Sarah and the Ferris Wheel

Sarah Sarsaparilla has been going around in circles. She calls it the merry go round but her mother calls it the Ferris wheel, because she always seems to go up before coming down to earth and crashing. You’ve been working the same job at Bill’s Aquarium for 7 years her mother whines, over another plate of sour potatoes and sour peas. What ingredient makes them sour? Sarah thinks that her mother bottles up all the whining and puts it in a special bottle, then dumps it in every dish she makes. That can only explain the sour taste she adds to almost every what-could-be delicious entrée.

But Sarah loves the aquarium. She loves the haunting blue cerulean light that ricochets off the walls. She loves running her hands along the blue walls, which have been painted so many times that they create a kind of blue beard stubble for your fingers to touch ever so lightly. The water is friendly and soft, and even drowns out Bill, who has maintained a surliness over the years despite her loyalty to the company. Albeit, a default sort of loyalty-the kind of loyalty born out of happenstance. When you just can’t figure out what else to do. Sarah always wore her hair red and heavy and long, and she always wore little black bracelets with silver bangles on them.

She liked the way the bangles refracted the light from the aquariums. Bill’s irritation with her and her mother’s whining probably came from the same place. If she were a dreamer then they might intone the same thing many artists and writers have heard for eternity, “Get your head out of the clouds!”, but Sarah made sure not even to reveal her dreaming, and maintain the façade of simply a floater, or a critical ewe observing from the mountaintops the dregs of society for her to ponder.

In sadness she looks over Arron's letters to her from childhood. He wrote these letters to her while she was at home and he had gone off to Harvard. Nobody in their family had ever gone so far away from Buffalo.

"Dear Sarah, remember to look for the mysteries in life. I love you always Sarah Bear. " Included was always a pressed flower or a key of some kind.

Sometimes Sarah tried to use the keys on different locks in the house.

"Dear Aaron, I miss you. Mom has been drinking orange and gin this week."

They always sent letters back about Mom's drinking, because it often reflected whether or not her and dad were in a fight.

The clearer the drink, the worse the fight.

Bill is Sarah’s Mother’s cousin thrice removed, a card that may have warranted her entrance into the business, but has not really resulted in any special treatment over the years. Sarah was lucky to get even a hello out of Bill. He always came in at 6 am everyday to open the store, and tend to the fish. And Sarah and the other aquarium employees-which were only a few usually arrived at 7, then 8 and finally, 9. Bill’s ex wives' son Hamlet always arrived at 9-probably because not only did he not want to work there, but he wanted Bill to know he did not want to work there.

Hamlet Hamlet! The girls squeal and tease. “I can’t believe your mother named you Hamlet!!”

Bill’s ex was a theater major at Syracuse for 5 years before she became a medical sculptor, which is where she met Bill-At a conference for people with weird jobs. That wasn’t really the name of the conference, but Sarah didn’t bother to know or remember the name, and the author can’t think of that right now either.

Sarah always wore her hair red and heavy and long, and she always wore little black bracelets with silver bangles on them. She liked the way the bangles refracted the light from the aquariums. Bill’s irritation with her and her mother’s whining probably came from the same place. If she were a dreamer then they might intone the same thing many artists and writers have heard for eternity, “Get your head out of the clouds!”, but Sarah made sure not even to reveal her dreaming, and maintain the façade of simply a floater, or a critical ewe observing from the mountaintops the dregs of society for her to ponder.

But mostly, she was just happy doing her work at the store, as happy as her mother would let her be. For 5 years her mother had been whining at Sarah to go back to school, and she began to refer to Sarah’s life as the Ferris wheel. “She goes UP! She goes down! Its the Sarah Ferris Wheel!”

“You think you’re so smart!” her mother wined. “You think you’re above us plebes in the real world!”. “I’m IN the real world mother!” Sarah would argue back sometimes, and sometimes she would just ignore her and go back to journaling in her bedroom-a deep lavender hued room in the far back of the house. "Dear Arron, I miss you. " She wrote tonight. "I wish I could give you a big hug."

This bedroom was Sarah’s little oasis away from the paneled wood siding, fuzzy vomit green carpet, and incessant “mothering” that her mother was obsessed with doing. The walls were such a deep purple that it was like stepping into a portal for another land. Sarah hung silver space-ships and anatomical models of space on the walls.

Her bed was a yellow and blue pastel quilt that her grandmother made. The bedframe was her brother’s old shaker style pine frame. Sarah ran her fingertips over the grooves in the pine, and the sheen of the wood captured her sometimes.

She sat in her orange sliding chair and wrote rants about her mother-at first, but then the rants turned into reflections, and the reflections turned into realizations. Maybe she SHOULD do something other than work in a fish store for the next 7 years. Where had the time gone? One moment she was patting Silver Spoon (their golden retriever) on the head and heading off to community college, the next minute, Arron was dead and Silver had run away.

Her mother was never the same after Arron died.

I guess the narrator notes that Sarah may have buried the lead a bit about her brother dying.

Of everything in life-Arron was goodness. Arron was the most GOOD person she had ever known.

Sometimes out of the corner of her eye, she used to think she saw a bit of his aura-and it looked just so darn GOOD, like a golden halo. Not like a saint, because nobody on this Earth is that, but like a beautiful letter, or a kind friend, which Arron had many of. He read lots of books and was good at math, but he was also popular with his friends and liked to spend time with them.

Only one thing made Arron stand out a little too much in Buffalo.

He was gay.

The family tried to keep it private, but somehow or another-a glance here, a stolen kiss there led to people finding out, and once people found out, the world found out and once the world found out-Arron was exposed for his secret to the world and it changed him. He began partying all night every night at the gay and lesbian clubs, and one night he never came home. Her parents cried and the police looked everywhere. Sarah stopped going to school so she could help her parents look, and eventually she just never went back.

Her parents divorced. Their marriage had been less than ideal but Ben’s death and the details surrounding his death were too much for Sarah’s Irish Catholic father to bear.

Sarah started writing letters to Arron's letters in her journal. "Dear Arron, what happened to you that night? Where did you go?"

She looked for signs of Arron's past in his letters.

"Dear Sarah, people hate the things they can't understand. But, I won't let their hatred turn me into them."

"I won't let them turn me to dust". But they had! They had.

She was crying now.

On Monday, Sarah took the letters to the police again.

"Sarah," Marshal Williams, a kind woman with strawberry blonde hair and freckles, and a stern smile said, "These letters won't help us much. We've already searched every club Arron was in that night. "

~Part 2 to be written ~