“It can’t always be a full moon. It mostly ever isn’t a full moon,” I said to the sky as I looked out from the Ferris wheel into the smug face on the full moon sitting above the Walmart in Nowheretown, Virginia.
That’s where the fair came every August before school started back up, to that dumbass parking lot in that dumbass town that sits low and forgotten in the New River Valley. That’s where every summer I’d go with my dumbass friends and pretend to like the rides, pretend to enjoy the heat of the Southern Comfort that ran from plastic water bottles into my unpracticed throat. It always came, and it was always hot.
But this time was different. This time, Kevin and I had driven alone in his uncle’s Honda Civic that smelled like Burger King and Winstons and parked fifty yards from the Ferris wheel. And the moon. Goddamn full moon. The full ass moon rolled up over the Goodwill, the Exxon, the Ryan’s buffet, the Cracker Barrell, I-81, and the 18-wheelers rolling toward lands I’d never go. Even there, in Nowheretown, that glowing, faraway rock shown in the black sky over the hot patch of asphalt we had to drive an hour to get to.
The fair was more pleasant from a height. Screams dulled in the humid distance. Flashing lights distorted in my eyelashes. I couldn’t tell what brands anybody was wearing, what phones they held in their hands. Boys and girls looked the same, and none of them looked at me. I was alone, and the sounds of joy and summer and fear were amusing because they reminded me of nothing that was inside my body.
Looking down over all that pleasantness, I ate my funnel cake and dreamed of great chaos. I saw the screws on the rides coming loose. Rusted metal cut through air and limbs. A young boy lost his arm while holding a corndog. The chains on the swings snapped. A guy in a Realtree hat flew over the parking lot and smashed through the windshield of a Chevy Lumina. Twisty teapots dumped children into vats of hot oil at the funnel cake stands. Screams. Fires. Burns. Tears. Blood. Methed-out carnies beamed, cackled, and prostrated toward the sky, displaying their receding gum lines and missing teeth to the gods as proof of their devotion.
I just wanted him to love me.
I pulled a piece of funnel cake and dangled it into my mouth. It was sweet in a way that made me sad, cloudlike in a way that made me wish for rain. Powdered sugar precipitated onto my powder blue Nowheretown High School varsity football shirt and the hair on my arm. Maybe if I covered myself in sugar, he’d not be so scared to press his mouth to my skin.
The moon looked at me like a disappointed teacher. I thought about physics class, Mr. Shelby showing us how many pencils it would take to get to the moon—over two billion. Surely there was a better way. I considered the vastness of this distance, but also the possibility, the fact that humans had walked there before, bounced around in puffy suits that cost more than the house I grew up in.
I found no comfort that humans were filled with such wonder, wit, and ambition that they’d built big fiery machines to fly hundreds of thousands of miles into space just to play around on a rock. Maybe this was not such a triumph. Maybe astronauts just wanted someone to love them. Maybe they devoted their entire lives to getting as far away from their dumbass towns as was humanly possible. Surely, the moon was a sad place.
So too, I wondered if any astronauts ever went to space and tried to hang themselves, only to find out it wouldn’t work due to the lack of gravity, if that poor bastard Buzz hadn’t floated horizontally around the space shuttle with a belt around his neck, cussing at the stars while he bounced off the walls.
Then I envisioned all the ways one could kill themself in space. They could go out for a spacewalk, untether, and float toward infinity—that big, wide, airless forever in all directions. Starvation was another possibility, but that seemed too worldly, provincial even. Of course, one could still slice their wrist open, watch the blood spurt and clot in balls and float around the room—little iron-red beads spinning like moons and planets without a sun.
I just wanted him to love me.
It wasn’t crazy. It would’ve been our secret. We’d have taken it back with us to two-a-day football practices, carried it until it became so unbearably hot and heavy that we had to tell everyone. We’d have smiled as they slung slurs at us in the hallway. We’d have patted each other on the butt at football practice and meant it. We’d have gone fishing under the bridge by the Exxon, caught zero fish, then drank Natty Light on the muddy banks of the New River, watching the herons glide toward heaven at dusk. But this secret was many moons away—billions and billions of pencils from where I sat.
Maybe I should’ve waited and told him someplace private. Maybe the heat in my hand was presumptuous. But the moon. The full ass moon. Our English teacher, Mr. Lewis, taught us that the moon meant something, that it affected us, that its gravity pulled our blood this way and that, that if there was a secret in somebody, a want, the moon would pull it out of them.
And it did. Because there Kevin and I were, standing in line for the Gravitron ride next to the corndog stall and the lemonade stand. I watched with terror as it spun. I’d never much liked moving fast, spinning especially. The Gravitron rotated such that it created a g-force that pushed people’s cheeks back and allowed them to climb up the padded walls. I couldn’t figure the point of it all. I was already spinning. But Kevin was excited, so I was too.
Kevin stood to my right, bouncing. We joked, poked, punched, and pinched like we always did when we were near each other. Our bodies had no choice but to touch, our flesh seeming to possess the kind of magnetism generally reserved for minerals and elements so specific that they can only be described in a series of convoluted letters, numbers, equations, and diagrams. He gave me a titty twister. I gave him a punch in the belly. My God. His belly. It was firm and flat and warm. I wanted to lay my head across it and let my chubby cheeks sink into the shallow valleys between his abdominal muscles. After I punched him, Kevin ducked his head and bull-rushed me. I put him in a headlock and kept him there until I could feel the blood filling his head. “Okay,” he laughed, “Okay.”
“Truce?” I asked.
“Truce.” I gave him one last squeeze and released the pressure from my bicep. “Jesus. You almost made me pass out,” Kevin said.
How’d you like it? I thought. He’d almost made me pass out every day since I saw him at JV tryouts in ninth grade—the way he held the ball high and firm against his ribs, the way sweat stained his gray t-shirt in a triangle that started at his shoulders and ended in a point on his tailbone. That was three years ago. I’d been in a headlock since, fighting for air whenever I was near him and wishing for that feeling of breathlessness when I was not. “Ha, no. It’d take more than that,” I said.
Kevin stood up straight. I left my arm hanging across his round and heavy shoulders—heavy like gravity, like forever in all directions. He didn’t say anything, or flinch, or squirm. I figured he understood, could feel the heat coming off my heart. The line crept forward. We stepped up.
The Gravitron whirled angrily like some mechanical bottle top that the devil had put all his strength into spinning. Inside, there were cries and laughter. It sounded like joy, like maybe we didn’t live someplace shitty. Maybe we lived someplace magical, and people were so happy that they came to this beautiful parking lot and spun in circles to celebrate.
I dragged my hand from his shoulder, up his trapezoid, and left it on his neck, squeezing soft and firm, rubbing my thumb against his last vertebrae, admiring the magic of Man, wanting badly to be on and inside one. Time slowed. The lights on the rides flickered unlike stars, flashing red and green and blue and yellow. We were weightless, waiting in line for the Gravitron.
But then I felt the muscles in Kevin’s shoulders tense up. “Whoa,” he said as he turned and chopped my arm down like one of those karate guys at the mall breaking a plank of wood. “What the fuck is wrong with you, John?”
My eyes got big with water. My heart sank. The Gravitron slowed to a stop. People inside unhooked, then exited woozy and silly. Kevin stepped in front of me, handed the carny his ticket, entered the Gravitron, and found a harness on the far wall. I followed, head down, stomach turning, and moved for the harness beside him. “No,” he said. “Not next to me.” I swallowed hard, walked to the other side, and strapped into the wall across from him.
The machine spun. My body pressed back against the wall. Kevin’s cheeks flattened and widened, his eyes pointed at the ground. I stared at him, trying to make eye contact, trying to go back to forever, trying to say sorry from across the galaxy. The machine spun more. Tears rolled up my face. My stomach pressed against my spine, then rose toward my throat and stayed there until the Gravitron slowed.
I just wanted him to love me.
When the Gravitron stopped, Kevin exited first. I followed, trying to push through the kids in front of me, trying to get back to him, to apologize, to rewind, to lie. Outside, the carny lifted the rope at the entrance. “Kevin,” I said, “Wait up.”
Kevin kept walking. The world did not stop. My eyes couldn’t keep up. The ground tilted sideways. I buckled in front of the carny and held my knees as my stomach jumped out of my throat. Bits of French fries, chunks of corndog, and Southern Comfort sludge sprayed from my mouth, fighting gravity and losing at the carny’s feet.
“Goddamnit, not again,” the carny said through the two-finger pinch of dip in his bottom lip, kicking at the orange and yellow chunks stuck to his ankles. “The trash can is right goddamn there. You couldn’t make it right goddamn there? It’s two goddamn feet away. Christ.” He pointed at the trash can then waved his hands in front of my face like he was testing if I was blind.
“Sorry,” I said and wiped the corners of my mouth with the back of my wrist. The carny shook his head, his wiry ponytail dragging against his back, looking at me disappointedly like I was to do something, like I was to make it all better. If I could, I would, I said with my eyes. Tears built in me again. Without the whirl of the Gravitron, they rolled down my face toward the ground, toward Nowheretown, toward Earth, toward that place that I wanted to be far away from. Dumbass tears. Boring ass gravity.
“Oh, Jesus Christ. Sorry, man, it’s just the third time today I’ve had to clean puke off my shoes,” the carny said. “It’s not your fault. Don’t worry about it. Go grab some water. You’ll be fine.” He pointed to a sweating red water jug by a picnic table. “Right there, next to the funnel cake stand.”
I swallowed hard, nodded, and walked with my hands in my pockets to the jug of water. My right sneaker came untied. I left it that way. At the picnic table, I grabbed a Dixie cup and pressed the plastic button on the nozzle. It sprayed heavily into the cup and overflowed. The water was cold and annoying on my wrist. I dumped some onto the ground, then sat at the table and took a sip. I was not fine. There was too much nothing in me to be fine.
Hiding with my nose in the cup, I surveyed the parking lot. There were kids and parents and teenagers, and they were all after something. There were smiles and red cheeks and hands holding cotton candy and stuffed animals and other hands. Kevin was out there somewhere. He was probably with someone, a girl maybe. She was probably tall and blonde and pretty and nervous to touch him. They were probably walking toward the pirate ship that swings up high, and everybody screams, “Ahh! We’re so high right now.” They’d probably leave the fair together and drive home without me.
Dumbass fair. Dumbass town.
I just wanted him to love me.
My stomach rumbled. I was hungry. Hungry for sugar. Hungry for the moon. Hungry for someplace that was not there. I scanned the parking lot until I saw the Ferris wheel.
I threw my cup of water in the trash, pulled out my last five bucks and purchased a funnel cake at the stand beside the table. It was warm and greasy and covered in a mountain of powdered sugar. I set it on the table and admired it briefly. Then I pulled my last ride ticket from my pocket and walked for the Ferris wheel, head high, staring at the sky, following that glittery wheel rolling toward the moon.
“Just you?” the lady working the ride asked when I handed her my ticket. I nodded. She let me on. The door clanked shut. I sat down. The metal bench was hot against my legs. I set my funnel cake on my lap and waited.
The wheel spun, and I rolled up toward that full ass moon. It was bright and white and closer than it had ever been, wearing it’s craters like scars. I wondered if it ever longed for the asteroids that left those marks. “It can’t always be a full moon,” I said. “It mostly ever isn’t a full moon.”
I looked down and saw how high up I was. I looked up and saw how low I was. It was all so permanent. I felt the speed at which gravity would throw me to the ground, and the density with which the asphalt would catch me. I was no asteroid. I wouldn’t make a dent.
Then I looked out over the parking lot. Half a football field away, I saw Kevin’s uncle’s gray Honda Civic. Kevin laid with his back on the hood, feet dangling over the grill, staring up at the sky. He was alone under the same forever. And goddamnit, ain’t it always a full moon somewhere?