Free We'll Always Have Paris by Jennifer Coburn

sounding a bit frustrated. “Rock the boat, don’t tip the boat over,” he mocked. “What bullshit.” He turned the knob on the radio until it landed on Cat Stevens’s “Wild World.” “ This is music.” Relieved that he seemed settled, I sang along with the chorus. He smiled and joined in, “Oh baby, baby, it’s a wild world, and I’ll always remember you like a child, girl.” Absorbed in the music, he kept the beat by tapping his silver-and-stone ring on the hard plastic of his steering wheel.
    “You like Cat Stevens?” my father asked. I felt proud that he assumed that I was up on the music hit makers at age eight and did not want to disappoint him, so I told him Cat Stevens was one of my favorites. I knew of the Jackson Five and Sonny and Cher, but could not name many others. Unless Cat Stevens was the guy who wrote “Time in a Bottle” or “Benny and the Jets,” I had no idea whether or not I liked his music. As we saw the steel frame of the old parachute ride, my father flicked his turn signal to enter the park. He sighed. “This man writes music. There’s so much bullshit and so little music these days.”
    Soon we were standing in the shadow of the Wonder Wheel beside the Spook-a-Rama, debating whether or not I could go in the haunted house ride solo. “I’m not a baby,” I explained. “Plus we just went on it, I know exactly what’s going to happen. I know when Frankenstein pops out, I know when the bats fly into your hair. I have the whole thing memorized.”
    “Then why do you need to go again?” he asked.
    “Pleeeease?” I begged.
    He conceded. “I’ll watch you through the little window,” my father said. What he hadn’t remembered was that there was only one small window where people from the outside could look into the Spook-a-Rama. That window was located at the precise point when carts passed a mummy lunging out from his casket. I’d forgotten that bit, so my father got a live snapshot of me shrieking in holy terror. As he described it, my hair was standing straight in the air like uncooked spaghetti.
    Moments later, I heard men shouting, one calling my name and another chasing after him. “Don’t get out of the cart, JJ,” my father shouted from what sounded like the inside of the Spook-a-Rama.
    “Are you fucking crazy, man?!” said a man with a Brooklyn accent.
    “I’m coming!” my father shouted breathlessly. The cart came to a screeching halt, and for a moment, I was alone in the pitch dark. “JJ?! JJ, where are you?”
    Suddenly the place was lit up like a hospital. I could see wires, levers, switches, and lights. The so-called bats were no more than shreds of rubber hanging from overhead. I’d been in car washes more frightening than this. My father raced to the cart. “Thank God you’re okay,” he said, jumping in with me.
    A man caught up with us a few seconds later. “Are you out of your fucking mind?! This thing is on rails, man. You could’ve been electrocuted.”
    “What could I do?” my father protested. “She was going to jump out of the cart. I couldn’t let my daughter get electrocuted!”
    “What could you do?!” the man shouted. “You could fucking tell me to stop the ride. I would have hit one motherfucking button and stopped the ride. You didn’t have to come running in here like Captain Fucking America.”
    “I’m sorry,” my father said. “I was so scared I didn’t think. I just knew I had to get to her.” Then he asked the same question he would pose to the security guard at the new World Trade Center two years later: “Do you have kids?”
    The man grabbed my father and hugged him. “I know, I know, man, you do fucking anything for them, even stupid shit like this.”
    “Thank you for understanding,” my father said.
    “Next time, don’t go all fucking crazy like that. I got an off switch I could hit anytime. A little girl needs her daddy around.”
    On the drive home, my father said I was absolutely never going on