It really was a stupid thing to have put on a carnival ride. The purpose of decorating the thrilling rollercoasters and terrifying haunting houses was to heighten the hysteria, exalt the rush, electrify the illusion. But for some bizarre reason lost to annals of history this merry-go-round of sorts had none of the post-modern flashes of spectacle and brilliance. Instead of a monument to the carnival’s sacred mission to push vomit from your guts, it was an homage to a pleasant, simpler time. It showed a prairie, just on the cusp of settlement caught in the shimmering, deified splendour of a blizzard recently passed. It told the tale of blissful destruction wrought on people who derived some unknown pleasure from taking all that God could throw at them and defiantly try throwing it back. Instead of pushing the ride faster and faster, adding to the whirls and whippets of wind striking your screaming face, it slowed the very world it shone upon. With one trepidatious glimpse, the pretenses of our hurried, racing lives melted away to the call of glistening snow on virgin plains.

But of course, no one ever looked at it.

The peculiar choice of the painter had been indicative of much wider issues facing the fair. It was a decrepit circus of rotting attractions and lazily defrauded carnival games peopled more often by prostitutes and their drunkenly smitten clientele than excited children and their exhausted parents. Even the polish on the pair of majestic lions guarding the entrance way had long since surrendered to the lacquer of carved graffiti and cigarette implants.

It was a miracle the place still existed. Then again, a place cannot really die as we do. It lives eternally, even whilst crawling on its belly like a corpse. No god or medical emergency can declare its death. Instead, it must die by choice and choose to dig its own grave. And like any living thing, no matter how destitute or degenerate, no matter how disconnected from the present or adhered to the past, it would never choose death on its own accord.

There were still the occasional patrons who managed to give the fair enough profits to post on a flowchart and show its rapidly diminishing investors. There were the two teenagers riding the merry-go-round for the fifth time, each continuing to bury their mouth into the other’s face in some ritualistic dance of affection and courtship. The thought that this frenzied slobber fest had once been considered among the most intimate acts two humans could share seemed as foreign to them as juice cleanses would have been to their forefathers . Intimacy was so commonplace it had become cheap and meaningless, a cheesy gimmick used to sell personal hygiene products and sticks of chewing gum. But what did they care that the world was not found on the tip of their partner’s tongue?

They passed the portraits of blood, sweat and tears lost to endless generations and cared more about their half-hour love affair than the entire history of their peoples. And it was in that that they became one with their ancestors. They didn’t share their lifestyles, their values, the calluses on their hands or strains on their backs, but they were endowed with their apathy. The past dissolved the instant it became the past, fading away to the ever present autocracy of the now.

And as those two sat strapped to their seats, flaunting their wanton ignorance of all that existed before them, a child slept in the chair behind. The day had been lengthy and hot, and the dizzying ride served only to oppress his consciousness. He drifted into sleep, not only forgetting the quiet symbols of his past which had bored him like the rest of his fellows, but ignoring too the audacious scene of his elders in the seat ahead. His mother had warned him about the antics of teenagers, and his eyes fell without a slip of curiosity. He would have his turn eventually, like all the others before. To him, the earth was only tired, a giant drooping eyelid.

Thus, the ride ended, the kissing stopped and the gentle nap abated. The riders returned to their private worlds, having never really left them. They returned not knowing that the day had been a gift taken from a dwindling pile, not knowing that they too would suffer the same fate as this forsaken, gloomy carnival. One day, they also would be pieces of the untouchable past, gripping out at the world to recognize them, and one day they also would be ignored. For although they had practiced the lesson everyday of their lives, they had never really learned it.

The living pay no tribute to the dead.