"Tomorrow afternoon," the sticky voice over the loudspeaker announced, "the blue ribbon winners will be announced, and all rides are half price."
I fold my arms around your slender shoulders, holding you against me, letting you lean into me. I feel the slight weight of you, and the slowgentle rise fall of your breath. All around the air crackles with sticky summer smells. Somewhere dough is frying and making the air around it shine. The light crisp flake of it melts against your mouth like a sugared kiss.
Somewhere closer by, the smell of popcorn fills my mouth and tastes like the ocean and butter. Cloying and overwhelming, nearer the rides, where we are, are racks of cotton candy in magical colors that don’t exist. You chase after the invisible taste of it with impossibly pink lips until I pull off gossamer fragments of it, placing it on your tongue. Like the hair of a dandelion it vanishes into the air and there’s nothing left between our skin but a saccharine memory. My vision rests lightly on your eyelashes. I feel like I could inhale you, and hold you in on a breath. Your skin brushes against my cheek when I lean in to you.
"Come for a ride on the ferris wheel with me..."
Fiction. But I like the idea of carnivals, if they didn't have so many people at them. I definitely like the idea of cotton candy.