Art Bench

This is a short story I wrote:

The day was a bright green. The first rains of the year had just let up, pushing down the smog curtain to let in the sun and dispersed the faintly metallic smell of fresh wet land. The trees lined both sides of the T junction. The leaves looked like pretty elves dressed in green hats for a party. The elves frolicked in bursts of euphoric dance, swayed by the playful wind. First, they shuffled towards the office complex. Then, they twisted towards the factory across the street, saluting the tall flues. Finally, they waltzed towards the single bench at the apex of the T.

A cigarette glared with its single red eye, disturbed from its slumber by the wind, and calmed down only once the wind had subsided. Ben put the cigarette in his mouth, inhaled deeply. He coughed slightly, and passed it to his left. Ben wore his customary white sweatshirt. He got up and stretched his long wiry arms and legs. He removed the huge plastic sheet that had covered them all morning. He rolled up and set the sheet under the bench along with the awkward bamboo poles that had held them up. He sat down and looked at Fiona. He ran his fingers through her blonde-brown hair. The hair was knotted, but to his fingers, still felt quite soft.

“Nice sunny day, no?” said Fiona, clutching the cigarette she had taken from Ben between her fingers. Her fingers trembled, and it took her a long moment to steady the cigarette and get it up to her mouth. Immediately, she dropped the cigarette, doubled over in cough, and a thick lump of blood and sputum oozed down her chin. Jake pulled a Kleenex from the bag at his feet, lay Fiona on his nineteen and half inch left biceps, and wiped her chin clean tenderly. He tossed the Kleenex into the trash bin a couple of yards to his left, and missed. He gently tilted her head over to rest it on Ben’s shoulder, picked up the cigarette from the floor, and puffing on it, he walked over to pick up the tissue and drop it into the bin. He pulled out another cigarette, lit it with the previous one, and dropped the older one into the trash. He looked at the bus stop a few feet away.

A crowd had gathered there, mostly from their college. Some looked their way. Others talked to each other and to the reporters and cops and firemen and medical nurses that stood on call. Some nibbled on their lunch of burritos or hot dogs from the stall around the corner. On one corner, Jake’s parents sat guarded by their friends. Ben’s parents had left earlier to feed the kids. An occasional reporter managed to slip by and get a question through, only to be steered away by Paul or Libbie or Diana. Jake’s mother was crying into his father’s brown coat. He smiled and waved. His father nodded back. A fair crowd for a fair cause, Jake thought, as he walked back and handed the cigarette to Ben. The pity was, he actually liked the smoking, and didn’t quite understand what the fuss was about, but he loved Alex more. A lot more than the smoking, he told himself.

A murmur began and rose, and the heads turned, a few at first and then all of them, towards the gate of the office complex. A tall gray haired man in a slightly glossy Prussian blue suit was walking from the gate towards the bench. A group of reporters dashed towards him, but he ignored them. He stopped by the bench, and smiled at Jake. “I believe you wanted to see me?”

Ben stood up and blew smoke into his face. “You know what we want.”

Diana walked over to the bench, and waved the file in her hand at his face, the wind from the file disheveling his kempt gray hair . “Did you even read any of this?”

“I get a lot of letters from a lot of people. I might have read it, I am not sure. But that is besides the point. I am here becau…”

Fiona’s face was red and her muscles twisted, as she forced herself up to shout, but barely managed a hoarse whisper. “Conceited bastard! A letter everyday for sixteen years. From Alex…Alex! He was a professor of philosophy at the university, not a bum! And you’re not sure?” She clutched her chest and fell to the floor. People lifted her gently, and laid her out on the bench. She vomited blood into a plastic bottle. Ben picked up the bottle and walked over to the man in the blue suit.

“Jim! She doesn’t have much time, do you see that? What more do you need to stop? How do you even live with yourself?”

Jim looked at him. His eyes still stared blankly, but Ben detected a flicker of something warmer deep below. Jim turned to the reporters to make sure they were getting his every word, and then back to the bench. “I am sorry that Alex died due to complications that may have been aggravated by smoking. I applaud your courage and love for your teacher, but am also sorry that you kids are deluded enough to throw your life and bright futures on this futile effort. Smoking until death demanding for the closure of Pristine Tobacco! What will it be next? Shooting as many people as possible till they stop manufacturing guns? Is this how you plan to change the world? Look, I run a business here, like anyone else. If the government deems this illegal, I am willing to accept what they ask of me. But until then… I suggest that you stop this charade, as that girl over there, she doesn’t look too good. I have a daughter about her age, and… this is not the age to...’

He turned to the cameras. “I have worked in the tobacco industry for the last twenty two years, but I have never smoked a single cigarette myself. You know why? Because I have chosen based on the information presented to me that it may harm my health, and I care about my health. Everything out there is known to have ill effects if used in excess – chocolate, alcohol, burgers, even videogames. So, moderation and abstinence are the recommended choices. A few people ignore the warning and take it to excess, and they meet the consequence of their actions.” He cleared his throat, and turned back to the bench. “I came out here to let you know that I am sorry about the death of your professor, Alex. However, we cannot accept or act on your demands for two reasons. One, because the right people to respond to this would be the government. As long as they allow this, others will do this, even if we give up, and we don’t see any reason to give up. More importantly, if we even acknowledge this, or act on it, this would set a precedent for more dangerous, severe demands in the future, which we cannot have.” He turned to leave, stopped in indecision for a couple of seconds, and then walked over to Fiona. He laid his hand on her forehead and said softly, “I’m sorry for you, child. Please rethink your decision. I don’t think life is worth throwing away, for any cause.” He wiped his brow with a silk white handkerchief and turned to the reporters. “This will be my only statement. All the people here are adults, and they have the right to choose their actions, and also have the responsibility to bear the consequences of their actions. It is their choice that is harming them, and Pristine Tobacco accepts no responsibility for the consequences. ” He turned around and walked back to the office, ignoring the reporters who surrounded him, drowning him in mikes and cameras and questions. The reporters walked back slowly, and then, as if to make up for lost ground, gathered at the bus stop for a fresh round of questions.

A middle aged man wearing a jacket with DCBA TV on it in large yellow letters, spoke into his camera.

“… to recap, earlier today, the sheriff of Langlow County talked to the students’ lawyers demanding that they stopped this demonstration or they would be arrested. The lawyers retorted that it was perfectly legal for all the students to smoke as much as they wished. They had no intentions of killing themselves. They were just enjoying their smoke. They also refused the medical help that the sheriff offered, as they said they had the right to choose when they needed medical help. Of course, if the factory was shut down, they would stop immediately. The sheriff hasn’t been available for comment since. And now, just moments ago, Jim Dougall, the CEO of Pristine Tobacco stopped by to make his statement. Here is a recording of that statement…”

Diana stood by a tree, and nodded at another camera. She leafed through her file. “They’re all letters that Alex wrote to Jim, and range from single lines to many pages. Ah,” she said, having found the one she wanted, “this is a good one from a month ago - a couple of weeks before he died.”

Hi, Jim
I think I can call you by first name, seeing how much I have written to you over the last sixteen years. How’s the family? I heard you had a new baby grand daughter. Congratulations to you and your family! May that provide you with a joyous reminder of how beautiful life truly is.

Now, in case you haven’t read my previous letters, let me, as I have done several times in the past, remind you of what I talked about.

I am Alex Houghton, professor of philosophy and a big fan of your top selling brand of cigarettes, Hickories, of course. I must tell you, in spite of all that they say, that even after smoking Hickories for a quarter century, the first puff of the day definitely packs a punch. It relaxes my eyes, and the world looks somewhat, I don’t know, friendlier?

Anyway, I have news for you this time. I am writing this time to tell you that my doctor has confirmed that the blood I am coughing up is lung cancer, and has given me about three months at the most to live. I had been warned before by my doctors, thank their souls, but I believe in the government and in great law abiding citizens like yourself. I believe that if you sell this freely while blocking the sales of marijuana, then surely this must be more fun and less harmful to the people. Or maybe you have a greater goal, which I am not aware of, but I trust you. I know you will withdraw this from the market if there is any true danger from this. Maybe the lung cancer that is eating away my life and soul is a result of the air I breathe on my early morning walks.

Let me assure you that I am a man of infinite will power (it is my job to talk about will, and I believe in controlling it), and I can quit this anytime I wish. However, I would like to reassure my students, who are either confused or who lack the will to stop smoking, by continuing to smoke. Unless of course you find with renewed research that this is in fact sufficiently injurious to health and addictive as well, and decide to stop making this available.

In case you had missed these, I have provided all the research there is on the subject. With my meager knowledge of the subject, I am unable to find the error in the research results. For instance, this report claims that addiction to smoking is genetic. If someone with the genetic predisposition gets introduced to it, then they have to fight against their own tendency to give it up. But I am sure I am missing something there, even though this result is based on a double blind study by a renowned panel of experts performed on a large fairly random sample. There must be some error here, and with al these reports. You are the expert, and if these have not been worthy of your comment, I am sure that these results are somehow flawed.

Congratulations again, and good luck to the new mother and baby in the family.

If you haven’t gotten a gift for the new parents, may I suggest a lifetime supply of Hickories – definitely a pleasant gift to calm their nerves with the new stresses of bringing up a baby.

As I have done for the last sixteen years, I hope eagerly to hear your comments on the matter.

Warm regards,
Alex

Diana’s voice rose hysterically as she read the letter, until, in the end, she screamed out ‘Warm Regards!’. Paul came around and held her close. He held his hand up to the cameraman, who was about to turn the camera on.

Paul said, “Once we knew he was dying, we went to his house everyday. He allowed that on one condition. We would not force him to stop smoking. He said that he wanted his death to have meaning, and dying a few days earlier by smoking to the end could go a long way in influencing the cigarette companies. So, we agreed and went everyday. He used to say that at his core, man’s rational and emotional self are in perfect harmony. It was only at more superficial levels that there was conflict. And so, the secret to connecting with a man’s soul was to talk to that core, ignoring the shallower layers.”

A shapely woman with oversized glasses asked, “Excuse me, but isn’t the sarcasm in that letter an example of the shallowness he condemned?”

“No, in fact, the question did come up in class, though in a different way. The approach may vary as long as you address the core. A violent person may use the means he knows best, an intellectual may use sarcasm, but the point is to sincerely target the core, the person.” Diana gently moved his arm, letting Paul continue, and excused herself silently to get lunch.

At the bench, Fiona coughed fitfully, into her bottle. Paul turned to the camera. “Fiona was very close to him. She used to live alone with her father, who would drink and beat her up everyday. She stayed at friends’ most of the time. One night her father pushed her out the apartment window. She fell three floors, fractured her ribs, one lung was badly infected. Alex had her father arrested, and then visited her everyday at the hospital. He then took her under his roof, and healed her, taught her at home, arranged for her to take the test. Some people at school thought that it was sex. We all knew that it wasn’t. She had been with Ben for years and they were dedicated to each other. Alex had gone through something terrible as a child, he never told us what. Once, he was delirious with high fever, and he mumbled that Fiona reminded him of those days, and he repeated again and again, “Fiona is Alex. Alex is Fiona”. He was too muddled to say much more clearly, but I gathered that he had an abusive uncle as well, who might have hurt him. Also, he rubbed the scar that ran across his right cheek several times that night, so maybe that was from his uncle hurting him.” He paused and looked right through the camera into the distance. “I guess we’ll never know for sure.”

Libbie came over, and patted Paul’s arm. She was a warm looking slightly plump girl, with her brown hair tied up in a bun. She continued, in a matronly tone, “Fee…Fiona, the dear child, had barely recovered from her injuries when Alex was given three months tops to live due to lung cancer. She had just begun to see new hope after years of abuse by her father, and now…” She looked at Fiona, now lying calmly on Ben’s lap, too weak to hold her own cigarette. “She somehow inherited her stubbornness from her few months with Alex. She knows she has weak lungs. We all tried to talk her out of it, but she insisted that she would go on as long as she was alive or they shut the factory. Earlier today, she passed out, and when she woke up she went berserk that the others hadn’t forced her awake to take her turn. Poor Ben. He loves her so much. I almost think he is here more because he can’t talk her out of it, but he can’t bear to live without her either.”

A man from the back of the crowd yelled, “What about the other boy, the He-Man…Jake is it? Why is he involved?”

“That was just a draw of lots. We decided there had to be three going at a time. If anyone is taken ill or, you know,… then the next in line would replace that person. We have eleven people signed up so far.” He paused.

“We expected this response from Jim, probably thought it would be worse. It will get better. It can’t get worse, can it?” He paused, as if expecting someone to answer the question. “We are all ready to die, if needed. At the end, you will either have eleven dead students or a closed factory.” He smiled weakly, “Consider it a form of live installation art, if you will.”

And then, a scream from the bench. Diana held a spoon in one hand, a bowl of instant noodle soup slipping carelessly from the other hand to the floor below. Fiona lay on Ben’s lap. Her feet were braced on Jake’s legs, giving her body a ballet-like grace, even lying down. A thin stream of dark brown soup flowed down her pink chin onto her neck. Her lips were parted slightly, to take in the warm soup. Her lips were held in the beginnings of a smile, as if amused by a mischievous thought. She was beautiful.

The Hat

This is a short story I wrote as part of my creative writing course:

The man was his hat – yellow brown, tattered, wrinkled, concealing an immense force that did not receive its due respect. And his hat was he, and they could not be separated, not even when the lady in uniform extended her aging fingers with matronly conviction, asking it to leave him, dark coats spilling out of her other arm. After the allotted maximum time for fussing over each passenger had expired, she moved on, and got lost among the other prim blue uniforms with tiny glinting silver, gold and red-gold badges brandishing increasing degrees of power. The usuals happened –seatbelts upright, turn off electronic equipment, candy, water and juice, the closing shut of the open overhead bins, stern loud, but not rude loud. The odd pillow, the belt checks, bassinets, silent headcounts.

Not many spoke, though everyone thought, of time. Especially of time to come, and all the hurry and the hustle seemed meaningless considering that try as they might, they couldn’t keep at it for longer than riding alongside the sun three quarters of the way across the globe could. And the time came, and the flight hissed alive, taxied in all directions at once, and then, made up its mind and raced northwards, took off into the clouds, and then turned left heading for its long journey west, slanting gracefully both ways, as if tipping its hat to both unseen hemispheres, somewhere below the thick fog, applauding its successful takeoff.

From below the hat that he was, a hint of grey hair queried fiercely for meaning amidst the chaos, like the antennae of a dying cockroach fulfilling its last wish to know its surroundings a little better. As the uniforms bustled around serving sweet nothings, too busy to note anyone in particular, he set aside his laptop, and ambled over to the front of the plane, frowning, clutching his hat as if stuck in a desert storm. An observant co-passenger might have conjectured from the direction of his frown through the cockpit door, that he required urgent clarification regarding the flashing light – the sixth green light from the left, third row from the top, in the panel to the left of the co-pilot’s head, just in front of the window and the clearing skies without. For a moment, the coast was clear, and he emerged right behind the captain, his head, hat and all, barely clearing the seated captain’s own, and asked, in crystal clear diction of his native tongue, a long passionate question, that no one, of course, understood. No one understood, especially because no one tried to understand, for the pressing concern around the question lay not in its interpretation, but in standard procedure to deal with such questioners in the cockpit who were not certified members of the flight crew. The captain pressed a button by his feet and murmured the specific code for possible foreign terror attack, which happened on that day to be QC31C. Immediately, muscles, and patches of a white shirt and grey suit appeared in the cockpit, in jumbled bits, sort of like a jigsaw puzzle of a suited gorilla all mixed up. The newcomer, who amorphously filled the little remaining empty space in the cockpit, grabbed the intruder, officially a suspected terrorist, to be killed before any questions asked, and pinned him down to the floor with one hand, while drawing a gun with the other almost expertly. The lights flashing green and orange and red, the dials and the knobs, the captain, the copilot, each felt a light breeze while the unwitting ape felt nothing where he had felt his gun, and then experienced excruciating intermittent pain at varying locations for the rest of his life. The door, realizing the need for room for important goings on inside the cockpit, had slammed itself shut. The entire flight staff had drifted towards the rear end of the aircraft, where everyone suddenly seemed to have exercised their rights to maximum baggage limits, and there were a few angry people indignantly protesting the manner in which their cabin luggage was seized and checked in at the last moment.

He pulled his hat down a bit at a time further as he spoke furiously, until his hat almost covered the thin slits of his mere points of eyes.

The captain tried asking him if he understood English or French or German or Dutch, but the man just stood there, hat in hand.

The copilot turned to the captain and asked, “Chinese or Japanese, Steve?”

“Chinese, not Japanese, could be Korean or Taiwanese as well, or from somewhere in those parts, and our great luck, he is the only Asian onboard – Pam at the desk mentioned this when I checked in – she mentioned that was because today is the birthday of Buddha and most people spend the day visiting temples, monasteries, whatever…”

He looked at the man, clutching his hat. Now he just stood there, bobbing his hat up and down, and then pulling it way down over his eyes and then again...

“Steve, could we ask the ground staff?”

The captain looked at the panel and at the spotless blue sky beyond. He had been glad the sky was clearing up, and had looked forward to a pleasant eventless flight, and then this.

“No way, Jeffrey! They will do what we did, only they will send the whole army down here, and he doesn’t look like he wants to hurt us or anything. He just seems worried about something in that panel.”

“And also about his hat,” Jeffrey looked at the little man. “Do you think his flash was beginner’s luck? Maybe I could take him.”

“You will do no such thing,” Steve nodded at the man on the ground babbling gibberish to himself, unable to even think of thinking about getting up, who reminded him of a drunken Indian monkey he had seen during a climbing expedition in the Himalayas. The monkey had somehow gotten into their van when they were out climbing, sprinted through every item of food in the van, and when they returned, the glutton had sat groaning exactly the same words as his bigger and arguably more civilized kin was now chanting on the floor. However, there was tangibly more emotion in the present case and the monkey was still able to roll on the ground.

He turned to Jeffrey, and said, “I will check every light in this panel, and you go see if you can find someone who knows Chinese back there. Don’t say anything, just bring someone who knows Chinese over – tell him that I would like to speak to him. But whatever you do, for God’s sake, don’t start a panic wave out there.”

Jeffrey left, carefully edging past the hat which was the man. Steve settled down to inspecting the panel.

A moment later, Jeffrey popped his head in. “Steve?”

“Yes?”

“Steve, when you say Chinese, do you mean Mandarin?”

Steve rolled his eyes. “Any bloody dialect will do – Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, whatever!”

“OK, boss. And another thing – how come the ground staff hasn’t contacted us?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. There is a lot of disturbance due to the thunderstorm, maybe the connection is down. But they should be back any time now. So hurry!”

Steve’s head squeezed itself out of the door and, finding a matching body with ambulatory capabilities, walked away to do his thing. The man who was his hat followed, one hand inside his hat, the other hand holding his hat down.

Once outside in the business class, the man in the hat, spoke loudly, as before, a solemn hymnic chant, a private message to no one in particular.

In an appropriate response to what sounded like a warcry from a man holding a gun under his hat, everyone panicked. Most people shrank into themselves, shutting their eyes tight, women screamed, men shrieked, children howled, while some men stared blankly, obviously planning something heroic. A couple of them in the back were calling the police on their cell phone, and poor Jeffrey was trying to control the mayhem by shouting, “It’s all fine here – nothing to worry about…” which was drowned in all the wailing.

One man in a bright green hawaian shirt strode forward confidently and spoke to the man in the hat. Jeffrey grabbed him, almost in tears and dragged him to the cockpit. The man followed, holding his hat that was him down over his head. They all entered and Jeffrey shut the door and latched it from within.

It would be only minutes before all hell broke loose. They may even send planes to gun them down – like September 11^th.

The man said to the captain cheerily, “hi, I’m Xavier.”

The captain didn’t care, though he allowed himself to think, Yeah, savior all right.

“Xavier, can you please tell us what this man is trying to say?”

Jeffrey said, “Just to provide you with a status update, well, how do I put it, they all know.”

At this moment, passengers were banging on the cockpit door, presumably demanding an explanation, most likely enlightened by their research that this guy seemed to be alone and there was no partner watching the passengers.

Steve ignored the moans from the floor, the bang from the door and squeezed Xavier’s shoulder hard.

Xavier turned to the hat and said something. The man replied something angrily.

Xavier did not look like a man easily influenced by cussing, and yet he turned red. He turned to Steve and said, “I will translate for you, as best I can, but I cannot do justice to the expletives. You see, swearing has its own regional flavors, and while I know when someone cusses, and how bad the words are by the tone and context, I cannot provide an exact translation to most of this man’s words, as he speaks a Mandarin variant called standard Mandarin, whereas I know only a variant called Sichuan Mandarin.”

The captain was speechless in response to Xavier’s passion for meticulous detail and sincerity around translating cusswords.

Xavier began, “You must land the plane immediately.”

Steve hesitated, “ Is this a terrorist threat of some sort? Does he have a bomb under his hat?”

Xavier translated. Hat responded. Xavier laughed till he wept, then turned to the captain and said, “No, no. That is not it. You got him all wrong.”

Jeffrey sang sarcastically, “Oh, please tell, please tell. I can’t stand the suspense. What is it?”

Another round of clarification and response. Xavier’s hawaian shirt almost instantly sprouted black patches of sweat as he heard the hat.

“He can explain, but he wants you to start procedures for emergency landing right now, otherwise it will be too late. Trust me, I will fill you in as you work on this.”

Steve and Jeffrey protested, and just then air traffic control made contact and demanded an explanation, and Steve made the call, and they landed the plane in the ocean, just like they show in the picture before every flight – with jets, flotation devices and all, and no one was hurt, except of course, gorilla man who now sat sullenly in a corner of the cockpit clutching his stomach by his right hand and his right wrist, which had held the gun on the hat, by his left hand. He was too occupied to even look at the man who was his hat. That was justice for you – the man in the hat had broken the law, the captain and his crew had ignored air traffic control, even the passengers had been an unruly lot who should, rightfully, have been punished in a court of law. But the only one hurt was the one who did exactly what he was assigned to do. He decided to go back to robbing stores across the country, much safer and a lot more job satisfaction there.

Later, Steve pointed to the pretty brunette in the first row – she was from an obscure local newsletter. She stood up and said, “I have brought along a technical interpreter, Mr. Lee”. She laid her hand on the shoulder of the man with black hair and blacker glasses wearing a black shirt and beige trousers standing next to her. “Can I ask Professor Huang a question?” Steve turned a little pink, but the dim lighting did not carry the change across the hall. She called out her question, “Professor Huang, thank you for joining us today. Can you please tell us what actually happened?” Lee translated. Everyone heard the word Huang. The professor moved towards the microphone, politely circumventing Steve. He spoke, and Lee translated.

“I am a professor of meteorology from the Nanjing institute of meteorology. I was touring Europe and headed to the US, demonstrating a new improved system for predicting storms. First of all, I regret the injury to the security officer onboard. I was merely saving my life using an ancient Indian Martial art technique called Marma. The pain will only go with time, but it may be some relief to know that it is only pain and there is no damage to his organ systems. Now, turning to the main issue of the evening, I will try to avoid boring you with technical details, but in short, we have found a way to accurately predict an impending storm very shortly before it starts. There are fifteen parameters which we measure to predict a storm. Now, there are certain combinations of some of these characteristics, which indicate a storm with very high accuracy. For instance, if some values are in a certain way, and there is a certain cloud formation, then a storm is highly likely. However, a rarer and deadlier pattern occurs when parameters are in a different combination, and there are heavy clouds which rapidly clear up. I had noticed the second such pattern in the route of travel, but the skies were cloudy and predicted to remain so all the way at the time of departure, through till our arrival. However, as we took off, the skies began to clear, and in fact, I first noticed it when the cockpit door was opened and the sun shone through a clear blue patch in the sky. I walked down to see for myself, and confirmed that the sky was clearing up, which meant that there was soon going to be a storm. I had no time to show them the data. I didn’t even know anyone there would understand. I thought of gesturing a storm, but that is somewhat hard to directly gesture for someone with no experience in charades. Also, I have just learnt that the word I was looking for in English is “storm”. I will never forget that word.” He paused.

The brunette gestured impatiently, “What did you do, professor?”

Lee conveyed.

The professor looked around the room, turned to Steve, and then replied, smiling, and pulled his hat down low over his head.

Bobby

This is a story assignment I did as part of a writing course:

Ma dug her nails into Pa’s shoulder. Ma’s light yellow blouse rained sweat. Pa aimed at the red dot with his cork rifle. Ma looked at the big prize, a giant Tweety, as she had leered at the red evening dress in the Bloomingdale’s catalog yesterday. Pa had tried thrice before and failed – a long line of kids waited impatiently. One of them pointed at Pa and said something. The others laughed. Pa squeezed the trigger and almost hit the poor girl in the stall. Pa wiggled his shoulders, turned to Ma and said icily, “Can I have some room here, please?” He thrust another dollar bill at the shaken girl. Bobby sighed.

A gentle breeze blew in a myrrhic fragrance over the odors of sweat and heavily buttered popcorn. Above the forest of round faces, he saw a huge glass ball filled with entwining fibers of green vapor. It floated above a red and white tent. He walked towards the tent. The green gas gradually turned olive, and then a delicious orange and settled at a deep orange red, still meandering in serpentine wisps.

Thwack! He mumbled an apology as he untangled his face from a dark maroon skirt smothered with a thousand small white flowers.

“Kids these days, I tell yo’! Ne’er watch where they’re goin’!”

He looked up again. Thin wires tethered the smoky orb to the pointed cony tip of the bamboo tent pole. His gaze traced a thin red stripe from the top down to the entrance of the tent. A line grew outside the tent like the tail of a giant painted rat. He stopped beside a young woman and asked, “What show?”

“Fortune te…”, she peered down at him through deep blue glasses. She raised her right eyebrow. “Where’s your mommy?”

A thick cloud of incense smoke from the tent cloaked the line in a dull brown haze. Bobby sniffled and stepped out of the fog. He spotted his Pa’s grey pullover near the ice cream cart to his left. He pointed and galloped in that direction, forgetting to drop his arm. A pretty little girl with shoulder length golden hair and light blue eyes walked up from behind the ice cream cart and tugged at the pullover’s dangling cord. The father handed her a cherry popsicle. She sucked on it noisily and planted a wet sloppy kiss on the man’s cheek. Bobby dropped his hand and stopped.

A convoy of tourists burst out of the tall cast iron gate straight ahead. From the mass of flailing limbs, an amuck wheelchair rattled down straight towards him. He sprang out of its way and rammed into a group huddled in front of a store. A straw hat flew up into the air and fell at his feet. A burly chap in a red and black shirt and blue denim overalls emerged from the crowd. He bent over to pick up his fallen hat, glaring at Bobby. Bobby picked up the hat, dusted it gingerly, and handed it over. The glare softened into a half smile. He nodded, scratched his shiny bald head, and put on his hat. Before Bobby could say anything, the man lifted him up with large calloused hands, revealing long dirty yellow finger nails, and deposited him at the store entrance.

A large rubbery finger tapped Bobby on his left shoulder. He swung around and screamed. The Incredible Hulk, the monster of his nightmares, stood facing him. He was larger and greener than he had ever imagined. He boomed, “Come on, quick! I haven’t got all day. I have to run along and get my revenge!” The green face contorted into a nasty scowl. The Hulk flexed his green rippling muscles and roared.

Bobby rushed away. He cried. He looked around, saw dark unfamiliar faces, and cried some more. Suddenly, the hot tears flowing down his cheeks turned icy cold. A cool mist blew in from around the corner up ahead. As he turned right, the ground under his feet shook. A thundering jet of water sprang from beneath, rose high up in the air, and fell, almost entirely on him. He blinked his eyes. A freckled boy with a solitary incisor laughed at him with crinkled eyes. Bobby rubbed his eyes, spat out the mildly salty fluid, and sneezed. The cold water sent a fresh parade of icy chills down his spine. He squeezed out a small puddle from his shirt tails. He shook his head from side to side, like a prize winning poodle set free after an extended bath.

He ran. His eyes darted in all directions at once. He breathed, in and out, searching, scanning. A chorus of blood curdling cries from his left stopped Bobby in his tracks. Six people were tied to an elevator hurtling down a rusty brown tower. Bobby retreated in terror, slowing down only when the screams had faded.

He chanted a silent prayer to give him strength. A soulful Jurassic groan responded, like a massive turbine being turned on after years of disuse. On the ground, the shadows of a mesh of rods moved around in menacing arcs. He stood, transfixed, trying to muster up the courage to look behind. The sound gained tempo as the rods moved faster and the shadows of the rods blurred into one another. He peeked over his shoulder. A giant ferris wheel spun like a windmill in a storm. He waited for the wheel to come to a stop, and then walked on.

The smell of sweet burnt sugar carved out his path. He stopped in front of a majestic red cart, with a huge spider web and a brown hairy spider on it. Behind the web, spiderman stood, weaving cotton candy. He waved at Bobby. The pink clouds circled fast in the spinning drum, growing in size as the drum spun faster. A breathless boy ran past him, handed in some coins, and accepted the biggest pink stick from spiderman. He bit a large mouthful of pink cotton, smeared a noseful on his nose, and chewed on the rubbery strip, before tearing an even bigger chunk with magenta teeth.

Bobby sat on a wooden park bench. Patches of yellow green moss gnawed at the bench legs. He wanted to go home. He wanted his Ma and Pa. He promised God he would be good if he found his Ma and Pa. He looked up. He had seen that tree before. A hand ruffled his hair. He laughed and squirmed as his father’s pullover cord tickled his ear. He paused, and then, twisting himself slightly on the bench, looked up sheepishly, face hanging low. Pa grinned wide, as Ma struggled with both hands to turn her prize around. Tweety’s large innocent eyes met Bobby’s. The sun lit up both their faces. Behind Tweety, spiderman emptied a fresh carton of powdered sugar into the candy machine and topped it off with four drops of bright blue liquid.