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        I aimed to stay home that Friday night, May Day, 1970, and not traipse down the hill to the carnival.  I’d even scribbled in my diary that carnivals were for kids, and for yokums without sense enough to poke acorns down a peckerwood hole.  Flipping through stale magazines, I sat sullen in my sour bedroom—the lights and sounds of the show bouncing into my window, and Maw sprawled on the couch in the sitting room, snoring again in front of the snowy TV.  
        Me, Annabelle Cory, nineteen-years young and looking mighty fine, and where in hell was I?  Clandel, West-by-God-Virginia.
        To get shut of my mulligrubs, if only for a few hours, out the door I flew in a burnt hurry down the treads, down the steep street, down the hillside our slattery apartment clung to.  Fetching up at the sidewalk along US-52, the main blacktop snaking through Clandel, I leaned over the rusty pipe rail and took in the carnival below. 
        On the bottoms by the train yard, colored lights danced in the night’s chill.  The heap of folks on the midway kicked up a flickery dust cloud with whiffs of fried food, hot sugar, and diesel exhaust floating in the familiar taint of coal—all swoggled full-tilt by the iron arms of monstrous rides, roaring and whirling through laughs and screams, through bells, bangs, buzzers, and barkers—all amid one golly-whopper ruckus of full-blast 8-track rock-and-roll.
        With no money for the front gate, I ducked under the railing and into the bushes—my feet finding and remembering the stony rut carved by years of us young’uns scrambling down this nigh cut to the weedy lot between the railroad tracks and the wide bend in Black Creek.  There we used to play our games, and there the carnival would set up each spring.  And then we’d play their games.  Skidding down between the bushes, grabbing at the budding leaves, I recalled other times with no money—my sister and me, sneaking into the show together, giggling till our sides smarted.  
        I clambered out of the brush, and up and over the bed of slack and cinders, the oily wooden ties, the gleaming steel rails.  Ahead, between the lonesome tracks and blaring midway, the carny camp lay huddled in trembly shadows.  Several cars and pickups and a pair of beat-up two-ton trucks crouched nearby a jumble of house trailers, a few curtained windows glowing like foxfire. 
        I put on like I wasn’t sneaking in, smiling and strolling into the camp as if I knew where I was going.  But in a blink, fear stole my breath, my heart leapt, my lips tightened.  I spied a bright gap in the backside of the line-up of booths surrounding the midway, and tiptoed toward it.
        Just before I got there, a bench-kneed chihuahua charged out from underneath a nearby house trailer, snarling and snapping at my ankles.  I kicked at it and fled to the gap, but it jumped at my leg and chomped down on the cuff of my favorite bell-bottom jeans.  Hopping on one foot, I swung my leg and the dog around and around, trying to spin it off, its pointy ears and bulgy eyes darting back and forth—the puny bastard in a fright about where I had it right then.
        I soon spun myself dizzy, and when I tottered and slowed and grabbed the corner of a tent, the dog let loose, rolled off—no doubt dizzy too—and it wobbled back under the shabby green trailer.  As I stood there, getting back my breath and my bearings—one eye on the dog, and the other eye on the crowd shifting by in the bright hullabaloo a few steps beyond the gap in the tents—the battered door of the trailer squawked open, and an old gypsy woman leaned out from the flutter of candlelight within.  For a spooky stretched-out moment, she eyed me up and down—gold hoops dangling from her earlobes, red kerchief tied atop her long gray hair, a black shawl over a colory and billowy dress.  
        Then her squinty gaze softened, as if she’d easily figured me out.  I turned tail and stumbled out onto the midway.
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copyright © 2012 by S.M.Fernand