Post by kailleaugh on Jan 3, 2005 2:21:56 GMT -5
#1565
By Kailleaugh Andersson & Alex Severin
I am an old man. My eight year old granddaughter by my side makes me feel even older than I am. Her head is tossed back, sunny curls dancing in the breeze; she laughs as the carousel turns round and round, digging her heels into the horses as if to make them giddy-up. Cheap plastic horses, impaled by multi colored barber shop-like poles, gallop to garbled, droning, horrific electronic music blaring from loudspeakers fixed above a long haired, punk kid smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, carnival company hat turned backwards, working the controls.
It is August, the sun blazes from morning onward, so blistering hot that even your pores hurt. The day gorges itself on cotton candy, soda, hot dogs, popcorn, snow cones; the ever present stench of too much food that hangs over any boardwalk, mingles with the giggles from my granddaughter's pink face; the ambience around me is nauseating.
As the sun sets, I welcome the evening’s cool presence. The giant livestock arena now casts a dark shadow over the carnival. Rows of tiny multi colored lights suddenly flash to life like a hundred thousand glowing eyes, and the black asphalt beneath me grows fuzzy, begins to spin and slowly, ever so slowly, becomes the past.
I am 16 again. A kid. War rages in Europe. Where there was once asphalt beneath my feet there is now dirt - the dirt is strewn with unfiltered cigarette butts and I can see dead beer bottles lying in state all around me, and a blue 4-H ribbon that some proud farm kid must have dropped in his excitement. The cheap, plastic equines are replaced by vibrant wooden steeds with flowing manes, and streaming ribbons tied around their hooves. But they soon fade into a nightmare of weathered gray bone with empty eye-socketed human skulls, and torn sinew for manes and tails as they bleed from being impaled, upside down, onto long, sharp poles.
The smell in the air is not the scent of the cotton candy or the hot dogs anymore; it’s that smell; when you smell it, you know what it is.
The horror comes back to me in glorious Technicolor. Until I see it again, I always think I have forgotten. But you never forget something like that. Never. The child I was then is still with me, still haunted, still has that look of stolen innocence in his eyes, my eyes, eyes that were never quite the same again. They are empty.
The only things that bring back that innocent happiness of my childhood before this day are the loves of my life - my wife, my daughter, my granddaughter.
But they don’t exist here, in this time - I am back there - the place and time it happened. I have not met my wife yet and I have no daughter, I have no little giggle-made-flesh by my side. I am here - where the horror ended my childhood and made me a man.
I can see it from where I stand; the red and white candy-stripes of the marquee tent. I can hear the laughter inside, but the laughter always changes to hopeless screams before I can reach it and offer help. There is nothing I can do because all this has come to pass, is history. But I still run towards the marquee and battle through the sea of bodies coming towards me. I feel the heat on my skin as things which look more like cremated remains than people run wildly by me, trying to scream and breathe at the same time with heat-fused air-sacks - that noise is so hideous it still makes my gut heave at the thought.
Each time it is like the first; the horror has not been diluted by the passing of decades nor blurred by the age of my memory. If only I had difficulty remembering it. If only I could be some withered old coot in a bath chair, dribbling down the front of my shirt and muttering about the roses in the garden, blooming in an array of pinks and reds and yellows. If only my faculties were as withered as my heart and my soul. If only I couldn’t remember this.
I reach for the candy-striped flap of the tent each time. I wish I could stop myself from touching that vile cloth and exposing myself to what lay inside. But I can’t. I look, every time. I know I will pull back that flap of cloth and I will look, long and hard at what lies inside.
I reluctantly pull back the flap, for the hundredth? Two-hundreth? time, like rewinding a videotape, playing it again. I know what happens next. I don’t need to see it again.
But I still look. The tent becomes an inferno, flames quickly crawling up one corner of the big top and then racing into the center of the ceiling. Like the Hindenberg a decade earlier, it explodes into a brilliant army of reds, oranges and white-blues, angry flaming fingers that dance and devour the canvas skin. It belches out a bile-hot shower of embers, burning ash, and glowing pieces of the tent frame’s timbers. They plummet onto the crowd below where the debris seers their skin like a branding iron on a cattle hide. Like a tidal wave, the sea of horror-stricken faces push their way forward to the safety of this candy cane-striped tent flap.
Their legs slip into the spaces of the wooden bleachers as those from behind trample over the top of them to escape. They are mostly women, a feminine ocean whose husbands and sweethearts are away at war; they scream and bleed as the bones of their legs are snapped into pieces, family clambering over family, friend crushing friend as the instinct for self-preservation emerges.
Small children are lost, little hands slip from the fingers of sisters, mothers, aunts. The crowd pushes against one another for the safety of the tent flap, and the children scream and cry as they are trampled and broken. As the main support poles of the tent are incinerated, the ceiling implodes and rains onto the faces below. She is there again, crying, with molten red-orange tears streaming down her cheeks, again and again, and will always be there, abandoned, alone.
The crowd pushes me away from where I stand but I still hold the cloth in my hand. The walking wounded wash me away from the tent. Soot-covered flesh, cuts, bruises, burns. Others had fallen underfoot in the stampede and lie screaming - limbs like lightning-spliced trees surround me, bones splintered and protruding.
The stampede is drowned out by something else - the penetrating screams of animals - lions, tigers, bears, elephants and monkeys suddenly erupt from the inferno and lasts for several minutes. Yet the circus animals were all still caged in colorful train cars all around us, and those mind splitting screams, screams that invade dreams and steal sleep, are coming from the hundreds of people still inside.
I let the flap go. Frantic hands pull me away before I am consumed by the flames that devour the last scrap of material. Each time I watch that last remnant burn, I wish the flames would come for me. They would fill the hole inside. They would cleanse me.
As the inferno cools I go back and I look again. When I see her, my future is painfully beside me. When I look into those eyes, they become the eyes of my granddaughter.
This is not happening now and there is nothing I can do for her. She looked as if she were sleepy, her eyes half-open. And she was unmarked. By that time, everything around her was reduced to cinders, bodies fused together from the ferocious heat. And there she lay, unscathed. Not a mark on her. Not a smudge of soot or patch of singed hair or burned skin. But she was dead.
Sometimes I think it would have been better for me if she’d been unrecognizable as a little girl. It would have been better for me if she was like the rest of the bodies. I could pretend that they weren’t really people. But her, no, she was a beautiful little girl and even in death, she was still a beautiful little girl, lying there amongst corpses still smoking and sizzling, steam rising from them because of the cold water that doused their flames. I think her pristine state was the worst horror of all that day.
Those screams come to me again and again as the images in my head rewind and re-play, over and over, until all is finally quiet and still. I am left with nothing except that scent, the scent which replaced the cotton candy and the hot dogs - that putrid, nauseating stench of cremation, the smell of burning human flesh.
I feel the tug of a tiny hand at the cuff of my jacket and look down into the face of my little Miss, her eyes burning happiness into my reluctant soul, a soul which was blackened on that day so many decades ago. But those beautiful eyes cause me so much pain. They are the eyes of the tiny little girl I see when I pull back the candy-striped tent flap - waterproofed with white gasoline and paraffin - scents that still make me wretch when I smell them; they always become the stink of human skin and fat and hair being incinerated. I look into my little cherub’s eyes and I can smell those two chemicals, and I can see into the face of death I saw that day as he stood over the small child he took - and had no right to take.
And he is here now. He stands with his sharp-bone hand on her tiny shoulder, his flowing black robes giving off the reek of ancient graves as he whispers idioms of ticking clocks and of pre-destiny at me. He taunts me,threatens to take her from me - again. Can I save her this time? As old as I am, age adding a creak to my bones and rusting the spring in my step, I won’t let him take her again.
I will the years to pass. I will my own death so I can finally rest and forget the day that the clowns screamed and wept. I will my own death just so I can forget. Everything.
But even dead, would I be free? Or will I spend eternity in purgatory - one of my own making? The guilt weighs me down, but I can’t die. I can’t leave her. I won’t lose her again.
© Kailleaugh Andersson & Alex Severin 2002
www.kailleaugh.com
www.alexseverin.com
By Kailleaugh Andersson & Alex Severin
I am an old man. My eight year old granddaughter by my side makes me feel even older than I am. Her head is tossed back, sunny curls dancing in the breeze; she laughs as the carousel turns round and round, digging her heels into the horses as if to make them giddy-up. Cheap plastic horses, impaled by multi colored barber shop-like poles, gallop to garbled, droning, horrific electronic music blaring from loudspeakers fixed above a long haired, punk kid smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, carnival company hat turned backwards, working the controls.
It is August, the sun blazes from morning onward, so blistering hot that even your pores hurt. The day gorges itself on cotton candy, soda, hot dogs, popcorn, snow cones; the ever present stench of too much food that hangs over any boardwalk, mingles with the giggles from my granddaughter's pink face; the ambience around me is nauseating.
As the sun sets, I welcome the evening’s cool presence. The giant livestock arena now casts a dark shadow over the carnival. Rows of tiny multi colored lights suddenly flash to life like a hundred thousand glowing eyes, and the black asphalt beneath me grows fuzzy, begins to spin and slowly, ever so slowly, becomes the past.
I am 16 again. A kid. War rages in Europe. Where there was once asphalt beneath my feet there is now dirt - the dirt is strewn with unfiltered cigarette butts and I can see dead beer bottles lying in state all around me, and a blue 4-H ribbon that some proud farm kid must have dropped in his excitement. The cheap, plastic equines are replaced by vibrant wooden steeds with flowing manes, and streaming ribbons tied around their hooves. But they soon fade into a nightmare of weathered gray bone with empty eye-socketed human skulls, and torn sinew for manes and tails as they bleed from being impaled, upside down, onto long, sharp poles.
The smell in the air is not the scent of the cotton candy or the hot dogs anymore; it’s that smell; when you smell it, you know what it is.
The horror comes back to me in glorious Technicolor. Until I see it again, I always think I have forgotten. But you never forget something like that. Never. The child I was then is still with me, still haunted, still has that look of stolen innocence in his eyes, my eyes, eyes that were never quite the same again. They are empty.
The only things that bring back that innocent happiness of my childhood before this day are the loves of my life - my wife, my daughter, my granddaughter.
But they don’t exist here, in this time - I am back there - the place and time it happened. I have not met my wife yet and I have no daughter, I have no little giggle-made-flesh by my side. I am here - where the horror ended my childhood and made me a man.
I can see it from where I stand; the red and white candy-stripes of the marquee tent. I can hear the laughter inside, but the laughter always changes to hopeless screams before I can reach it and offer help. There is nothing I can do because all this has come to pass, is history. But I still run towards the marquee and battle through the sea of bodies coming towards me. I feel the heat on my skin as things which look more like cremated remains than people run wildly by me, trying to scream and breathe at the same time with heat-fused air-sacks - that noise is so hideous it still makes my gut heave at the thought.
Each time it is like the first; the horror has not been diluted by the passing of decades nor blurred by the age of my memory. If only I had difficulty remembering it. If only I could be some withered old coot in a bath chair, dribbling down the front of my shirt and muttering about the roses in the garden, blooming in an array of pinks and reds and yellows. If only my faculties were as withered as my heart and my soul. If only I couldn’t remember this.
I reach for the candy-striped flap of the tent each time. I wish I could stop myself from touching that vile cloth and exposing myself to what lay inside. But I can’t. I look, every time. I know I will pull back that flap of cloth and I will look, long and hard at what lies inside.
I reluctantly pull back the flap, for the hundredth? Two-hundreth? time, like rewinding a videotape, playing it again. I know what happens next. I don’t need to see it again.
But I still look. The tent becomes an inferno, flames quickly crawling up one corner of the big top and then racing into the center of the ceiling. Like the Hindenberg a decade earlier, it explodes into a brilliant army of reds, oranges and white-blues, angry flaming fingers that dance and devour the canvas skin. It belches out a bile-hot shower of embers, burning ash, and glowing pieces of the tent frame’s timbers. They plummet onto the crowd below where the debris seers their skin like a branding iron on a cattle hide. Like a tidal wave, the sea of horror-stricken faces push their way forward to the safety of this candy cane-striped tent flap.
Their legs slip into the spaces of the wooden bleachers as those from behind trample over the top of them to escape. They are mostly women, a feminine ocean whose husbands and sweethearts are away at war; they scream and bleed as the bones of their legs are snapped into pieces, family clambering over family, friend crushing friend as the instinct for self-preservation emerges.
Small children are lost, little hands slip from the fingers of sisters, mothers, aunts. The crowd pushes against one another for the safety of the tent flap, and the children scream and cry as they are trampled and broken. As the main support poles of the tent are incinerated, the ceiling implodes and rains onto the faces below. She is there again, crying, with molten red-orange tears streaming down her cheeks, again and again, and will always be there, abandoned, alone.
The crowd pushes me away from where I stand but I still hold the cloth in my hand. The walking wounded wash me away from the tent. Soot-covered flesh, cuts, bruises, burns. Others had fallen underfoot in the stampede and lie screaming - limbs like lightning-spliced trees surround me, bones splintered and protruding.
The stampede is drowned out by something else - the penetrating screams of animals - lions, tigers, bears, elephants and monkeys suddenly erupt from the inferno and lasts for several minutes. Yet the circus animals were all still caged in colorful train cars all around us, and those mind splitting screams, screams that invade dreams and steal sleep, are coming from the hundreds of people still inside.
I let the flap go. Frantic hands pull me away before I am consumed by the flames that devour the last scrap of material. Each time I watch that last remnant burn, I wish the flames would come for me. They would fill the hole inside. They would cleanse me.
As the inferno cools I go back and I look again. When I see her, my future is painfully beside me. When I look into those eyes, they become the eyes of my granddaughter.
This is not happening now and there is nothing I can do for her. She looked as if she were sleepy, her eyes half-open. And she was unmarked. By that time, everything around her was reduced to cinders, bodies fused together from the ferocious heat. And there she lay, unscathed. Not a mark on her. Not a smudge of soot or patch of singed hair or burned skin. But she was dead.
Sometimes I think it would have been better for me if she’d been unrecognizable as a little girl. It would have been better for me if she was like the rest of the bodies. I could pretend that they weren’t really people. But her, no, she was a beautiful little girl and even in death, she was still a beautiful little girl, lying there amongst corpses still smoking and sizzling, steam rising from them because of the cold water that doused their flames. I think her pristine state was the worst horror of all that day.
Those screams come to me again and again as the images in my head rewind and re-play, over and over, until all is finally quiet and still. I am left with nothing except that scent, the scent which replaced the cotton candy and the hot dogs - that putrid, nauseating stench of cremation, the smell of burning human flesh.
I feel the tug of a tiny hand at the cuff of my jacket and look down into the face of my little Miss, her eyes burning happiness into my reluctant soul, a soul which was blackened on that day so many decades ago. But those beautiful eyes cause me so much pain. They are the eyes of the tiny little girl I see when I pull back the candy-striped tent flap - waterproofed with white gasoline and paraffin - scents that still make me wretch when I smell them; they always become the stink of human skin and fat and hair being incinerated. I look into my little cherub’s eyes and I can smell those two chemicals, and I can see into the face of death I saw that day as he stood over the small child he took - and had no right to take.
And he is here now. He stands with his sharp-bone hand on her tiny shoulder, his flowing black robes giving off the reek of ancient graves as he whispers idioms of ticking clocks and of pre-destiny at me. He taunts me,threatens to take her from me - again. Can I save her this time? As old as I am, age adding a creak to my bones and rusting the spring in my step, I won’t let him take her again.
I will the years to pass. I will my own death so I can finally rest and forget the day that the clowns screamed and wept. I will my own death just so I can forget. Everything.
But even dead, would I be free? Or will I spend eternity in purgatory - one of my own making? The guilt weighs me down, but I can’t die. I can’t leave her. I won’t lose her again.
© Kailleaugh Andersson & Alex Severin 2002
www.kailleaugh.com
www.alexseverin.com