DeKalb County (Ind.) Fair; September, 2012. Photos by Q. Reed Ghazala.

Come. See. The. Really. Strange. Thing.

 Dollar admission, daredevils in Baghdad, shrunken head, fingerprints on glass.

The Nowhere blog showcases a monthly feature from a selection of exclusive stories that provide a glimpse of far-flung locales or local backyards. This month’s feature comes to us from a county fair in mid-America.

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My dollar could have been better spent on the toy crane with its butter-finger claws dropping my pick of the treasures—a cheap wristwatch, a stuffed bear, a harmonica, a pocketknife with a steel blank in which to engrave my initials—back into the treasure pile and returning empty-handed to the chute. I could have bought a second helping of deep-fried bubble gum that you can swallow because the vendor promised she cooks out the seven years it takes to pass through you. I could have ridden the Space Ride and felt the press of the padded bar across me still moist from the midriffs of sweating country girls. But I only stood with my dollar watching the cars fill one after the other and, ever mounting, a couple rocking theirs up to 12 o’clock high, where his cheek flashed and pressed against the cage and then her bare toes bit through the mesh and coins fell from their pockets as they performed above the treetops, in the full moon rising down the other end of 9th Street, at the other end of the world. They would be daredevils in Baghdad, risking insanity, black leprosy, paralysis in the child, possession by jinn doing it makrûh and in time to the dol­lar I fingered, that burned a hole in my pocket. I could have lost it betting on a hole in the mouse wheel, betting it, limp, like if it went through the wash, and so soft my fingers tried it on like a dress as I walked back and forth before a three-sided booth. The barker sat in a lawn chair, holding a karaoke mic under his breath, where it made for this accidental, almost, covered with a wind­sock, to hold up his face in order to more talk in his sleep than bark, “Come. See. The. Réally. Strange. Thing”—the accent mark on Really floating from one punctuated word to the other with every cadence of this invitation, almost with a mind of its own, spermato­zoa finding, trying some chink in the protein wall of the egg as I thought about the National Geographic photograph going on deep within the loins still on the Space Ride, agitated by the spinning around and around and up and down of la machine infernale far from Mon. Cocteau. Three Amish girls were al­ready inside taking their turn, looking down on a five-gal­lon tank with its glass sides facing outward blacked, redacted. Their faces were aglow with this sixty-wattish awe, the kind, per­haps, some of these county fair animals might enjoy if they live long enough to play themselves in a Christmas crèche. The girls wore dresses from the same bolt of gingham de­noting sisters and these white linen caps, with the chinstraps untied and streaming loose, in place of their hair tied back in a single braid. This incited a respect I had not felt the whole day amid all this Jismdiana Jinndiana, and Jimdiana and since I had now paid a dollar and had established, philosophically speaking, my trans­immanence. I was real to everyone there, subject and verb. The barker took my pale green swatch of a bill and rolled it around so many others, a roll so fat that he had to jimmy it back into his pocket with his fist first. 

The girls looked up and could see me. Two, taller, lowered their eyes demurely but one, younger, pale, thin and fair-haired, gave me the most heartbreaking sigh that I ever heard. She moved aside as I stepped around the card table on which the five-gallon tank rested. The really strange thing appeared to be long dead, but the littlest sister next to me whispered as if not to wake it. More out of def­erence to her, I spoke in hushed tones, as one might before an open casket. The mars yellow shape behind the glass had those pinched, progeria features of a shrunken head and sported a full head of jet black hair that had once sprouted from an old shaving brush, which made me think it had been in the carnival business for years, back to when it could have heard Billy Sunday preaching from another tent with its little pointed ears.I answered a question. It was not a mermaid’s child, not with those fingers, two on each hand, ending in goat horns. I asked my little companion how a mermaid could present herself to a prince with such a tail, a fluke sculpted from beeswax, the notches in its fins sealed like apple pie crust. I looked at her for the intended effect, for where I was lead­ing her and her sisters, or her friends, or cousins, some attachment like that, because I had them all now in the palm of my hand, the demureness of the other two having given way to some of the trust of the smallest of the three. I asked her—them now—to look at how the hot bulb, which gave the thing’s sallow skin a glow of health far more than it needed. You can see the maker’s fingerprints, can’t you? There’s his lifeline where patted down its little paunch. The thin, pale youngest sighed once more, and some of that sigh was of fresh disappointment, of exasperation that I elicit to this day. It had that same soughing I remember, too, when I asked my mother and father to stop the car on the way to Florida. “We were making such good time,” I kept hearing my father urbi et orbi over his shoulder into the backseat. But I wanted to see Rock City. And when they said no, I made a mist on my window and with my finger drew my eyes in it. Yet only part of her sigh was meant for me, I think. The rest, the most, went to the thing she seemed to care about with its withered arms—“made of some long-ago Sunday supper’s chicken bones,” I said, piling it on now because I did not want them to leave but I was saying everything that would make them leave, piling on this little farm family mother-to-be especially, who said she only saw fingerprints on the glass, where she rested her hand on the tank’s glass lid, as she would one day on a crib rail.

—James Reidel