The Lightning Carnival

The words on unfinished pages in front of me slithered unnervingly about, not making any sort of sense. Nor did the words coming off my fingertips at ever declining speeds resemble any sort of coherent logic. It was not until the music became repetitive that I knew for sure the drug was wearing off. The fall had snuck up on me again, and the chemicals were now clinging to my consciousness in the same loathsome manner as every other time. Where joy and clarity had existed only an hour ago, now vague notions of fear and confusion at looming due dates and the generalities of life shifted about uneasily in the dark corners of the room. A nervously quick glance at my watch revealed it was 9:00 p.m, which was of some concern considering the last time I‘d left the desk was sometime in the small hours of that morning. A break was in order— I needed to move a bit, get some blood flowing before I completely lost it.

I stood from the desk on shaky legs and pulled on my boots, raggedy jean jacket, and white bucket hat. After taking one last survey of the room before switching off the lamp in the corner, I walked down stairs and out into the night. My mind was still engaged in lingo with the throes of the drug, and odd thoughts accompanied me as I walked alone through the dark spring air. The normal sights and sounds of town, which were engrained in my DNA, had now become new and weird visions with mysterious qualities too hard to put to words. They would not, I figured, ever occur to the totally sober or the wholly sane. At some point when nearing the trail on the north edge of town I became aware of a far off sense of paranoia. One of those nameless things had sent an echo through space-time which my now haphazardly tuned, sleep-deprived senses were picking up. The faint vibration reverberated up my spine and ricocheted around the inside of my head, and despite its unknown origin I suddenly felt like a lost wanderer without place or time.

Finally I came to the head of the trail that in a short distance opened into the back of our town’s small park. It loomed long, dark, and straight ahead for miles past that though. Above me vague illuminations of skeletal tree branches touched overhead, which made me feel like I was walking through a tunnel into a different world. I lit a cigarette and continued on, listening to the clicking of my boot heels and the far off yelping of a coyote out in the countryside. The trail was just like town, familiar ground turned not so familiar. Memories from a past I could barely remember played on short fragmented loops as I neared the park. Jogs with friends in high school, bike rides with family members long since gone the way of acquaintance. It was subtly unnerving how little the physical scene had changed in comparison with my life.

At last the dim halos of fluorescent street lights in the park shone through the trees on my right. A branch of the creek which criss crosses town ran along the edge of the lot, and across that three dimly lit baseball diamonds and a playground sat suspended in black nothingness. I turned off the trail and walked downhill a ways, then found a large rock to sit against and think clearer thoughts. The creek babbled quietly about twenty yards in front of me— for some reason I dared not cross into the park itself. There was the objective fear of being busted after curfew to consider; but on top of the constant concern for the law there was a serenity to the place I wished not to break. The scraggly undeveloped corner suited my mood better anyways.

I sat there smoking cigarettes, which eventually turned into hashish, just thinking and remembering. All about me there was the amphibious, droning chorus of countless thousands of frogs. Bull frogs, tree frogs, spring peepers, leopard frogs, pickerel frogs. For years as a child I’d come to this branch of the creek with my brother to catch these hopping vocalists and other aquatic critters. But we hadn’t come in years, and I couldn‘t recall specifically the last time we went tromping back across town soaking wet with a bucket of crawfish or sack of bullfrogs. Then my attention turned to the baseball diamonds, which I’d spent upwards of twenty hours a week on in my younger days. I could see from my vantage point third base on the biggest diamond, and I felt in my right arm the motion of grabbing a ball by its rough stitched laces and slinging it across the red patch of dirt into the first basemen’s glove. That was all though; because again, for all the thousands of hours I spent on that field, I could not recall heading into the dugout for the last time. These integral memories all brought a certain degree of happiness— but said joy was overshadowed by my despair at realizing how quickly they’d come and gone, and how little of them remained in any sort of vividness. I then resolved to dig through my memory banks for at least one coherent scene here— more than a splintered fragment— but a whole scenario.

A slight drizzle began after about an hour of being there, but it didn‘t bother me much. I just pulled the brim of my hat down lower and tugged my coat around me a little tighter, then continued puffing swirls of bluish smoke out into the raindrops. I must have sat there for another half an hour in the rain getting more and more drenched while stubbornly trying to come up with something. Then there was a bright flash of lightning, and suddenly the neon lights of a carnival began materializing across the darkness in front of me. Live music and laughter carried on the breeze along with the smells of funnel cake and popcorn. It was a memory I knew; but my mind and body now being in a very dazed state perceived it to be real.

It was the first time our parents let my brother and I go to the Fourth of July carnival by ourselves, and it had been a torrential downpour. Perhaps it was my stubbornness to remain sitting in the rain which reminded me of our bull headed attitude to stay out in it all those years ago. The rain had fallen on us fat and heavy, but still the place raged on, and us with it. We ran around to our hearts content, spending every bit of the twenty dollars each our mother had given us on various sugary treats and cheap nick-nacks. At one point my brother, who could not have been more than eight at the time, lost his shoe in the thick upheaved muddy lanes between vending trucks. This had hardly slowed us though— I don’t think he even noticed. I remembered in vivid detail when the rides had closed due to lightning and we had come to the very sloped hill I sat on now and slid on our stomachs all the way down it, ripping our shirts to ribbons and getting caked in mud from head to toe doing so. There was unceasing laughter and fun to be had anywhere in those days— nothing could stop us, nothing could hold us down. And although our mother had been less than pleased with us for our unsightly appearance and soggy fair food when we returned home, our laughter continued as she sent us back out into the rain with bars of soap and towels. Then, just as quickly as the memory had come, it vanished in another furious crack of lightning.

The vividness of this memory, wholly complete down to the last detail, brought a feeling of satisfaction to me. The park was still the park I knew, and then I realized all those other things still happened here. A new generation of little league third basemen were learning how to make that perfect throw to first, and siblings still in their youthful days continued to come and catch all the things that needed catching in the creek. The yearly carnival still came, and there were still kids to enjoy it. This place still lived cemented in me— but equally so lived on for itself into another era. I stood and headed for home then; thoroughly soaked and grinning with new found confidence in my place in space and time again. I was ready to continue writing.