CARNIVAL
Prompt - Carnival : Write a poem or story or journal entry inspired by a carnival or street fair.
Through some long forgotten historical anomaly, the council owned a large patch of land on the eastern edge of the village. Even more unusually, they'd always resisted tempting offers from developers to buy it up and plant housing there. "It's a community resource" was the mantra, and they stuck with it. There was a very basic community centre in the north western corner, with what passed for changing rooms and toilets, but otherwise it was just a big green space. It got used for sports, both school and adult, and outdoor yoga and joggers and dog walkers and whatever anybody wanted to do there really. And every year, in the last weekend of September, it was Carnival Time. Smithson's Travelling Funfair would arrive, set up camp, and people would come from all over the county to give themselves over to the classic pleasures of childhood.
They won't be coming back.
We were there, the usual crowd, trying to pretend we were doing it all ironically and really imagining we were ten again. The waltzer, the roundabout, the dodgems, the shooting and throwing and grabbing stalls, the fortune teller, in an atmosphere of flashing lights and electrical sparks and the smells and tastes of hot dogs and candyfloss. Simple pleasures they're called, and it was best to set your mind to simple and enjoy.
In the centre of it all, the bright beacon everyone saw as they drove into the valley. The ferris wheel. This one had only been in use for four years, finally replacing the rickety old thing that dated back to the sixties. It had twenty four gondolas, three seats in each, largely open to the elements. Go to the top and you could see every ride, every stall, every pleasure seeker, and into the quiet of the village beyond. An annual must-do, a habit we couldn't break.
I was with Steve and Jackie and we'd come to a stop just one car down from the top spot. We were laughing, shouting to and at the other cars, pointing out anything and everything, trying to give each other a scare. The same as we did every year.
So it took us a bit more time than most to realise we'd been stationary for a lot longer than usual. We looked down to see a crowd there. Not the queuing and observing crowd that would have been normal, but a concerned crowd, trying to look into one of the gondolas that were down at access level. Jackie spotted the St John's people pushing through, urgency guiding their movements. This didn't look good.
We were stuck up there for sixty five minutes. A bit chilly, but we could see there was something more important than our comfort happening below. An ambulance had turned up, police too, and the crowd had being pushed back. We saw a laden stretcher being loaded into the ambulance which moved away. Slowly. The wheel started to move, but with longer pauses than normal, and it was another fifteen minutes before we could get off and be corralled into a makeshift pen, awaiting our turn to be questioned by the police. This wasn't the excitement we'd come for.
By the time I left I knew a woman had been found dead in one of the gondolas. She'd been on her own, but nobody seemed to know who she was or how she'd died. That would only emerge over the next few days and weeks, which also brought us follow up police visits. The woman was about thirty, very pretty, well dressed, but with nothing on her to identify who she was. She'd paid in cash, didn't have any cards, phone or house keys. Nobody knew who she'd come with, where she was from, why she'd chosen to go up there alone. Nobody knew, or could figure out, how the slim blade had entered her heart and taken her life.
Six months later and nobody knows. Maybe they never will. All we do know is that Smithson's won't be back.
This time next year there will be fifty eight new homes on that land.
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