Excerpt: Halloween Faer

The ping pong ball floats like a white moon through the air, a dandelion sphere of air and plastic as bright as a star. It lands in the fishbowl with a small hollow sound, and after a moment of tension—will it stay in?—the ball bounces, rolls, shudders, and remains within its shallow prison.
“Step right up!” the young man at the booth calls, eyes glittering an unfathomable black. Around him swirls light of many colors, the reds and violets and greens of the midway showering him with a kaleidoscope of neon light. Music of the fairground and the babble of peoples’ voices nearly drown him out, but something about the quality of his voice—a smoothness, of a sort—draws a dozen interested stares.
Putting a ping pong ball in a fish bowl from ten feet? Sounds like fun, they think as they watch the boy sink shot after shot.
“Only a buck to play,” the boy calls as he gracefully fills the bowl with balls. “Only a buck to win a prize!” He gestures to the colorful stuffed animals bound to chicken wire all over the booth’s interior. Their eyes glitter in the whirling lights, and they promise to smell of the pervasive midway scents: cotton candy, funnel cake, trampled grass. “Step right up! It’s as easy as one—“
He picked up a ball.
“Two—“
He readied the ball.
“Three!”
He threw the ball; it landed with a plunk in the fishbowl.
I can’t take my eyes off of him. My mother pulls me by the hand in another direction, away from the boy and his ping pong balls. “Want to see the petting zoo?” she asks.
I look up at her, at her distracted face and distant eyes. I don’t know what to tell her—I am afraid of animals; why would I want to pet them?—and instead point to the boy at the booth. She looks his way, then she looks back down at me.
“One game, and that’s it,” she tells me. She frowns as she walks us over to the booth; for once, I get to drag her along by her reluctant hand. “Are you even big enough to throw the ball?” she asks.
I barely hear her as I dodge feet. The boy—so much older than me; a teenager and therefore ancient to my seven-year-old child’s mind—doesn’t notice me until I grip the booth and haul my torso over the top. He is busy with a customer, but I am patient and wait for him to deliver their ping pong balls. Then he turns, sees me, and gives me a smile as the customer unsuccessfully lobs his three white balls at the fishbowl. Two of them miss; the last one tips the edge of the bowl and bounces out the other side.
He sees me watching the other customer. “It takes practice,” he admits. “I make it look a little too easy.”
My mother scowls. “Cheat,” she mutters, but I shoot her a look and she hands over her dollar to the boy. He brings three balls out from under the counter and places them before me.
“You wanna stand on the counter?” he asks. “Must be hard to throw when the counter’s as tall as you are.”
I nod at him, and he hooks his hand under my armpits. The boy puts me atop the counter and smiles at my mother with apology in his eyes—she had begun to protest when he touched me, but he was just a teenager, oh yes, and he meant no harm at all that she could see; he was just helping a little lady get a fighting chance and a decent shot at the stuffed bunnies with toothy smiles on their stupid faces.
I take the first ball in my hand and throw it over-handed with a franticness I can’t explain. It falls to the ground with a puff is displaced air, and my mother heaves a frustrated sigh.
“A waste of a dollar,” she repeats. “I told you so.”
I snatch up the second ball, hurt by my mother’s words, and I try again with similar results. The boy picks the two balls off the ground and hands them back to me.
“Free of charge,” he says more to my mother than myself; a glint from the fairground lights colors his eyes, for an instant, a violent shade of red. He looks at me—we are on eye level—and his eyes go back to black and his smile is warmer than the cotton-candy scented air swirling around us. He cups one of the balls in his palm. “Throw it underhand, like this,” he tells me, miming a good throw. “Not too hard, or the ball will bounce out. Gentle, you know?”
I nod at him. I pick up the first ball. It sails from my fingers almost of its own accord, flies through the air, lands in the fishbowl with a plunk. It only bounces once before settling down, a white egg waiting to be scrambled.
“I don’t believe it,” my mother murmurs.
The next ball sails like the first, colored blue and red and green in the midway lights. It settles next to its brother with the demureness of a dove; the third arcs from my fingertips before I even have a chance to grip it properly. It tips off the rim and lands safely in the bowl.
I notice, vaguely, that people are applauding—a small crowd has gathered.
“Easy as pie!” the boy calls. “Anybody can do it! Step right up.” A gaggle of eager participants shower the boy with dollar bills and begin to throw; only one person manages to get a ball in, and only barely at that.
“Now, what prize would you like?” the boy asks me.
I look at my choices, at the fluorescent rabbits and dogs and cats, and I point decisively at a large rag doll with button eyes and a gray plaid dress. Her black hair has been gathered into pigtails and her mouth is small, without expression. I do not like the smiles of the other figures; they border on manic.
“Good choice,” the boy says as he lifts the doll from her perch. She is nearly as large as I am, but she is light enough for me to balance on my hip the same way my mother carried me as a toddler. I’m too big to be held now; my mother insists so whenever I complain of tired feet, and although I am not facing her, I can feel the way my mother’s eyes glow with dull disgust at the sight of the cheap toy I have wrapped myself around.
“Thank you for your time,” says my mother. “Let’s go, Andy.”
I turn around, still standing on the countertop, and the world slows down as if molasses has taken the place of air. Darkness converges, zooms down from the parts of the night sky not filled with swirling carnival rides and paints over the smiling fairgoers like a spilled bottle of ink. Sounds dissipate. My mother’s patient and world-weary face disappears. The counter beneath my sneakers loses its colors and substance and weight. I float on air. My muscles are numb.
“Just a minute, Andy,” says the boy. I can’t see him, but he’s there, and I can feel his black eyes bore into me like needles of dark scrutiny. “You didn’t think you could just walk away, did you?”
I turn around to face him, my eyes pulled by an unseen magnet until our gazes lock.
“You didn’t think I would help you for free?” he asks. Behind him, the booth with its bright stuffed toys and fish bowls blends into the pervasive blackness of the night. All of the midway music stops. The lights no longer swirl. “You didn’t think you really made those shots yourself, did you?” His features are cast into shadow, but his eyes boil even darker than the gloom surrounding us. He reaches out his hand, and the doll in my arms turns to look at me with it button eyes of black, but I can’t drop the doll and she holds on tight, so tight, choking me with her soft arms in an embrace of shade and pain. “You owe me, now. Pay your debt.”
As the world begins to fade, I remind myself that I am dreaming of a memory—a memory that ends differently than this twisted rendition begs to tell.