Free Going Native by Stephen Wright

television."
    "Don't tell me what I'm thinking. Don't even try."
    "Huh?"
    Rising up across the floor in the unforgiving luminosity of dawn was a forbidding landscape of stale clothes, lost shoes, red and blue capped plastic vials, IDs and credit cards phony and legit, cigarettes, magazines, newspapers, cans, cups, and Styrofoam burger boxes. By candlelight this colorful array of textures and forms had seemed intriguing. He got up and left the room without a word. She remained on the mattress reading and rereading the same tattered issue of People and the stars kept smiling for her and heaven was user-friendly and the limos were at the curb. He came back. In a dramatically swirling cape of snowy smoke.
    "You ever do any moon rock?" she asked.
    "Moon rock? What's that?"
    "It's new."
    "I've seen everything that ever came down the street. Never heard of no moon rock."
    "That's 'cause it's new, it's happening."
    "Yeah?"
    "It's what the astronauts use. It's NASA-approved."
    "Get some."
    Then the unidentifiable strangeness that had been creeping moldlike across the windows resolved itself and it was night. Again.
    "Whoa." She struggled to her feet, unable to manage the responsibilities of upright posture beyond a simian crouch, in which attitude she contemplated the wonders of planetary motion. "Went right past that day. Going faster than days now."
    "What?"
    She collapsed like a deflating balloon back onto the mattress.
    "What'd you say?"
    "When I was a little girl," she began, her huge eyes still full of whatever she had seen outside that black window.
    "Oh holy Christ."
    "When I was a little girl, I wanted, more than anything, to run away with the carnival."
    "Please. Don't give me a heart attack."
    "You know those sleazy carnivals that come every summer to the parking lot behind the mall? The same nothing rides, the same crummy prizes year after year, but every summer we couldn't wait to get out there the first night they opened. And every night those girls working the booths, man, couldn't get enough of 'em. Beanbag. Darts. Air rifle. Ping-Pong ball in the goldfish bowl. I studied them. Their moves, their faces. We're talking major cosmetics here and kinda glass eyes that looked right at you without looking. Their bodies were always hard and skinny and count on at least one to have red hair and everyone had a pack of Marlboros sticking out of their jeans and they didn't take orders from nobody and they certainly didn't think much of you, shuffling past with a ball of cotton candy in your face. I wanted so bad to be one of those girls, wear a greasy change apron around my hips and grow a hard face under those yellow lights and carnival stink and yell insults at all the straights."
    "Yeah," said Mister CD, "you just wanted to sit on a corn dog."
    She didn't sleep that night, either.
    "We're on a mission," he reminded her.
    In the morning, when the light came monstrously round again, it found her poised ballerinalike at the window thinking, it's a beautiful, it's a pink cake day. She dressed herself from the nearest pile and said, "Time to get out, campers. Let's go, we gotta go. Movies, we go movies, Daddy." Daddy had spent much of the night positioned out in the living room, watching the trees twitch.
    "In a minute."
    Hours later, Latisha and Mister CD emerged from the shadowy house into the hot bedazzlement of high noon, outfitted as if for a mountain hike in layered clothing not usually seen until late autumn, sober faces shielded from painful rays and close inspection by matching pairs of expensive Italian sunglasses. Covering the sparse growth on Mister CD's head a neon blue baseball cap with a gold showtime patch sewn across the crown. The car, an unwashed, unwaxed, decidedly unnew green Ford Galaxie, sat baking in the driveway.
    Noncommittal eyes beneath a lowered brow observed all from next door, where Mr. Hugo, a retired classics professor with a nasty fungoid blemish bleaching out one ruddy cheek, was down on his knees