She makes sure the water doesn’t boil off. Too-high heat destroys the THC. Cooking is an applied form of chemistry.
She pours the slurry into a pottery bowl through a strainer draped with cheesecloth, then twists the cloth to get the last of the butter. The water and butter go in the fridge to cool. She cleans the tools and starts breaking apart squares of Ghirardelli unsweetened chocolate, which she will eventually combine with brown sugar and melt into the separated butter.
——
The bullet blasts a gaping exit wound in the girl’s body. It’s not the penetration of the bullet that does this; the bullet is quite small. Rather, it’s transferred energy—a shock wave—that knocks a plug of blood and muscle and skin out of her side, that vaporizes a portion of her body and splashes it over the massive open block of the carousel engine a moment before the bullet splashes, too.
That bullet has already passed through the girl when she reaches weak, estranged hands for the impact point and staggers one step back, then two, teetering among littered tussocks on high heels she never should have worn to the carnival.
——
January takes the brownies to the birthday party. The clamor of the Wurlitzer greets her as soon as she opens her car door, but the carousel is out of sight, turning and turning in its great wood-and-glass enclosure that glows like a Christmas ornament in the blue twilight. The sound of the one-machine band climbs against a clear October evening. The western sky’s still creamy gold, though a band of indigo shows to the east, stars prickling through. January’s breath mists, and oblong yellow leaves somersault across the grass, but once she’s inside she’ll be warm.
For now she tugs her scarf tight and balances the plate of brownies on one hand while locking the car doors with the other. She picks her way over uneven ground, watching another dark shape or two rattle keys, check doors, and drift through the gloaming like ghosts drawn to a sйance. January follows a tall, slender woman in a plain gray dress, much younger than most of the crowd. Somebody’s daughter?
The carousel is housed in a circular structure like a train roundhouse—except smaller, and intricately decorated. The row of windows under the cedar-shake eaves are stained glass—this side, over the open double door, shows autumn scenes shading into winter.
January imagines the theme is carried all the way around. Around the curve of the building, the milk-glass snows probably melt out in lime green and gold.
The band organ almost blows her hair back as she passes inside. It thumps through the cold cement floor. The bass drum shudders in the empty spaces of her chest. The lofty space isn’t as warm as she’d hoped—cold air settles along the neckline of the pushed-back hood of her cardigan—but it’s bright and crowded and full of the smell of popcorn and the voices of crowds of people January knows sort of halfway well, or used to know well in college.
She waves with her free hand as she moves around the outskirts of the carousel, looking for the birthday boy, the snack table, or both. The crowd keeps her from getting a good look at the merry-go-round; apparently Martin can turn out enough friends for his fiftieth to make even a carousel housing seem crowded. But that’s okay; she can wait until she’s found Martin to go pet the wooden ponies.
As if her determination were a summoning, he materializes before her, one hand extended for the plate and the other to take her shoulder and kiss her quickly in hello. He’s got crow’s feet and spectacles now, and he’s thicker in the middle than when they were lovers. The hair slicked back into his ponytail is more silver than ginger.
He points to the brownies with the corner of his eyeglasses. “Adulterated table?”
“Would I let you down?”
He grins, a grin that pays for all their long and questionable history, and takes her arm. Progress to the refreshments is slow—the penalty for traveling with the guest of honor—but the inevitable interruptions allow January to gaze her fill upon the carousel.
Because she was curious, and because she has the research skills of any good children’s librarian, she knows that it was carved between 1911 and 1914 by Russian Jews who had immigrated to Ohio. She knows that their previous work was carving ladies’ hair ornaments, and she knows that the carousel stood in its original setting for fifty years before being shipped east to its new place of pride as the focal point of a municipal park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted—where you can rent it for birthday parties at night or in the off-season.
But that’s not the kind of knowledge that can prepare one for the glow of lights and the flash of mirrors, the chiaroscuro and the colors. The crashing of the Wurlitzer echoes until January can only make out what Martin is saying because she knows him so well, and eventually they find themselves by the snack tables.
The larger one has a white cloth, and is covered with casseroles and chips and desserts. A cooler must contain cans of soda. The smaller one has a tie-dyed cloth, and the cooler underneath contains beer.
Martin sets her plate in the center of the display, whisking off the plastic to reveal a stack of two-bite chocolate squares, each stuck with a toothpick with a paper cannabis leaf glued to the top—just in case there should be any misunderstandings. Before he turns away, he liberates a brownie. “You made these kind of small.”
“I made them kind of strong,” she answers. A responsible herbalist always tests the merchandise before turning it loose. “Anyway, there’s three-quarters of a pound of chocolate in those things.”
Judging by the blissful expression that crosses his face when he sniffs the brownie, that’s the right ratio. “Someday, these will be nearly legal again.”
“Nah,” January says. She takes Martin’s arm and leads him toward the carousel. “It’ll take generations to recover from the eighties. Come on. Let’s ride.”
Despite the crush of people, there’s no real line, and even if there were, clinging to the birthday boy’s arm has its benefits. Martin, licking brownie grease off his opposite thumb, hands January up onto the deck of the carousel, which—unlike the smaller merry-go-rounds she rode as a kid—doesn’t settle beneath her weight.
Martin releases her hand. The Wurlitzer hesitates.
The carousel has more than just horses. The closest animals, three abreast, are giraffes, vivid yellow and chocolate brown with caparisons of gold and red and blue. Their long necks look knotty; January can see the places where one piece of wood was joined to another to make up the length. The giraffes look awkward and their blown-glass eyes bulge unnaturally, catching the harsh glow and reflecting it back like raccoon eyes in headlights.
“Lasers fully charged.”
“I don’t think the carvers ever saw a live giraffe.” Martin’s a contractor now—four years of college and it turns out he’s that much happier with a hammer in his hands. It took him years of thrashing to figure it out, but the fun of being fifty is having done the figuring.
He ducks to inspect the hooves. “These don’t move. Do giraffes really have hooves? I’d have thought camel feet.”
“They really do.” She reaches way up to pat the nearest giraffe on the nose. “And the next row go up and down. It looks like just the circus animals don’t move.”
Martin stands as if the rising thunder of the Wurlitzer raised him. He leans around the giraffe to follow her gaze. The next row of three is horses, and if the giraffes are stiff, the horses are stunning. The Russian cousins were apparently better at familiar animals, because these breathe. They’re slightly caricatured, flaring nostrils and bulging eyes—glass again, too-round bubbles affixed to the insides of the hollow heads, so the carousel lights shine through them—but the cartoonishness expresses itself as heroism rather than ridiculousness. The carved necks arch, the carved teeth champ, the carved manes mount like breaking waves. The outside horse in each row is larger and braver than his brothers, the exterior side of each pony more brilliantly decorated than the one inside.