Memories and Lights

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Red flew past with the sun glinting off the edge, turning it pink, and then green followed, then blue...orange, yellow...all the colors of the rainbow blurring together as the spinning carnival ride neared the end of its two-minute run. The sun was going down, and just as the colorful circle slowed to a stop, the row of flashing lights on the edge lit up, illuminating the faces of the kids filing off to the exit gate.

She used to come here when she was young, back when money didn’t matter to her and the only currency in her life was carnival tickets and the piddly allowance her mother pushed into her hands when they got home from school. It was just the loose change collected in the drink holders of her beat up Mazda. A few quarters, a dime that looked like it had been swallowed by a swamp monster, and a handful of pennies that had entirely lost their shiny copper color, looking more like the shade of brown you might find in a moldy toilet.

It was barely enough to buy a candy bar. Just over a dollar, at most.

One of the parents that was trying to tame their unruly child, screaming about wanting to go on the ride again, was wearing a t-shirt that said ‘My futures are bright’.

Five years ago, she would have vehemently been against that.

Five years ago, almost exactly, she had been sitting in a hospital room watching them desperately trying to restart her mother’s heart. The beeping, and shouting...scuffling of feet, the whirring of the defibrillator had become a nightmarish symphony invading her mind every time she wasn’t focused...and she still remembered the exact moment...

“Time of death, 4:55,” the doctor had said in that mechanical voice as though he was speaking about a malfunctioning robot that had just stopped working.

Then, she would have said that she didn’t have any more futures, that all she had was a lifetime of looking at the past, when her mother was still alive, when her mother wasn’t facing eternity of being a rotting corpse in a coffin, when-

A gust of wind slammed into her face just as she took a deep breath, and the sudden fresh air filling her lungs was cool and calming.

But today, September 7th, five years later...she could finally maybe say she had a future...a life to live, places to go.

Like the carnival. She’d avoided this place like the plague until now. Too many memories, too many ways to slip back into that dark hellish vortex of misery and defeat.

But walking past the cotton candy stand didn’t send her into a fit of tears, she made it by the petting zoo without remembering exactly how she’d beg her mother to let her ride the horses, and she even forgot about the spot that she’d tried to run away after her mother had refused to let her get her face painted.

“It’ll rub off on your pillow,” wasn’t a good enough deterrent for her 9-year-old self.

Time really did heal almost anything.

It just didn’t heal death. All you could do was learn to move on.

Rising from the red plastic bench, she turned away from the ride and peered back in the direction of the entrance.

Her temporary release was almost up. They’d granted her a few days for good behavior, but they’d been swallowed up by the rush of not staring at white walls all the time. The van was waiting out by the gate, with ‘Rosewood Mental Correction’ written across the side of it.

Christmas, just when the lights and the snow and everything else were bringing that sense of spirit and...sense of loneliness…

Christmas was when she could go home.

Home to nothing except a dark empty apartment and her thoughts.

At least this time she would get to stay.

This time she really was going to get better.

“Adapesa!”

The nurse was calling her name...her full name that she hated.

“It’s Peso,” she muttered as she brushed past the woman towards the van, barely catching the bewildered look on her face.

And back to prison she went.

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