black shirt. My father said, unnecessarily, Watch what they do.

           The carney’s cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. He leaned back against the railing right in front of the balloon he tried to pop. He threw five plastic-feathered darts in a row, and he popped five balloons, also in a row. He plucked the darts from the board, and after he took the man’s money he gave him five darts from a jar.

           The man aimed low so the balloons rolled. When he aimed higher he popped two balloons but won nothing. His girlfriend threaded her arm through his and tried to guide him away but he gave the carney another five dollars. He shot again and hit three. The poster he chose was of a girl in a bikini draped over the hood of a muscle car. His girlfriend looked irritated and they left.

            We moved up. I asked the carney to pin more balloons at eye level. While his back was turned, I pulled myself up onto the façade, and I stood on my knees. I looked to the poster I wanted. On the sidewall a sign forbade leaning over the ledge. The carney turned around and said, You can’t lean over the ledge. My dad put his hand on my back to steady me and gave him the five dollar bill. The carney went silent. He handed the five darts to me with papery fingers.

 I asked, How manny do I need to win?

When he spoke he showed gray teeth. Five for an animal. Four for the blowups. Three for a picture.

             The carnival noises behind me, the music, the hawking, the winning and losing sound effects, the metal-on-metal churning of coasters, the vomiting of cotton candy and rolling of skee balls, all pooled into white noise as I fired dart after dart just below the balloons’ pushpins. I popped four out of five.

I want that picture, I said. I pointed to the woman.

The carney reached for tweetybird.

No, the woman, I said.

No, tweetybird, my dad said.

That’s not fair. I won it, I thought.

The carney held out a roll of paper taped into a cylinder, and he lied, We’re out of Marilyn anyway.

             I looked that carney in his bloodshot eyes. I didn’t take the scroll. My dad’s hand wrapped around it and stuck it in his back pocket. Then it came up under my tangled black ponytail to steer me away. As we walked he asked me if I wanted a snowcone but I didn’t answer. He asked if I wanted to go home. I wanted that poster. I wanted to decide what I wanted and I wanted to devise my own strategy and I wanted to use my strategy and I wanted to win what I wanted. I would realize later that games did not work that way, and that eyes-on-the-prize was no the lesson my father tried to teach me. That day I thought I’d been had. I thought I was the exception to the strategy’s tried-and-true rule about imitation. I thought that rule didn’t work for me because I was a little girl and I had no agency over my outcomes. Because I was little. And because I was a girl. And because a nerdy brown country girl like me would never be fair and blonde and desirable like that photograph. I dropped my toys at the foot of the merry-go-round and I climbed to sulk on a unicorn, clung to its peeling gold pole as we gained speed and the crowd around us blurred.

            As the circles slowed my father appeared and said it was time to go because it was time to go. I descended the metal steps to gather my toys, but when I saw the funhouse across the path I hesitated by my pile. Before my dad could palm my shoulder I quick-stepped through the thinning crowd, pretending not to hear as my dad called my name. I brushed past the carney in a group of teenagers fiddling with their tickets. Inside, my blood pounded. The hydraulic noise of the shifting floors seethed and blocked any sound from the outside the metallic trailer walls. The portal to the next stage rotated vertically. This pale kid lingered in it, downsliding headfirst in the cylinder’s slow roll. It’s my turn, I said, and he disappeared.

            In the doorway I turned sideways, watching wall turn into floor turn into wall turn into ceiling, and then I burst through the cellophane curtain on the other side, slick with sweat.

            I ran through a hall of swinging punching bags and climbed to the second floor on pegs that retracted into the wall. Past the ball pit was the room of mirrors. I tried to catch my breath at this part of the obstacle course. They distorted my reflection. In one, my belly exploded in another my hips and chest expanded and my waist pinched but so did my head. Other girls in there tried to bend or stretch to get their proportions right—I guess they had seen Marilyn too. But the mirrors had minds of their own. We tried different inputs but they spat back their own ideas. This was a game of chance. All we could do was try and enjoy the thrill. I did for a while then I left into the last room with the triangle floors. I climbed to one’s apex and looked out its barred window.

Daddy!

            He smiled and held up his palm. I waved my whole arm and grinned back. He looked tiny way down there. After the triangles there was a pole going into a hole in the floor, like for firemen. I wrapped around it. I hung for a moment. Then I let go. And screamed.