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  • The Queen of Hearts
  • Brooks Wright (bio)

Standing there with her paper cone of pink cotton candy, she was an easy mark. The Teddy bear she’d won got tucked under her arm while she watched Duane fumble in his billfold for money. The voices calling out were calling for her, seemed like—the Kewpie dolls and colored lights promising something vague and ill defined. Looking up, she saw the Ferris wheel spinning above—the lights and little seats tilting against the black sky making it seem that she was about to spin away from everything toward something new.

Inside the tent Omar took her hand as he whisked her from the audience, his great red and black cape darkening behind her like a cloud. She felt for a moment like she was disappearing. And when he whispered in her ear, “Just follow me,” she had to say, “What? What did you say?” And he said, “Just follow me. I’ll show you what to do.”

But he must have had more than that in mind right from the start, even before he plucked those tiny bits of pink cotton candy from the corners of her mouth with his flitting tongue and laughed and said, “Now you see it, now you don’t.” He must have known before that night, before the umpteen-million quarters he slid from her ears and the zillion hearts he flushed from the deck in her hand, the doves flying, the scarves unfolding, the ropes cut into pieces that grew back together with a flick of his wrist. He must have seen her coming.

All day she had wanted to disappear. Disappear from her life and reappear somewhere else. A car could drive up out of nowhere. “Anywhere,” she’d say. “Anywhere’s fine with me,” and she’d get right in, no questions asked. “Let’s go,” she’d say. “Let’s just go.”

It was sweltering hot. The fan humming and gliding from side to side like a bird whose wings flapping might pull her upward into that blue body, the sky, the dead corn outside rustling conspiratorially. But there is no breeze to ease the heat that comes on an ocean of floating air. It had settled on the house like a flood. Her [End Page 475] dress stuck to her back so she felt like a fly in the paper hanging in sticky curls. Three games of canasta with her kid sister, Tammy, and four glasses of lemon ice tea were all she could take. “I’ll never last until tonight,” she said, and then, “If I live that long.” She’d said that more than once. There was a carnival in Plainview. She wanted to go. “If I don’t just evaporate first.”

Her momma’s black Bible sat on the table beside the telephone. In it was a Jesus bookmark to keep Momma’s place. If Duane called, she’d put that Bible in the drawer where she wouldn’t have to see it when they talked. When Momma and Daddy were gone they played the radio. Tammy watched her dance around the room pretending she was someone on tv. “You need more lipstick,” Tammy would say. The radio was for Daddy to hear the weather and farm report. Every night and Sundays Momma listened to the Reverend Jesus Walker on the Bible Hour. “It’s a sin to call yourself Jesus,” Daddy snapped one day out of the blue when Momma turned the radio on. Before Daddy came in from work they’d have to switch back from their station in Shreveport they liked so much, or he’d be mad. It was far away and they wondered out loud what that Shreveport must be like. Daddy didn’t like to see them dancing and wearing makeup. Duane didn’t like to come around when her father was there.

She turned the music up loud and walked out onto the porch. Across the sun-baked field dust rose from a car passing on the county road; beyond that was the edge of the world. The gray towers of grain elevators rose into the sky like a distant city...

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