Free Wait Until Twilight by Sang Pak Page A

my eyes. “Man, that’s terrible,” I say.
    “Whoooeee! Skizzet!” says Brad after he drinks.
    After a minute or two I feel it smoldering in my stomach. Strangely enough, it feels good, and I want more. It’s just the taste that’s the problem. Will and Brad go to buy some fountain drinks while David and I wait in the car. David takes another sip.
    “Give me that,” I say. It tastes just as bad as before. They come back with four orange soda fountain drinks, which we spike with the mountain dew. The soda does a good job of masking the horrible taste, and it goes down a little easier. We take our drinks into the park and buy a bunch of tickets for rides and games. The place is packedmostly with kids and their families, but there are some high school and college kids, too.
    The line for the Ferris wheel isn’t too long, and it looks like fun. Brad and David think it looks gay for two guys to get on together, but Will and I don’t care. We give a couple tickets to the operator and get seated. The big wheel moves up each time a person is seated until Will and I are a quarter of the way to the top. Then after a moment we lurch forward, and the whole thing moans and groans as we start turning down and then come back up to the top, where we get a view of the whole town.
    “Look,” I say, and point at David and Brad down below. We give them our middle fingers, and they start cheering us on. The turning of the wheel and the drinking, the crazy circus music, the lights of the town, my friends’ happy faces, the stars in the sky all go to my head. It feels like I might split open. After the ride’s over Brad and David give it a twirl, not even caring if it looks gay.
    We play all the games: shooting little metal ducks, throwing little rings onto Coke bottles, doing the strength test with the hammer, all of them. Then the guys want to get on the spinning cups, but just looking at those things spinning around makes me queasy. So I go for some water while they ride the whirling dishware. Along the way I pass by the funhouse, where a hawker is yelling, “Come one, come all, into the funhouse of amazements and horrors, ghouls and angels, through the labyrinth of mirrors and freaks…” The line’s empty and I have some tickets left in my pocket, so I step up and give the old scummy-looking carnie a ticket and go in with my spiked orange soda drink in hand. I follow a black painted corridor until I get to a black door, which I walk through and find an array of strange body parts floating in large bottles of formaldehyde. Snakes, a heart, a brain, kidney, even a head, which I don’t think is real. There’s a whole corridor full of them placed on black swathed podiums of different heights. I look atthem all slowly, because I’m the only one in there. One of the bottles contains a deformed fetus. It’s got two big heads, one growing out of the other like it’s trying to escape from its brother. It looks so real. It could just as well be one of Mrs. Greenan’s alien babies floating in there. Dead. Stillborn. Not even a chance. But those alien babies are still alive, breathing, squirming around. Squirming like that singer on stage having a fit. That singer is the freak. What a creepy bastard. He belongs in the jar. I move to the end of the jars, where there’s another black door. The next chamber is an assortment of cheesy relics. A little crusty-looking mummy in a coffin sits on a table. A skeleton with angelic-looking wings hangs on the wall next to a skeleton with horns. A stuffed two-headed calf and a stuffed one-eyed pig stand in a little corral full of hay. I stop a moment, taking a close look at the angel skeleton while sipping my orange drink. There’s no one around, so I touch the left wing to see if it might be real. I pinch the bone, expecting it to be brittle like plaster of Paris, but what happens is the entire wing breaks off with a snap and falls to the floor and splits into three pieces. I think I hear