‘Those Grand Young Zoetropes’

A sample one-page tale 

Last December my kid sister Angie broke reality for a good few hours; a happening that was, in hindsight, really – to both our parents and to us, her
siblings – more of an annoyance than anything sinister.
This was the deranged season. Mom had fallen in love with her secretary, Dad had run away with his boss, and both blamed the other’s infidelity for our family’s sorry state of schism. Wintry weekends for once came premature. Dad, we realized, had set out to win back our souls through overtures of undeserved and unrequested pleasure. This meant the arcade for Christine, the library for Daniel, the movies for me and, to his eventual regret, the amusement park for 8-and-a-half year old Angela. As you would expect, it was not a case of dumping each offspring off at their respective paradise like so many Fauntleroys. Instead, each expedition, he would give one of us the equivalent of a second birthday: an entire Saturday with which to expend both the place’s enjoyment and the company’s. This was difficult for the first three.

We wanted to fool dad into extending his penitence and so feigned sulkiness in our scheduled traipses. But none of us had the stoic wherewithal to play air hockey with each other in gloom, and we were all – unsurprisingly – already itinerant readers, and awards season and the blockbuster deluge had somehow momentarily coincided to make three, almost four, movies in a day feel like Christmas had started franchising.

But we had all, except for Angie, grown up and out of Funville.
Thus, that last weekend, we had expended every ride thrice by 11h00 and her innocent preference had us hating her openly by lunch. And so, when she evaporated, the first feeling was indeed a kind of gobsmacked schadenfreude. This was at the very end of the day, on her seventh go on the centrifuge, which she still loves as much as Antoine Doniel did in The 400 Blows. Dad and I saw her enter, caught her blurred image wrapped around the inside of the spinning chamber and then waited on her dizzy return. She was no longer there, which was, as I say, impossible. We got the usual assistance from park security to scope out the whole establishment but we hadn’t the heart to tell them she could only be in the ether. Approaching midnight, in deep despair, we loitered by the entrance waiting for the park manager’s report and consolations. He arrived and right as he opened his mouth Angie came spinning through the main gate. She had literally come from nowhere, and for her, we ascertained, no time at all had passed. The vortex had been fun enough to capture her. In the days following, we tacitly agreed to forget everything for the sake of mankind’s ultimate sanity.