Nightmare Carnival

Shelton wants to run. But there is nowhere to run. There’s just the sky, the grass, the animals all around.

They speak as one, although they have no mouths, he has never given them mouths. They speak, and there’s no anger, no irony. “Welcome,” they say. “Welcome to the Popping Fields.”

And now he sees them properly. The misshapen creatures whose limbs have been twisted into the wrong positions and cannot walk. Heads lopsided, ears and tails askew, what was he doing when he made them like that, was he drunk? The older animals who had once swelled full with air, now sagged and wrinkled. Shelton cries then. He can’t help it. He looks upon all these beasts that are suffering and he cries. And they urge him not to cry. Don’t cry, because he can help. And they ask him for that help now.

He tells them he doesn’t have anything sharp. They don’t seem to listen. They crowd about him on all sides, bobbing on top of each other to reach him first, they’re eager for his touch in a way he hasn’t known in years. His fingers are thick and blunt, but he tries his best — he picks up a dog, and he digs his fingers into its rubbery skin as far as they can go, and he can feel the dog howling in his head, and he doesn’t know whether that’s in pain or in anticipation — he claws at the rubber, he tries to break the surface of the balloon, and then, at last, at long last, he’s done it. And the dog pops. Thank God it pops. And it isn’t a loud pop, it sounds to Shelton like a sigh of relief.

He gets better, faster. And as he squeezes some animals with his hands, he’ll step down hard on others, and there is popping in the fields that night, there is so much popping.

And at times he thinks that he’s done, that there are no animals left to pop. And he can stop long enough to wipe the tears from his face. But when he looks again there are still more, they’re stretching into the distance as far as he can see.

He does not know how long he spends in the Popping Fields. The blue sky stays blue, there’s no sunlight here, no dark at night. His hands begin to blister, his tired arms ache. And the green grass beneath him is now hidden under a blanket of spent rubber — scraps of yellow, red, orange, all the colours of the rainbow. “No more,” he says. “Please. No more.”

“No more,” the animals agree. “No more. For now.”

And he turns, and there is the ladder again, and it has always been there. He need climb only a few rungs, and there he is, hauling his exhausted body into the upper bunk, Ruth still sleeping peacefully below.

The trapdoor is there the next night too, and the night after. Joshua Shelton feels the stirrings in his bladder and knows it must be time. The animals don’t mind him taking a piss on the green before he starts, they’re not proud. Each time he goes down the steps it’s a shorter climb, and as the weeks go by the Popping Fields seem ever closer to him, sometimes in the heat of the afternoon, as he sits outside his caravan making rabbits for the children, he feels he could close his eyes and drift back there and pop what he’s just created. He isn’t frightened. And he isn’t ashamed.

He doesn’t rely upon his fingers any more. He’s selected the sharpest knife he can find, one with a blade so keen he’s sure the animals don’t feel the slightest pain as he slits them. And he sleeps with it, tucked under his pillow, ready each night for when he awakes.

One evening he goes into the caravan and there’s Ruth — and she’s not cleaning, she’s sitting on her bed and playing with a pack of cards. He decides not to say anything. But she sees him watching, and she starts, and turns red.

“I’ve been practising a magic trick,” she says, lightly, as if that’s the most reasonable thing in the world. “Would you, do you want to see?” She tells him to pick a card. Wordlessly he does so, tapping one randomly with his finger. She shuffles the pack, smiles so charmingly at him. “Is this your card?” she says, holding up the nine of spades in triumph.

“Where did you learn this?” he asks. Still hoping for the ludicrous, that she’ll have taught herself — or hoping that she’ll lie and say she taught herself anyway.

She tells him she’s met a boy from the circus, and she admits she knows his name too, and that his name is Ed. Joshua Shelton asks his daughter if she’s going to see Ed again, and she says she doesn’t know; he asks her again, and she says they’ve arranged to meet the next day. “When you see this Ed of yours, you must ask him home for supper.”

Ed is polite, and arrives in clothes that are clean and may even have been ironed. He calls Shelton “sir,” and shakes his hand respectfully. He is short and slight, and that reassures Shelton somewhat, if it comes to a fight he’s sure he can best him. Shelton doesn’t know how old Ed is, can’t judge it; old enough to grow a moustache, not so old it doesn’t look absurd.