Free Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peelle Page A

myself to go in, and even then, I moved around like a trespasser, as if any minute he might appear in the doorway. I found the comic books boxed up carefully, chronologically, under his bed. A brittle piece of notebook paper, left over from the days when we fought over everything, fluttered to the floor when I lay on my stomach to pull them out: Hands off, Cole! But that money kept me going for months, bought me the truck, got me miraculously, against all odds, out of Virginia— Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, Green Lantern, Atomic Man.
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    The people come, as they always do. In spite of the heat, the humidity, the exhaust-colored sky, they come dropping coins and car keys, yanking kids along by the wrists, eating funnel cake with their eyes on the Ferris wheel, their dogs locked in hot cars. I sit behind the table and watch them, the same faces making the rounds, hell-bent like they’re searching for something. It’s always the same, everywhere. I watch boys and men clamor in Dub’s tent, T-shirts in their fists, throwing their money at him. I hear the clang of the bell at the Test Your Strength booth, the shouts of the barkers, hollers from the rickety Tempest, screams from the Gravitron every time the floor drops. The bleeps and buzzes and techno bass beatsof the games. Eyes pass over my table and move on, looking for something bright and new. A hot air balloon rises on the horizon, hovers red and stark against the steel-gray sky. People stop to point it out to one another, causing traffic jams on the paths. Something about it makes me uneasy. It looks like it has come to judge us.
    No one has stopped at my table by the time the smells of lunch start to waft over: corn dogs, sausage and onions, Dinosaur Wings. At night, the smell is deep in Kathy’s braids. Bob doesn’t want her anymore, or at least that’s what she told me. He spends hours in the wing stand after closing, trying to teach himself guitar. Kathy sits in the bus and waits for me. I come because there’s nowhere else to go. She has an easy laugh, the optimism of youth. Bob’s missing two fingers. He curses the stubs when he plays, the chords muted and muddy. The bus is parked so close behind the stand that sometimes, in bed with her, I can hear him. I pull the blanket over our heads and try not to listen. When I listen, I start to sink through the dark depths towards the pointlessness of it all. Why does he bother? At his age, what’s the use?
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    Last night, I left the bus late and ended up at the grandstand, where most of the crowd had gathered for a beauty pageant. It was part of some festival going on in conjunction with the fair: the Corn Festival, the Harvest Festival, the Illinois Pride Festival, I don’t know what. The girls, in their elaborate dresses, all looked incredibly earnest and downright scared,as if this was the most important event of their lives. The winner cried as the judges crowned her, touching her frothy pink dress and piled-up hair. The sash they looped over her shoulders read MISS HOPEWELL COUNTY . She twisted it in her fingers as she stepped to the microphone to give a speech about her brother in the army. “We never know when the enemy might strike,” she said, feedback crackling. “It could happen right here in Thunderbird. That’s why I’d like to take a moment of silence for our boys over there. They remind us all to follow our dreams and never give up.” The heads in the grandstand all nodded, and after a round of applause there was a minute or two of an almost sacred quiet. Out there on the edge of the crowd, I tried to direct my own silence towards the common cause, but all those grave unmoving faces only made me feel more invisible and alone.
    Afterwards she posed for pictures, biting her lip between smiles. As she turned and waved to the crowd, she moved like so many country girls I know: trying to fold in on herself, trying to tuck away her broad