The Day You Lost Your Lunch and Your Grandmother’s Shawl on the Tilt-a-Whirl by Theresa Boyar

Later, you will realize it was all part of the fortune-teller’s ploy, the way he looked at you across the crowd and tilted his immense, dark beard in that way, as if to say, “Whoa! There’s a lot going on in that girl’s future!”

The midway is howling and your teeth tear at the last chunk of corn dog, scraping the wooden skewer clean. The gloss-shelled apple you devoured earlier has left pockets of hard sugar in your molars, and the handheld axe swinging from your hip feels like it’s always been there, though you swiped it less than an hour ago. You couldn’t say why, except when the dull-eyed carnie at the hatchet-throwing booth turned to fetch your prize and reached for something soft and red, always something soft and red, something mutinied in your blood and you nicked the axe before he had time to turn back around.

The fortune-teller’s tent smells of woodsmoke and pine and the mushrooms that grow in the part of the forest even sunlight thinks twice about. The flap falls closed behind you and your hand in his, across the wooden table, is so small. If hands are what tell your future, yours won’t say much, just a thumbnail-sized flipbook of a small girl—soft, red—falling and being rescued over and over again.

He rubs your palm but he’s looking into your eyes with his own, which are yellow and larger than any eyes have a right to be. He leans across the table and with a shudder, his phony scarves are shaken off, bits of fur suspended in the air like dust motes. The table splinters beneath his weight and his mouth opens wide and the teeth inside are so sharp that in spite of yourself, you can’t help but lean a little closer to take it all in.

You’ve been here before, of course. A million times over.

And if it were any other day, you might shrug and accept your destiny and crawl over those miles of teeth, curl up in his belly with your grandmother’s shawl soft and red beneath your cheek for a pillow, and wait. But the corn dog isn’t mixing well with the candied apple and honestly, aren’t you just done with the smell of wet dog? Besides, the midway’s howling has only grown louder and as you take aim with the gleaming axe and grin, you realize it’s calling your name, maybe it’s always been calling your name.

---

THERESA BOYAR — Theresa’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Florida Review, Lost Balloon, Poet Lore, Juked, Smokelong Quarterly, and Tar River Poetry. Her essay “Peaches” was selected as a Notable Essay of 2000 by the editors of the Best American Essays series and her chapbook Kitchen Witch was published by Dancing Girl Press. She lives in Missoula, Montana.

Art by ERIN BRAITHWAITE — Erin is a writer and illustrator from South Africa living in Bristol, England. She was selected as a mentee with Writer’s Block North-East and finished drafting her first novel in 2023, which has recently been longlisted in David Fickling’s Search for a Storyteller competition. Her short fiction has been published by Northern Gravy and The Amphibian, and in November 2024 she won the Wilko Johnson Writing Award via Louder Than Words Festival in Manchester. You can find her on Twitter (@EJBraithwaite28), Bluesky (@ejbraithwaite.bsky.social) and Instagram (ej_braithwaite).