hwango

It was like a nightmare. There was screaming. Flickering lights. Weirdly discordant music. Cotton candy.

Selene hated traveling carnivals. She had always thought that there was something inherently untrustworthy about a business that disappeared shortly after peddling its wares. It reminded her of those mysterious shops where people bought strange things that turned out to be magical or cursed, and when they went back to try to get help the place had vanished like it had never existed.

"Ooh, fried dough!" said Elenora, pulling urgently on her older sister's arm.

"Can we go home yet?" Selene asked.

"We just got here!" Elenora said, though of course they had been there for hours. Selene had already endured fortune-telling, rides that each inflicted varying amounts of motion sickness, and several games. It was her burden to carry their spoils from this last activity, which amounted to an alarmingly bright green yet still somehow somber stuffed animal of uncertain species.

Pondering their prize anew, she held it up and stared into the creature's soulless black eyes. Shouldn't it be a bear, or maybe a cat or something? But it was somehow clearly none of those things, yet not obviously anything else. Not that it should matter. And on its own, it wouldn't even seem that strange. But the carnival games themselves had been a little weird. Like, instead of tossing a ball to knock over milk bottles, she'd thrown a foam rubber dodecahedron at some hollow tin statues of people with their hands covering their faces.

Now that she thought about it, the rides had all felt a little odd as well, which she hadn't really registered underneath the obvious vertigo. Like they'd moved in a little more than the usual three dimensions.

"This carnival is evil," Selene suddenly found herself saying. "I want to go home."

"Why do you hate everything that's awesome?" complained Elenora.

"Come on, this place is weird. We should leave."

"Ooh, snow cones!"

"Ugh. Fine," Selene relented. Then she turned to look where she was being dragged, and dug in her heels.

"What's your problem?" Elenora said, tugging at her arm.

"Ell, the snow cones are glowing. GLOWING," she said.

"So? They must have lights in the paper handle thing. I think it looks awesome!"

Selene allowed herself to be led over to the stand. It was being operated by a mysterious hooded figure. Come to think of it, so was everything else.

"What flavors do you have?" Elenora was asking the apparition behind the counter.

"These taste of the sun, and the stars, and the endless gulf of infinity betwixt them," said the being in a toneless voice, gesturing at the blue ones. "These taste of forgotten dreams and the edges of sleep," it said as it waved at the purple ones. "These –"

"How about the red ones?" interrupted Elenora.

"Pomegranate."

"Blegh," she said, sticking out her tongue in distaste. "I'll take a purple one."

Selene paid. It was the only thing she'd paid for that night that required the vendor to make change, and when the coins were placed in her hand she found that they were shockingly cold. But that's just because the cashbox was near the freezer with the snow in it, right? That wasn't weird.

Selene looked over to see that Elenora had somehow already consumed half of her snow cone.

"Careful, you'll get a brain freeze," she admonished.

"Nah," Elenora said, "It's not even that cold."

"Not...okay, we're definitely leaving." This time she was the one dragging her sister and she led them purposefully towards the exit. "What does it taste like, anyway?" she asked, curious despite herself.

"Like the guy said. It's weird...it really does remind me a little of this dream I think I had. I think. It's good though."

This whole night was starting to feel like it was actually a weird dream. That would be nice, in a way. Selene would wake up tomorrow and none of this would have happened. She could picture it now – there would never have been any carnival at all, and she would laugh the whole thing off, and then she'd walk into the kitchen and the creepy stuffed animal would be sitting there on the table and eerie music would play in the background and then she'd wake up for real this time. Wait, what?

Now she was really getting scared. Would she be able to find an exit? Would they keep wandering through an endless labyrinth of enigmatic carnival games and non-euclidean rides? Would faceless figures swarm around them and drag them screaming back to a hall of mirrors that showed them only reflections of themselves with their hands covering their eyes?

No, there was the exit right there. And they walked through it unchallenged by any menacing hooded figures. Everything was fine. She heard the sound of crumpling paper and looked over to see that Elenora had finished her snow cone and was mashing up the paper cone into a ball.

"Where's the light?" Selene asked.

"Huh?"

"The light. That made your snow cone glow."

"Oh! There wasn't one."

So the evening ended with a trip to the emergency room at the hospital. The doctors couldn't find anything wrong with Elenora, though, and she didn't appear to have consumed anything harmful. Apparently it was just some kind of perfectly safe luminescent not very cold snow that tasted like half-remembered dreams. Because that was totally a real thing.

Selene tried to go back during the day to ask them what the heck her sister had eaten, but as she expected the carnival had vanished like it had never existed.

Elenora named the creepy stuffed animal Hypnagogia, which she insisted was a name she had made up on her own, and became inseparable from the thing.

Selene hated traveling carnivals.