Free On the Wing by Eric Kraft Page B

passed through telephone their friends and relatives along our route and urge them not to miss the daring flyboy when he passes through their town?”
    Whatever the banner announced—and I still thought it might be my arrival—had certainly caught people’s fancy. The whole town seemed to be in the street. I wished that I had taken the opportunity at the last rest stop to straighten my clothes a bit, comb my hair, and give Spirit a dusting.
    â€œAm I dirty?” she asked.
    â€œNot dirty, exactly. But both of us could use a little spiffing up.”
    â€œI know that I would look a lot better if you’d take that ratty banner off my tail.”
    I said nothing, but I had to admit that she was right. The banner advertising Porky White’s Kap’n Klam restaurant had suffered from being dragged along the road through New York and New Jersey. It was battered and dirty and twisted, and the part that had initially read THE HOME OF HAPPY DINERS had been reduced to THE HOME OF HAPPY DIN .
    Perhaps Spirit and I both understood how contentious an issue Porky’s banner was likely to become, because we both stepped aside from any discussion of it with the simultaneous declaration, “This is an occasion!” and when I was close enough to read the Mallowdale banner, it told me that the occasion was the 97th Annual Marshmallow Festival.
    Festive it certainly was, and the marshmallow theme was inescapable. Many of the citizens of Mallowdale had dressed themselves as the plump white confections, either just as they come from the bag, or in various stages of toasting, from barely beige through golden brown to singed to the fragile wrinkled skin of black that follows ignition. I felt conspicuous in my flyboy garb. It seemed as wrong as could be in a crowd where marshmallows were à la mode.
    â€œYou need an outfit,” said a matronly woman at my side, taking me by the elbow. She wore a smile, but her brows were knit, giving her the air of someone taking pity on an unfortunate soul. In memory’s eye, though, she seems not to be acting from spontaneous generosity but as part of a program. I see now that she was estimating in the back of her mind the benefit that would accrue from what she was about to do. “Here,” she said. “Try this.”
    She offered me a crepe-paper hat that resembled a marshmallow somewhat. It was, I understand now, the Marshmallow Festival equivalent of the cheap jacket and tie that some restaurants keep in the checkroom for patrons who arrive dressed for dinner at a steel cart on the corner. The hat was enough of a marshmallow costume to make me feel that I could join the festivities. It was not nearly enough to allow me to fit in, but it was enough to make me stand out less. Still, as I walked around the center of the town, trying to mingle with the festive throng, I felt that the Mallowdalers considered me an outsider, someone suspect, possibly dangerous, a threat to their way of life, their beliefs, their young women. I liked it. I may have begun to swagger.
    The flow of the crowd carried me to a parking lot behind the Marshmallow Museum where long tables and wooden folding chairs had been set up. From its resemblance to the Babbington Clam Fest’s “Gorging Ground,” I recognized this as a feasting area, and discovered that I was hungry. I joined the line for tickets. The price was reasonable, and the sign at the entrance said ALL YOU CAN EAT , a wonderful offer for an adolescent who had spent the long day piloting an aerocycle.
    I paid the price. Not until I sat down and read the little menu card on the table did I understand that there would be nothing to eat that did not include marshmallows.
    Of course, that made me feel tremendously nostalgic.
    â€œThis is just like the Clam Fest back home!” I said to the person sitting next to me, a woman I guessed, carefully dressed as an evenly tanned marshmallow on a supple stick cut from a