Another Year Around the Carousel
“Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will.” Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked this Way Comes
Photo by Karen Arnold
Can you hear me? Listen. You have to stay awake. We need you to stay awake.
“Just give up,” Colton tells himself. He is laying in bed, staring at the popcorn ceiling of his bedroom. For the last four hours, Colton has tried and failed to fall asleep. He’s tried counting sheep as they hop over the whitewashed wooden fence into a field of flowers. He’s tried counting happy cows leaping high and flying over the smiling moon. He’s tried a nightcap of whiskey and once he even tried smoking pot, but to no avail.
Colton turned forty-eight almost a year ago and ever since, it has been this way. Along with thinning hair, arthritis and a bulging waistline, Colt now can’t sleep for more than a couple of hours. It’s as if every cell in his body has started to slack off on their job. Every day, he feels more and more like he’s dying and his body is giving out.
When he is able to drift off into restless sleep, the night terrors come. The dreams are always the same. He is a carney, working in a dark carnival at night. He smells buttery popcorn, funnel cake and death. He’s cuffed to the carousel with a short chain that wraps around his waist and his ankles. He is pushing with everything he has to keep it turning, knowing that if it does lose momentum or, God forbid, stop, he may not be able to get it spinning again.
Colt can see dozens of faces floating in the ether, bobbing up and down, spinning around in circles and taunting him with spitting hate. Not only the distorted faces of the riders, but the faces of the animals they rode, snapping their jaws with thick tendrils of spit hanging from their chins, like werewolves or giant rabid bats.
Colton does decide to give up, and he gets out of bed with only an hour of darkness remaining in the world outside. Only an hour before the burning light of the day will begin to roast away the shadow and cool of the night. Only an hour before his alarm clock will ring.
After draining his bladder and taking his spot on the couch, his phone rings. Colton lets it ring only once before snatching the phone from its cradle on the end table.
“Hello? Do you have any idea what time it is?” Colton feels his face turning red, flushing with anger.
“Well, it’s not like I woke you, right?” The voice of his brother Tim asks with all of the smug assurance that he’s known for.
“It just so happens that you didn’t, this time. What’s got you ringing me so early, anyway?”
“I wanted to catch you before you left for work. Your birthday is next week and I hate to do it, but I’ve got to cancel our dinner plans. Somethings come up in Philadelphia and I have to fly up.”
“Oh, that’s okay. We can push it off until you make it back. It’s a bad time to fly, isn’t it? With the storm that’s coming, you should probably drive.”
“I’m not scared of a little storm. Besides, I’m leaving in a couple hours, I don’t think the storm is supposed to hit until tonight.”
“That’s good. At least you won’t be in the air when it comes. How long will you be gone?”
“I’ve got a one-way ticket. I won’t know when I’ll be coming home until I get there. It shouldn’t be more than a week or two, though. But hey, I’m going to drop your gift off with UPS on my way out. There’s no reason you should have to wait for it.”
“Alright, sounds good. I’ll keep an eye out for it. Did I tell you I installed that doorbell camera you sent?”
“You did? I just knew you were going to send it back. Do you like it?” Tim asks through a smile that pitches his voice up an octave.
“I was going to send it back, but now that I got it set up, I don’t hate it.”
“I told you. Embracing technology is not a bad thing. One day, I’m going to get you to cut off this landline and on to a mobile.” Tim lets out his patented chuckle, hyucking into the phone like a cartoon character.
“Don’t get your hopes up, Timmy. I’ve only used this tablet pad thing you sent one time, and that was to set up the doorbell.”
“We’ll see, brother. We’ll see. But let me get off here and get ready. Look out for your present.”
“Will do, have a safe flight.”
“Thanks, catch you later.”
“Bye.”
The meteorologists were wrong and there was a short morning rain in Asbury that Tuesday, just enough to fill the gutters and wipe away some of the pollen. By ten o’clock, the sun is out and shining bright. The temperature rose to near triple digits, but otherwise the day is beautiful. It’s the type of day that landscapers and lawn care workers pray for on short weeks when the rain is sideways and won’t stop. Colt cuts grass for a living and although it has been a short week so far, and there was work to do, Colton doesn’t go to work.
He tells himself that he’s just too tired. How can a man be expected to work when he hasn’t slept for more than wink all night? It’s just not right, besides Colt works for himself. His contracts with the school board aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
He spends his day off like he always does, watching TV in his chair. He watches the news with his coffee, getting more and more frustrated by the minute and wondering to himself where decency decided to fuck off to.
By noon, he is dozing in his recliner with a cold coke-cola fizzing on the table beside him. The morning news shows of assholes talking about assholes are gone, replaced with a movie starring Denzel. Colt’s a big fan of movies and everything Denzel does is good, but he just can’t keep his eyes open.
For the first time in weeks, he doesn’t dream of the carnival, or the faces that laugh at him, mock him and whisper about him. Colt isn’t chained to the giant wheel under the carousel and pushing forever and always, like some Greek god punished for eternity.
In this dream, Colt is forty feet in the air, strapped to a tree with a chainsaw running in his hands. Colt knows what is coming but is unable to pause the scene. On the ground, working the rope, there is an older man with white hair. Colt knows the face. It’s Sam the Man, wearing his customary overalls with leather patches replacing most of what used to be denim.
The other man on the ground isn’t really a man, at least not yet. At seventeen, hardly any of us are. Although I think most of us think we are as grown as we’ll ever be at that age. Steve McDonnell started with us the summer before. At first, we just had him moving limbs and raking up yards after the chipper was through. But he was a good worker and by his second summer, he was running the chipper by himself.
Colt watches himself cut through the trunk of an old pine and sends it falling to the ground. Sam guides the heavy log down before untying the rope and starting the process over. The chipper is running and Steve is feeding branches into it. Colton tries to close his eyes but finds himself unable to control himself at all.
There is a man walking through the yard underneath Colt and he turns off his saw. The man is approaching Sam the Man and waving his arms, pointing at the house next door. The chipper grinds louder as a fresh piece of twisted limb is fed into it. Colton tries to scream, but his mouth doesn’t open. He tries to look away, but his eyes refuse.
Steve screams and Colt’s dream forces him to watch as he is pulled into the raging machine. His glove has caught on a broken branch. His boots are off the ground and from the angle, Colt can’t see his face anymore. Sam is running, but his old knees give out and he goes sprawling across the grass.
Steve’s scream goes feral and Colt is struggling with his straps, trying to climb down, trying to get to the kill switch. Trying to save a life but knowing it’s too late. Somewhere, unseen, an organ begins to play a familiar tune.
Welcome back. I was wondering when you would finally wake up. No, keep your head forward, never look up. Keep pushing Boss.
It’s a quarter past eight in the afternoon by the time Colton pulls into his driveway two days later. He has been out running errands and has a trunk full of groceries. It’s mostly microwaveable TV dinners with a few stovetop box dinners for variety. When his headlights sweep his front yard and small front porch, Colt sees it. A small cardboard box wrapped in blue and yellow striped tape.
He carries his bags inside before coming back for the box. It looks like the present his brother had promised and when he opens it and reads the card, he is sure of it. On the front there is a picture of a simple wrapped present with a bow on top. On the inside, written in big, flowing letters, the card reads: Happy Birthday Colton Douglas. Here’s to another year around the carousel.
Colt drops the card, trying to remember when he told his brother about the nightmares. He thinks back on their numerous early morning calls and although he remembers telling his brother about the insomnia, he is pretty sure he never mentioned the dreams.
Feeling like an actor playing the role of Colton Douglas, his face tingles and his lips feel tight against his teeth. Colt gasps for air, not realizing he had been holding his breath. Under blue and yellow tissue paper, Colt finds a small box with the printed picture of a watch on the outside.
It was one of those new digital ones without buttons or even hands. After fidgeting with it for a moment, Colt learned that he could double tap the small black screen to bring it to life. When he does, the screen lights up with a brightly colored welcome screen that asks him to download an app.
It takes him almost an hour, and by the time he has the watch set up and working, his worries about the card are forgotten. Colton puts on the watch and opens the app on his tablet. He’s presented with a flood of information. His heart rate is shown, a smooth 96, along with greyed out charts for his sleep cycle and another for his weight and another for tracking his calories. Scrolling down the screen, Colt finds more greyed boxes for his Cardio Health Score and a step counter reading 0.
Colt loses interest and turns on his television. Another gift from his tech savvy brother, the TV is a big flat screen with a remote he could talk to if he wanted to. Colton is a button type of guy and uses them to scroll the endless menus to put on a movie. He decides on The Matrix, a movie he has successfully avoided for twenty-six years.
Around the halfway mark, he pauses the movie for a bathroom break and to pop a dinner of beef tips and gravy into the microwave. He grabs a cold soda from the fridge and reads the box while he waits for the beep.
Sitting back down in his big comfy chair, Colt starts the movie and grabs his tablet while his dinner steams, too hot to eat. He finds the field and logs the five hundred calories of his supper. A few moments later, he wakes the tablet again and logs the sodas.
Around midnight, Colt decides that he’s had enough of The Matrix and stops Netflix from auto playing the sequel. He finds a pseudo-documentary about alien abductions and the hidden activity of UFOs in our atmosphere. When it’s over and Colt feels a little dumber, he climbs into bed with the hopes of a couple of hours of rest. What comes next is live changing.
Colton Douglas, the man without sleep, doesn’t wake up for sixteen hours. His sleep is deep and restful. There are no faces or carousels. There are no chainsaws or wood chippers. The hours pass without memory or the startling surges of adrenaline that send him rocketed up out of bed. For the first night since the accident, Colt sleeps soundly.
When he finally opens his eyes, it is late afternoon and Colt lays in bed looking at the pattern of shadows on the ceiling. Feeling like a bear fresh out of hibernation, his body is sore from being in the same position all night. He gets up and takes a shower, letting the water flow over him and wash away his grogginess.
Sitting down with a breakfast of hot coffee and three microwaved sausage biscuits, Colt’s tablet lights up with a new notification. When he is finished eating, he checks and sees a graph of his night’s sleep. There is a small bounce between REM and Light sleep during the first two hours, but then the graph bottoms out into the range marked as Deep and it doesn’t rise again until the moment he wakes.
Impressed with his sleep and the watch, Colt gets up to read the box of biscuits and logs the calories. There is another notification, and the activity tracker is telling him to get active. Feeling better than he has in months, Colt takes the app’s advice and gets dressed for an afternoon walk.
The sidewalk out front wraps around the neighborhood and connects to the Asbury trails that snake through the woods behind the college. Most of the path is concrete, with inset bricks engraved with the names of the original supporters. Across a small bridge with a high arch, the path leaves the cement and leads to an old veteran’s cemetery. Colt sits at the small bench beside the graves to catch his breath and dry the sweat from his neck.
Colt’s wrist vibrates and for a moment he thinks that his heart has just blown a head gasket. After a moment without the world going dark, his breathing slows and Colt decides that he’s not dead, just severely out of shape. The watch logs twenty-six minutes of activity and flashes with colors, congratulating him for his hard work.
Sitting by graves too old to be read without being rubbed with charcoal or crayons, Colt takes long, deep breaths, feeling the sweet air fill him with life. He feels a stillness that he forgot was even possible, as if someone had finally turned off the stove and stopped boiling his mind into a broth of soupy brains. His muscles burn, but there is no pain. Somewhere, unseen, a bird begins to sing its familiar song.
In the following week, Colt sleeps every night and walks every day. He logs every meal and, after the first two days, he swaps to Coke Zero after seeing the numbers spike with every drink. Each day, he increases his range and gets more and more steps logged. His late night routine of watching movies and mockumentaries into the morning hours is forgotten and replaced with stretching, showering and reading before an early eight-thirty bedtime.
Colt’s birthday comes and goes without much thought. His brother calls while he is walking and leaves a sweet message on the machine. It’s him and Cindy, Colt’s niece, singing the birthday song and wishing him a happy one.
In that time, instead of dragging himself out of bed feeling defeated and wrung out, Colton wakes up refreshed and alive. Each morning he immediately checks the app to see his sleep cycles and to relish in the logged hours.
When he is working and lunch time comes around, he doesn’t go to McDonald’s or Burger King. He instead, eats homemade wraps with grilled chicken and vegetables. Feeling like a new man with control over his life for the first time, Colt starts to think about the future and slowly, bit by bit, he learns to forget about the past. Accept it, but let it go.
There’s no use. He’s too far gone. I thought we were getting somewhere, but we have to let it go.
It’s Friday, ten days since Colton got his watch and started to be able to sleep with any sort of regularity. He wakes up and stretches in bed, laughing and picturing himself in a commercial for anti-depressants. He gets up and makes himself an omelette with cheese and turkey bacon before doing push-ups in the living room.
After eating and logging his breakfast, Colt gets dressed and prepared for his daily walk. With the Georgia heat as hot as it is during the summer, it’s always best to get them in early. He fills his water bottle and opens his front door. Outside, on his small porch there’s a box that’s shaped more like a basketball than the cube it once was. The cardboard looks wet and if it weren’t for the tape holding it together, the whole thing would burst open.
Colt brings the box inside and closes the door. There is a return address, but it’s covered underneath labels explaining how the box was lost and found. When Colt peels these off and reads who the sender is, something in his stomach turns glacial and his fresh, clear mind immediately fills with foggy confusion. The return address reads Timothy Douglas, 1130 Milstead Ave, Conyers, Georgia, 30012.
Colt tears through the soft cardboard with frantic fingers. What falls out is a card and a small white box, with the printed image of a watch on the front. Colt picks up the box first, analyzing the photo. He tears open the box and removes the watch. The band is the same and even the face looks exactly the same. But, unlike his, this one has a button, a single one, on the side.
Colt opens the card. On the front there is a simple picture of a single wrapped present with blue and yellow striped wrapping paper. On the inside, there is a short handwritten message from his brother.
Happy Birthday Colton! Cheers to another year around the sun brother.
Colton’s mind feels murky and thick, as if each synapse is struggling to fire off a connection, like a mind wired with old spark plugs, due for a tune-up. Only one thought comes through to him clearly: Take off the watch. Without looking away from his brother’s written words, Colt rips the watch from his wrist and throws it across the room where it smacks the fireplace, cracking the screen.
In the instant that the watch cracks, so does Colton’s vision. Like the spiderweb cracks in a windshield that find their way across the whole length, everything Colton sees is shattered into a mosaic. In one small square, Colt sees his living room carpet, in another he sees the light coming through the window, but in others he sees darkness and in others he sees faces.
Feeling like how a spider must feel, Colton’s head lulls around on his shoulders as he struggles to find some orientation. Some sense of what is happening and where he is. His stomach is rolling and boiling over and his mouth fills with saliva in anticipation.
After a moment of fighting it, there’s a strange feeling of doubling, tripling, and his stomach lurches forward, spraying his breakfast all over the scarred and bloody back of the man in chains in front of him.
He is looking at the ground and his bare feet, standing in mud. A chain of black iron wraps around each of his ankles and his chest, before disappearing into the black, starless sky. He is being pushed from behind and stumbling forward. The black chain holds him up just high enough to keep him from falling down, sometimes yanking him up in painful jerks when he does start to fall. The music is playing again. Somewhere, unseen, an organist is hammering away.
In front of Colt, at waist level, there is a thick wooden post running horizontally. Beyond that is the man with vomit on his back. He’s leaning forward and pushing his post. Colt’s been here before. He’s dreamed of this place many times, but this is different. He can feel the weight of the chains, smell the wet earth under his feet, and taste the bile in his mouth. Colton doesn’t think he’s dreaming, and when the chain yanks him up, off his feet and into the infinity of darkness above, the pain he feels and the tsunami of fear that rips through him, he knows he’s not dreaming.
No, every moment before now, that was the dream. This thing, this huge face that is a lightless void of nothingness, coming forward out of a deeper pool of impossibly darker blackness. This God that holds his chains like a puppeteer and looks at him with glee in its sharp eyes may be the only real thing he’s ever seen. This being of shadow opens its smiling mouth, revealing sharp jagged teeth set in shark-like rows and, tipping its head back, eats Colton Douglas. Crunching through flesh and bone with loud, wet bites.
Did you see that? Oh my god.
The sick doubling happens again, and Colt is on his knees in his living room. There is puke on the carpet and his stomach is doing flips inside of him. He sits back and closes his eyes for a long while. His elbows are on his knees, he’s holding both hands to his face and dry heaving every few moments.
The world trembles in rhythm with his pulse. Every color shimmers, shifting in intensity, and every shadow flashes with a view of some other, darker place. His legs ache in pain, burning from exhaustion with all the other muscles in his body. A thick band of pain wraps around his chest and armpits that make it hard to breathe.
On the television, a man in a suit is angry, yelling at the camera and pointing a finger. He is mad about something that doesn’t matter in an unfortunately successful attempt to take attention away from something that does.
There is a flutter in the worlds. Both the real one with the carousel and the fake one with his television and beige carpet tremble and vibrate with pulses of energy that make his heart punch against the inside of his chest. Colton sees this in fragments. In one second, he is in his house and in the next he is back, in the darkness, with carnival music booming in his ears.
Someone is speaking to him, the voice comes from behind him. He’s back in the mud and pushing the wooden bar in front of him, turning the carousel while the monsters bob up and down. A younger man with muscles rippling his body is talking to him, telling him to push. Telling him not to look up.
A voice speaks to him from his right side, talking about government waste and the billions of dollars that could be saved by cutting social services. He’s in his living room, on his back, beside the couch. He feels something warm under his head and thinks it’s vomit. The broken watch lies on the ground beside him. The screen is shattered, but Colt can hear it vibrate, calling to him. Telling him if he just puts it back on, all this can go away and he could go back to living the lie he was used to.
From the left, another voice tells him to hold on, don’t let go, help is on the way. Bright light burns his eyes and slowly Colt understands he’s outside, laying under a beautiful blue sky with a single puffy cloud drifting by, a harbinger of the storm that will surely come. The voice has a red puffy face, looking down at him with tears in its eyes. Colton tries to speak, but his mouth doesn’t move. He tries to close his eyes, but his eyes don’t move.
Colt feels his stomach start to turn and with it, the world begins to shift. There is a moment of feeling weightless and floating and Colt sees himself laying twisted on the ground. One leg is turned and kicked backwards. One arm is crunched underneath his back and there is a pool of blood growing around his head. Sam the Man is there and, although bloody, Steve is too.
The watch vibrates, a final call to return to the illusion before it’s too late. There is a feeling of being on the edge of a cliff. Wind is blowing hard and Colton knows he must jump. He has to leap from the safety of the earth and fly. In the distance, carnival music plays, confirming Colt’s intuition that forward is the only way left to go.
Colton leaps from the edge of the cliff. He falls through the threads that form the weave of the worlds and flies. Colton soars through cool, sweet smelling air that fills him. He flies over his house and the sidewalk, the trails and the cemetery. He flies over Asbury and Mayfield, past the McDonald’s and the Burger King. In the parking lot of the old Kmart, he flies over a travelling circus with a Farris wheel and a carousel.
In one moment, Colt feels completely free and able to fly wherever he may decide, and in the next, he feels locked into a path. An invisible track he’s being forced to follow. Colton Douglas flies over Jimbo’s Used Cars and the patch of woods that surrounds the City Pond, and continues in a straight line directly through an open window and into a hospital room where he lies, surrounded by the familiar faces of his brother Tim, his best friend Sam the Man and un-chipped Steve, behind them all, a TV is on and playing the news. Cables and hoses are snaked across his body and machines beep and boop in a steady rhythm around him.
Without knowing if he can, or even processing it as a tangible thought, Colt sees himself float over his body. He hovers above himself, millimeters away from his own nose, feeling his own faint, shallow breath. Smelling his own foul breath, Colt pushes forward. Without effort, his vision spins and he is no longer looking at his own closed eyelids, but looking out through his own open eyes.
Somewhere, unseen, an organist plays his familiar tune and another lost soul is dropped into Colton’s old spot on the carousel.
Thanks TopInFiction.com for featuring this story in the TIF Week 24 of 2025 newsletter!
This was a spectacular read!
I don't think I expected this to go where it ended up. However, I'm glad it did go where it went!