The Ride by Belle Crawford
We ride the one that inches upward while it ticks, the one that holds you still over the bodies moving around below with their cotton candy, their sticky apples, their tattoos and cigarettes. It’s the one with red lights flashing, the sirens pushing their way into your skull, breaking glass there until you know it’s a mistake.
“He’s the smartest in his school,” his cousin Anita said when I arrived to take Chris to the fair. While I waited for him to get ready, Anita rocked in the sun, gnats dancing around her baby’s head in the heat of the yard. She doesn’t talk to the baby’s father but her boyfriend buys the groceries and plays with Chris in the dirt driveway where there are oyster shells in mounds by the mailbox and dead puppies on the grass. (They’d been killed by the big dogs and by hunger and the heat.)
Now the ride carries us up into the night and holds us like an inhale over the swarm of heads moving. And when the ticking stops we are held there, knowing the drop - knowing we do it for the drop. And the drop always comes. Soon we’ll cut through the air, a complete iron slip.
At the top we listen to the breathless-quiet and we wait. We do not speak. Then it lets us go and a sound like a baby dog runs from Chris’s mouth. I close my eyes to see his mother there on the couch but she can’t see me, her body disappearing, her eyes cloudy with cataract, white blood cells disappearing.
At last we are falling, wild animals in our stomachs running loose at the howl of gravity inside us as we race toward the earth, toward the bottom, the end.
When we land our bodies settle and Chris looks into me, his eyes alive with the spark of a horrible fall. This is when he tells me he won’t EVER do it again. And I want to tell him I wish it were his decision.
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About the Author
Belle Crawford
Born: Columbia, South Carolina, USA
Now Resides: Aiken, South Carolina
Bio: Belle Crawford has lived in Japan, France, England, and the United States. Before receiving her MA in creative writing at the University of Manchester she worked with autistic children and made art about the nature of memory and the relationship between innocence and exploration. She is currently working on a novel about these same topics. She teaches English in a small southern town in South Carolina and frequently dreams that she can fly.
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image by pushAUDIO.
