Carnival Souls

The Carousel

It was the music that woke her. 

An intricate melody that spilled in through her open window and made the thick summer air shimmer, as though each note had come alive in the form of a firefly. It wreathed around her head and whispered the soft cadence of another language in her ear, nudging her out of bed.

She followed it into the dead of night on bare feet that didn't feel the scrape of asphalt. Through darkened streets where nothing moved and nothing could be heard above the haunting strings of a violin, she flitted like a shadow. Even the wind lay in hiding.

It was only when the pavement beneath her feet turned to dewy grass that she realized where she was: the fields at the edge of town. In the pallor of the crescent moon, darkened fair rides hunched like slumbering monsters. They even seemed to be breathing. The sprawling carnival lay just as quiet as the rest of the town when a few hours earlier it had been alive with twinkling lights, whirring rides, and the delighted screams of children.

Prone to jumping at even the most innocent of sounds in the night, the girl was strangely unafraid as she moved through the darkness. Instead she walked forward, following the music like a trail of breadcrumbs as it slithered backwards to its source. Lights began to flicker on one by one as she passed.

The Ferris wheel lit up blue and gold and began to rotate ever so slowly, chairs rocking in the breeze as though they were occupied by ghosts. Dark purple flared on her right as the Tilt-a-Whirl hummed to life. She turned onto the midway where white stalls on either side of the grassy channel glimmered under the glow of tiny golden light bulbs strung along their stilted tops.

The food vendor that sold whole clouds of pink cotton candy and buckets of popcorn soaked in butter, now stood empty. As did the game of stacked milk bottles she had tried unsuccessfully to knock down with a bean bag to win a prize.

The fortune-teller's tent stood open, a warm red light pouring out, but she had been too nervous to go in earlier and she was no braver now. She passed the tent and continued towards the huge carousel that sat at the end of the long line of booths. It was even more beautiful than she remembered.

Though she had told her mother and father that, at twelve-years-old, she was too old for a merry-go-round where parents held squalling babies and toddlers with sticky fingers and running noses, she had felt a secret pang of longing to ride it.

The carousel seemed old beyond time, archaic in its beauty, preserved through centuries as though the original builder had frozen wild horses and mounted them as they stood. The equines, with their cocked heads and flared nostrils, would have seemed real even without their manes and tails streaming behind them. Her favorite had been a chestnut mare, one foreleg arched as though to strike, with hair black as tar caught in what she imagined was a hot, dusty wind.

Looking closely, she spotted the same horse to the right, on its way to the far side of the ride. She began to walk over to it, wanting to fulfill the desire to see if the horses felt as alive as they looked, when a voice stopped her.

"Hello."

The girl's head snapped to the left to see a boy sitting side-saddle on a ferocious black stallion with rolling, dangerous red eyes. The boy appeared to be around seventeen, though it may have been his hair-long and tied back like one of the colonists in her history textbook-that made him seem older than he was. His legs were crossed at the ankle, feet as bare and dirty as hers poking out from rolled green trousers.

Her eyes widened when she saw what he held in his long-fingered hands: the violin, tucked under his chin. He barely seemed to have to concentrate for even as he watched her, his fingers continued to fly over the strings, the motion of the bow nearly invisible as it sent shivers of notes through the air. And the music-- oh the music was so sweet and pure she wanted to laugh and weep at the same time.