Two young boys—one eleven years old, the other twelve—walk on either side of their father, each holding one meaty hand. Lights blaze around them. Ferris wheels spin. Carnival barkers bark.
They do this every year, because every year the carnival comes to their town, and their father brings them here, doing his fatherly duty, spending time with his sons.
For one of the boys, the carnival is always the best thing to happen all year; the other boy is a little afraid of the carnival's presence. He wishes they wouldn't go so much. Sometimes he wishes they wouldn't go at all.
But a father will do what a father will do.
The first boy, the one who loves the carnival, he loves it because he feels it speaks to him in a way that nothing else in his life does. The clowns and other strange characters that dip and sway and carouse around him, he thinks he knows them well—he thinks he knows them from the inside. He comes to view the world through this yearly carnival, soaks up its desperation, its thoughtless glee.
This boy feels that the carnival somehow represents him.
The other boy simply puts one foot in front of the other, clenches his father's hand tightly and hopes not to be swept away in all the madness. He has a fear deep down inside that he cannot name. A fear that he might get lost, separated from his family, and die here, forgotten by everyone, left to dry up and wither.
Blow away in the wind.
P o o l
The sun sits low on the horizon, but the water is still pretty warm—Stephen's treading it. Tiny, tiny bubbles surface as he paddles his legs. His arms do the same, but slower. Pushing out, pushing in. Staying afloat. His father reads a newspaper on the pool deck. Stephen's younger brother, Michael, smiles and cups his hands a few feet away from Stephen, squirting water as high as he can into the air.
The sun is hot on Stephen's face. It has been a few minutes now and his father has not looked up from his newspaper once.
Stephen turns to look at Michael. He watches his brother turn to look at their father. Their father doesn't look back, flips a giant double-page spread, snaps the paper tight, keeps reading.
Michael's squirting the water higher and higher, treading water himself. Getting bored with this, he sinks to the bottom and bobs up again, filling his cheeks with water so he can blow it out through a whale-like blowhole when he surfaces. Michael does this three times, but on the fourth trip down, Michael's head disappears beneath the surface of the water for longer than it should.
Stephen looks down into the water to see that Michael's got his legs caught in something. Thinking fast, Stephen dives down to where Michael struggles with whatever is wrapped around his legs. He locks eyes with his little brother, tries to convey the message: You have to calm down and stop thrashing around, Mikey. I'll get you out of this.
Stephen calmly unravels what he can now clearly see is a skipping rope. It drifts to the bottom of the pool, while Stephen lifts Michael under the armpits, pulls him to the surface.
Both brothers pull in massive gulps of air. Their father is in the house calling 911. His face is not the face of a father who almost lost one of his sons in a drowning accident.
Stephen pulls Michael over to the ladder and, his lungs burning with the effort, hauls him out of the pool, lays him flat on the grass. Michael suddenly rolls onto his side, coughs up a gout of water. Stephen thumps his back, says, "That's right, get it all out, Mikey."
Stephen hears sirens getting closer, turning the corner at the end of the block. Car doors slam; booted feet slap the driveway. People dressed in white, carrying equipment, come around the side of the house.
Michael rolls onto his back and stares up at the darkening sky.
W e e d K i l l e r
Bright day. Really bright. In memory's eye, it's blinding.
Stephen is on the back porch of his aunt and uncle's place, fiddling with sticks. Michael has no idea what he's trying to do with them. It's just something Stephen does—fiddles about with sticks, sometimes moving them around in circles and semi-circles, clattering them off each other, as if trying to somehow communicate with them. The boys' father is out front, in the driveway with their uncle, fixing the car. The hood's up and the sun's glinting off it, making Michael squint whenever he looks their way from where he stands at the side of the house.
The house is big and white. Suburban, yet not in the suburbs. This is the country, but the house wants desperately to be from the outskirts of a big city.
Stephen shuffles his sticks around some more, repeatedly coming close to looking like he's actually doing something recognizable—if not trying to communicate, then perhaps playing a game of some sort—then the motions fall apart and he's back to simply fiddling again.
Michael looks back to the car and the sun has moved just enough for the hood to flash him straight in the eyes. He takes a step back, shielding his face and crunching gravel under his sneakers. Stephen looks up from his sticks at the sound. Then his eyes settle for a moment on a giant bottle of clear liquid to the right of the big wooden chair he's in. There is a hose attached to it, with a little black nozzle.
"Come 'ere for a sec, doofus."
Michael walks over to him. Stephen sets down the sticks. There is a matching wooden chair to the right of the giant bottle and Michael sits in it, rests his arms on the armrests. Michael looks at him. "What?"
"Have some water, Mikey."
"Ya mean this stuff?" Michael points to the giant bottle.
"Yeah, it's really good. Fresh, you know? Good and cold."
"Alright." Michael leans over, grabs the hose. Brings the nozzle up to his mouth. Stephen goes back to fiddling with his sticks.
Michael pumps the nozzle a few times, aims it at his mouth. He swallows. Down it goes. Tastes a bit funny, but not so bad, really. He pumps some more in, keeps swallowing. Stephen keeps fiddling.
A few more squirts and swallows, then Michael hears Stephen chuckling.
"What's so funny?" Michael asks and sets the hose down.
"It's weed killer, doofus." Stephen turns to Michael. "I can't believe you just drank it. Couldn't you taste it?"
Inside Michael, alarm bells are ringing. Weed killer. Poison.
"Come on, Stephen," Michael says, heart beginning to pump hard, helping distribute the stuff through his system. "You're kidding, right?"
Stephen shakes his head, chuckling, and plays with his sticks some more. "Such a doofus," he says.
Michael turns to ice. His heart thuds harder in his chest. I'm going to die now, he thinks. He has never been so afraid in his life. "Stephen, it's not really weed killer, is it?" he whispers. He feels a vein trying to burst out of his head in the heat and silence of the day. Stephen says nothing. Michael imagines the vein popping and splooshing all over Stephen's sticks. Anger mounts, building in his skull, ferrying poison around his body. But he says nothing. He's not sure how he resists, how he calms himself, but instead of screaming at his brother, he gets up from the wooden chair, walks slowly around the house and out to the front yard.
Michael's feet crunch more gravel, only this time it's really loud in his ears. He stops behind his father and uncle, who are hunched over his father's car, poking around under the hood.
"Dad?" Tentative.
His father doesn't hear him.
"Dad, we have to go somewhere," he says. His brain is making him say strange things. He's not being clear, but his father's not listening anyway.
"Dad?" Michael feels tears coming, but he doesn't want to cry. Not now. Even if it would get his father's attention.
"Dad, can—"
Michael's father looks over his shoulder and says, "Yes, okay, hang on; your uncle and I are talking."
His father and uncle are British. Some of their words sound strange to Michael's ears, like "hang" with its dropped "h." He repeats this word to himself when he's alone. It tastes funny coming out of his mouth.
His father turns back to the car.
Michael tugs on his sleeve and says, "I swallowed weed killer." He could get to the point now. Now that his father had spoken, acknowledged his son, Michael could get to the point.
"You what?" his father says.
"Weed killer," Michael says, and points to the backyard. Now the tears are really threatening. They're glistening on his eyelids.
Understanding comes to his father; Michael sees it in his face. He sees that his father loves him. But at the same time, he also sees him cast a quick glance toward his brother. There is something in that look. Something Michael doesn't understand. Something that, perhaps, even his father doesn't understand.
Clock ticking. Every second that goes by, with every thump of Michael's heart, the poison spreads in him. He knows that Death, whatever that really means, is coming.
Suddenly, it is as though someone has pressed Fast Forward on the video machine of Michael's life and his father is picking him up in his arms and tossing him in the back seat of his uncle's car and his uncle is running to grab Stephen and they're on the road and going very fast and cars are whizzing by, whizzing by, going so fast Michael barely makes out their colours and then there are more colours because a cop has pulled them over for speeding and Michael's father explains what's happened, then they have an escort and they tear off the shoulder back into traffic and now—
Everything slows down.
Michael feels fine. Stephen is beside him, looking grumpy. He's playing with his sticks. Ever since Stephen saved Michael from drowning the year before, all he sees are those sticks. He fiddles and fiddles and barely looks up at Michael anymore.
Cars sail by in a hazy fog cloud. Michael sees all their detail. Colours are still flashing, but they're so slow they're like splashes of paint on the other cars instead of quick flashes of light. The colours drape themselves across the drivers' faces.
Stephen ignores Michael all the way to the hospital.
