by Mikki Aronoff
Greta compacts her body into stone and rocks as far away from her father as she can, given that they are both squeezed into a swan seat on the park’s carousel. The ticket taker runs to the center of the ride, turns on the switch. The swan lurches forward. “It’s not fair!” Greta pouts, chin down, as the calliope pipes dreams, all passengers moving at the same speed in counterclockwise circles, all looking ahead. “She’ll get there first.”
Three feet ahead of the swan, her sister Sylvie stretches, a forward lean, her thighs straddling a white stallion with wild eyes, a silver pole at its center. They rise and fall together, up and down, up and down. Sylvie will later have the same crazed look in her eyes when the best-looking senior in high school is riding her and she dreams her hair is floating like a horse’s mane, or a slow-motion shampoo commercial. But now she and horse piston as one, the ride circling like a man trying to walk with one foot nailed to the ground, like her father, who’s trying to keep everything equal since mom walked out a year ago, stretched from trying to keep things in balance.
“It’s a carousel, Gret,” her father says, teeth clenched, patting her hand a little too hard. “We’re all going the same distance, and there’s no brass ring on this ride.” In his other hand, he’s holding a goldfish in a plastic bag as far away from him as he can, as if it were ready to explode into smithereens, into tiny fishy fragments, like the goldfish his high school teacher froze then smashed across a table. Sylvie won her fish playing bean toss, after whooping and hollering in the bumper cars and before she got first pick on the carousel. So far, Greta’s won nothing that’s alive. She’ll go home with only a plastic princess ring, now tucked for safekeeping in her father’s shirt pocket. The goldfish flashes orange. It seems bigger than it should be. Greta eyes it with suspicion.
In a month the fish will float upside down in a bowl never cleaned of its shit. Two flushes and a wave. Bye, George. Greta is the only one who will mourn, but now she is crying over everything. The horse is ahead of the swan (true). Her piece is bigger than mine (chocolate cupcakes twinned in commercial wrapping). I wanted it first (she thinks this is hard to disprove).
Greta is weighted to the swan seat like a boulder. She watches her father lean back, regard her petulant mouth, her quivering chin, two tiny buds under a too-tight sparkly pink tee-shirt left behind by her mother in a rush to get out of town. His right hand fists. Fingernails jam into his palm, etch red arcs like parentheses trying to contain what’s coming.
Mikki Aronoff’s work appears in New World Writing, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Tiny Molecules, The Disappointed Housewife, Bending Genres, Milk Candy Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Gone Lawn, Mslexia, The Dribble Drabble Review, The Citron Review, and elsewhere. She has received Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best American Short Stories, and Best Microfiction nominations.
Emerge Literary Journal 