The Calendar Year

Michael stared at the shirtless man in overalls as he lifted the hydraulically mechanized safety bar at the end of the roller coaster ride. He’s not really lifting, Michael though. And he wasn’t. But it did lend a sense of purpose to a man who could, and in strictly economic terms, should have been replaced by the far more reliable machine. A machines which, after all, did not show up to work an hour and a half late, breathing the stale remnants of Pabst Blue Ribbon and waitress vagina into the faces of small children.

Michael’s mother conversed with the insurance company photographer, asking if he worked for DistribuLife fulltime (“no”), then what his personal work consisted of (“Mostly cats, I guess. Kittens”). She nodded, politely, then looked down and noticed her son had disappeared.

The announcement was lost in the noise: “Just once more Look pleaeeeeaaase!!!!! at that fucking giant rabbit Three dollars for a bottle Michael of Crain water?! Easy as onePlease tworeport thrreeto the Kiddie You Kingdom looking for someone little fella? Hop up on Grandpa’s lap, whaddya say?”

Michael stared at the man, who was not his Grandfather. “I lost my cotton candy,” he declared, and scuttled off. The man eased back onto the green bench, asking God for forgiveness and for strength.

Michael walked past people, hundreds, maybe millions of people. People in white sneakers and jean shorts and tube socks, people with chocolate ice cream on their faces, people holding hands, people with stains beneath their arms and on their bellies and on their backs.

“Every one of these people is going to die,” Michael said aloud. He heard that on tv, on one of his mother’s soaps. He did not know what it meant.

He smiled as he found the escaped wisp of cotton candy, resting atop a hedge. He smiled again as his mother hoisted him into her arms (“I was so…!” etc.), and once again as he tasted the cumulous sweetness.

He pointed. “Look, Mom!” he shouted. “It’s flying!”

“Smile!” the DistribuLife photographer called from the base of the roller coaster, snapping a photo—THE photo—of mother and son, of Mary and Jesus and his recovered cotton candy.

Two faces in front, smiling, yes. But it was those sixty-four faces behind the image, those sixty-four faces of surprise and anger and a kind of joy as machine separated from machine, dropping down, down, down toward a shirtless man in overalls picking at the bacteria which had found a home in his body, and toward a photographer, who was overwhelmed with the satisfaction of having made a single moment last—at least in human terms—forever.

That was what Michael remembered.