Santa Monica Eats Its Own

The pier smelled like rot and sugar, seaweed and funnel cake clashing in the same breath. Gulls wheeled and screamed overhead, scavengers with wings sharp as knives. Somewhere a band was playing out of tune mariachi, warped through blown-out speakers, and the sound carried under the planks as if the ocean itself had learned a new instrument.

The Ferris wheel loomed at the edge of it all. A broken halo, half its bulbs dead, the rest too bright, flickering in seizures of white, red, and sickly green. People streamed toward it with the same slack-jawed rhythm as tidewater—laughing, shouting, licking pink cotton candy off their wrists. But to me, the thing looked hungry.

I bought a ticket from a vendor who never looked up. His hands were spotted, papery, veins like blue glass. He tore the stub in half and pressed it into my palm with fingers that lingered just a second too long. His mouth didn’t move when the words came: “Round and round, until you see yourself.”

I wanted to laugh it off. Carnival creepiness, canned mystique. But the whisper clung to the inside of my ear like water after a swim, refusing to drain out.

The line curved along the boardwalk, buzzing with moth-like faces. The longer I stood there, the stranger the people became. A man in a Dodgers cap with no face beneath the brim. A child holding a balloon that I recognized—the same rainbow Mylar clown I’d begged for at a fair when I was six. A woman who looked too much like my ex to be coincidence, carrying a goldfish in a bag of water. A girl dripping saltwater onto the boards, puddles forming around her shoes, hair tangling with bits of kelp. A man clutching a bouquet of remote controls, holding them like roses.

The pier itself warped with us. Neon signs bled into one another, letters slipping into impossible alphabets. The boards under my feet flexed like ribs. The air tasted metallic, as though the whole place had been wired into some larger circuit.

When it was my turn, the operator barely glanced at me. He wore mirrored sunglasses though the sun had long set, and in them I could see a warped reflection of myself—grinning, though I wasn’t. His gloved hand clamped on my shoulder as he guided me into the car, almost tender, almost like he was seating a child at church.

The safety bar slammed shut across my lap. Cold, metallic, but oddly warm in the middle, as though someone else had just been there.

The wheel jolted upward, gears grinding like teeth.

The first ascent felt ordinary enough. Below me, the pier stretched into the horizon, a snake of blinking lights. But then, with the slow turn downward, I realized the skyline was wrong. Downtown was frozen mid-construction: half-built towers bristling with cranes, no glass in their bones. Billboards for movies that were never released flashed along the freeway, actors whose faces I couldn’t place.

By the next rotation, the world below had shifted again. The city had transformed into something luminous, a sprawl of mirrored towers threaded with glowing freeways like veins in a body. Silent vehicles slipped along them with insect precision, each lit from within by sterile light. I pressed my forehead to the glass, my breath fogging as I tried to convince myself it was a trick of perspective.

Another rotation, and the ocean was gone. Sand stretched in every direction, dunes swallowing neighborhoods whole. The pier itself jutted from the desert like the ribcage of a buried leviathan. I could smell dry heat through the glass and taste dust on my tongue though I hadn’t opened my mouth.

I gripped the bar harder, but my hands felt slippery, slick with a sweat that wasn’t quite mine. Round and round. The ticket stub still burned in my pocket, though I couldn’t remember putting it there.

Every time the car reached the top, I told myself the view would steady, that the world would return to the one I’d left below. Instead, each descent tore open a new skin of reality, peeling the city down to stranger bones. The whisper from the vendor followed me up each curve, down each drop: “Until you see yourself.”

The wheel shuddered and dipped, and suddenly the car was sinking. Not into air, not into night, but into water that shouldn’t exist.

Salt filled my mouth though the window was sealed. I gagged, swallowing nothing. Phosphorescent fish streamed past, flashing like coins tossed from the sky. Whole schools darted through skyscraper windows, their bodies glinting neon against glass towers now submerged. A drowned freeway wound below, cars still full of skeleton families clutching each other. Billboards glowed underwater like stained glass, lit from behind by eels writhing in their bellies.

An octopus clung to the side of a freeway overpass. Its eyes blinked with eerie recognition, like it knew me.

From below, voices bubbled up through the tide. My mother’s voice, laughing. My ex’s voice, angry. My own voice, crying. The ocean sang in tongues of memory, and the ride lifted me back above the surface before I drowned in them.

The next rotation was worse.

The pier teemed with versions of me. Hundreds. Thousands. Each going about their day, buying drinks, slinging skateboards under arms, kissing strangers under broken neon. Some were younger, their hair bleached and reckless. Some older, bent and exhausted. Others were grotesque—jaws unhinged too wide, eyes glowing insect-green, torsos stitched wrong.

One sat on the sand eating handfuls of it, teeth grinding it to dust. Another mirrored my every move in perfect sync, hand pressed to glass when I raised mine. A third stood apart, eyes bleeding down her cheeks, staring directly at me with something like rage.

One waved. Just one, from the back of the crowd, mouth forming my name.

I slammed my palms against the glass, but none of the others even looked up. They rippled as one, moving like a hive, their laughter braided into something insectile and sharp. The wheel carried me away before I could decide if the wave had been a greeting or a warning.

My stomach dropped, colder than the ocean. Sweat stung my neck. The air in the car felt thin, like it had been siphoned out. My heartbeat was a drum too fast to dance to.

The wheel lurched, and suddenly the ocean was gone again. In its place stretched a beach made entirely of teeth.

Millions of them, packed together like pale pebbles. Molars with roots still attached, incisors yellowed from coffee, canines chipped and sharp. The Ferris wheel towered above it, planted in the gums of some invisible giant jaw. Every gust of wind rattled them together, a dry, clattering symphony that scraped against my skull.

I pressed my palms to the glass. The sound vibrated inside me.

At the waterline—or where water should have been—the waves foamed not with sea-salt but enamel dust. Gull skeletons pecked at the sand, crunching down on tiny baby teeth, leaving trails of bloodless beaks.

Children played there too, barefoot, their feet bleeding from cuts. They built sandcastles of molars, decorated them with braces twisted into flags. Some carried buckets sloshing with spit instead of seawater.

One child turned, and I saw it was me. Not just me as a kid, but me right now, face smeared with powdered enamel, mouth grinning wide, gums empty. When they laughed, the sound was a dentist’s drill.

I tried to look away, but the Ferris wheel forced me to keep watching. The horizon opened like a mouth, and the tide of teeth began to move—rolling, grinding, a million gnashing fragments inching toward the pier.

The whole beach shifted, chewing.

I tasted blood in my mouth though I hadn’t bitten anything. When I spit, a tooth clinked onto the floor of the car. Not one of theirs. One of mine.

Another turn, and the world was fire.

Malibu’s hills glowed like charred ribs. Griffith Park was a pyre, trees exploding in orange blossoms. The air pressed hot against my skin though the car was sealed tight. Ash drifted down into my lap, pale as snow, soft as talcum.

The crowd below didn’t scream. They clapped, ecstatic, as if the hills were a stage show. Children pointed at the flames, bouncing with joy. Couples kissed, silhouetted in red.

My face burned; the heat singed the edges of my hair. Yet when I caught my reflection in the glass, I looked serene, almost blissful, as if this inferno were the truest thing I’d ever seen.

By the next ascent, the pier had mutated into carnival games, all built from my past.

A claw machine filled with my childhood toys—scratched Game Boys, stuffed animals with eyes missing, the plastic watch I lost at ten.

A whack-a-mole booth where faces of my exes popped up in jagged sequence, grinning, grimacing, bruised. The mallet was bloody.

A funhouse mirror that aged me decades in seconds, showing my skin sagging, hair silvering, teeth falling from gums. Then younger, then infant, then ash.

I staggered against the car, laughter spilling from me in hiccups that turned to sobs. I couldn’t tell if I was grieving or entertained.

The carnival barkers cheered, their voices warping into a chant: “More, more, more.”

At the bottom, I looked for the ride operator.

It was me.

Same shirt.

Same face.

Same scar on my hand.

But his smile was wider,

crueler.

Sunglasses mirrored the

flames.

The reflections in those mirrored lenses weren’t of the pier—they were of futures: me at a desk, me in a hospital bed, me in the ground. His grin split wider, teeth glinting too many to count. He mouthed words I couldn’t hear. When the wind shifted, I read them anyway: “You’re not the real one.”

The Ferris wheel groaned around me, cables humming like guitar strings. My heart pounded in sync with the machinery. I tried to scream, but the sound was swallowed by the ride itself, churned into the gears.

The safety bar across my lap pulsed. I realized then it wasn’t metal—it was flesh. A vein beat under my palm. I tried to pry it open, and it hissed like breath between teeth.

“Stay seated,” it whispered. “The ride isn’t done.”

I thrashed. My body slammed against the side of the car. The ocean below yawned wide, black and endless. I thought I could throw myself into it, escape whatever this loop was.

The belt tightened. It cut my circulation, dug bruises into my thighs. My legs went numb. My ribs ached under its grip. The car rocked violently, lurching to the side. For a heartbeat I was free—half out, dangling over the void—but then the bar yanked me back, slammed me against the seat so hard my teeth clicked together.

The ocean laughed beneath me.

The next rotations came faster, each one spitting another life into my lap.

I saw myself in a dress, married to someone I didn’t recognize. I saw my own funeral, people I’d never met weeping at the coffin. I saw children with my nose, my crooked smile, running barefoot through backyards that didn’t exist.

These weren’t hallucinations. They were memories I didn’t own, timelines braided from me but not mine. They poured into my head like sand through a funnel, heavy, unstoppable. My body couldn’t hold them. My hands flickered—first translucent, then skeletal, then nothing at all. When I pressed them against the glass, they left no smudges. My reflection was no longer me. Its eyes were different, wider, older. It watched me with pity, then with hunger.

I begged aloud, voice hoarse: “Stop the ride.”

The Ferris wheel answered with wind through its teeth: “There is no stop. There is only round and round.”

Other cars hung suspended in the air around me. For the first time, I noticed passengers. But each face was mine.

Some stared blankly.

Some pressed palms

against the glass.

One tore at its own hair

until strands drifted like

feathers.

We were a constellation of me, strung along the wheel’s orbit. None of us real. None of us whole.

The gulls flew backward now, their wings jerking like broken toys.

They screamed words

instead of cries: JUMP.

Then: STAY.

Their voices fought each

other in static chorus.

The air shifted with smells—burnt popcorn, then ozone after lightning, then perfume I remembered from a girl I kissed at sixteen, then the stench of rot and formaldehyde. Each scent filled me until I thought I’d choke on memory.

And still the wheel turned.

The midpoint came when I realized the Ferris wheel wasn’t showing me Los Angeles at all.

It was showing me myself.

Every spoke was a timeline. Every rotation a life I might have lived. The carnival was not entertainment but autopsy, peeling away what I thought I was to reveal what I could have been.

I wasn’t riding the wheel. I was the wheel. The axis around which all these versions spun.

My body flickered once, twice. My reflection mouthed words I couldn’t hear.

And then, just as the car climbed toward its apex, everything went silent.

The wheel slowed as if choking on its own momentum. The car climbed and climbed until it hung at the apex, swaying in the breathless dark.

Below me, there was no pier. No city. No desert, no ocean, no fire. Only black water stretching forever, swallowing every horizon. The lights of Santa Monica, of Los Angeles, of the world—I realized with a hollow drop—were gone.

The Ferris wheel groaned, cables taut and trembling. Then the bulbs blew out, one by one, like eyes shutting. Silence swallowed everything but the pulse in my ears.

I pressed my hands against the glass, but there was nothing to look at anymore. Only myself reflected back.

And yet, it wasn’t me.

The reflection smiled with different eyes. Older, wiser, crueler. Lips moved with no sound, forming words I had been waiting to hear since I bought the ticket.

“You’ve always been the axis.”

The phrase cracked open something in my chest. The ride wasn’t moving me through time. It wasn’t moving at all. I was the pivot. The fixed center. Everything else spun around me: cities, deserts, oceans, lives I had and hadn’t lived.

The realization landed like vertigo. My breath came short and hot. My chest burned as if filled with carnival light.

The reflection leaned closer to the glass. Its lips brushed mine from the other side. I felt nothing and everything.

The Ferris wheel began to unravel.

The seat dissolved into sparks, neon fragments scattering upward like fireflies. The glass bled into constellations, streaking into stars I didn’t recognize. My body loosened, atoms sloughing off like dandelion seeds.

Each particle of me streaked outward to embed itself in Los Angeles. I felt myself root in palm trees, flicker in streetlamps, rush in bloodstreams of clogged freeways. My laughter became static on radios tuned to empty frequencies. My grief settled into the smog. My hunger became the hollow of boarded-up motels. My joy burned inside pink neon diner signs buzzing at midnight. My shame scrawled itself into graffiti on freeway overpasses. I was no longer a passenger. I was weather. Architecture. Exhaust. A rumor whispered at dusk.

The void below churned. For one last second, I looked down into it. A single Ferris wheel remained, lit in a halo of trembling bulbs.

And I saw them: another me, far below, walking toward the ticket booth. Nervous smile on their lips, dollar bills trembling in their hand. The vendor tore the stub, pressed it into their palm, whispered words I could still hear echoing through my dissolving bones.

“Round and round, until you see yourself.”

The wheel jolted, starting again. Passengers screamed in joy. The ocean sang. The city reassembled, all its lives weaving back into place, none of them quite right.

And I—whatever I had been

—spun outward, endless,

infinite, caught in the turn.