The Contortionist by Kathryn Ann Kingsley

Which was kind of insulting, seeing as it had been there first. Sitting on the edge of a large lake in New Hampshire, it had been called the Coney Island of the North. Right up until the moment that it didn’t. No air had pumped through the pipe organs. No music had come from the abandoned hurdy gurdy machines. Carriages with flaking paint that once bore colorful swirls, smiles, or terrifying faces had not budged in decades. It was the skeletal remainder of a carnival-a reminder of the laughter and joy that once was. Rafters and structures were tilted and bent, collapsing under age, and rot, and time. Broken and burnt bulbs sat in rusted sockets and had not illuminated the night sky in decades. The dilapidated towers of wood scaffolding stabbed at the sky like bony fingers reaching out of the dirt. Harrow Faire sat neglected and abandoned.

The fee won’t be too high for you, I promise. It makes the job of taking it all away so much easier. Worse yet, we think of our memories as monotonous. Surrounded by ourselves, we think such things are commonplace. Humanity is too eager to toss away that which they deem ordinary without ever realizing what it was that they had. Is it not the tragedy of the elderly when they can no longer remember who they once were? Do we heed these warnings of loss? It’s a shame people are too foolish to value these things. The memory of exchanged vows at an altar. The order in which one puts on one’s socks in the morning. In memories, in choices, in the uniqueness to which the soul bears witness. It is that personality that the soul carries like a basket of eggs to the market, trudged there by a vessel of flesh.

A soul is merely the gangue around the valuable ore in the rock. It isn’t the fabric of the animation in which a person is borne. If souls are the currency of hell, then the devil himself has become the victim of inflation.

The Contortionist by Kathryn Ann Kingsley