Joyland

hadn’t woken you up . . . if he’d even hesitated—”
    “I know.”
    “Eddie couldn’t have done anything for me without Mike. I don’t see ghosts, or hear them. Mike was the medium.”
    “This is hard,” she said. “Just . . . so hard to let him go. Even the little bit that’s left.”
    “Are you sure you want to go through with it?”
    “Yes. While I still can.”
    She took the urn from the picnic table. Milo raised his head to look at it, then lowered it back to his paw. I don’t know if he understood Mike’s remains were inside, but he knew Mike was gone, all right; that he knew damned well.
    I held out the Jesus kite with the back to her. There, as per Mike’s instructions, I had taped a small pocket, big enough to hold maybe half a cup of fine gray ash. I held it open while Annie tipped the urn. When the pocket was full, she planted the urn in the sand between her feet and held out her hands. I gave her the reel of twine and turned toward Joyland, where the Carolina Spin dominated the horizon.
    I’m flying, he’d said that day, lifting his arms over his head. No braces to hold him down then, and none now. I believe that Mike was a lot wiser than his Christ-minded grandfather. Wiser than all of us, maybe. Was there ever a crippled kid who didn’t want to fly, just once?
    I looked at Annie. She nodded that she was ready. I lifted the kite and let it go. It rose at once on a brisk, chilly breeze off the ocean. We followed its ascent with our eyes.
    “You,” she said, and held out her hands. “This part is for you, Dev. He said so.”
    I took the twine, feeling the pull as the kite, now alive, rose above us, nodding back and forth against the blue. Annie picked up the urn and carried it down the sandy slope. I guess she dumped it there at the edge of the ocean, but I was watching the kite, and once I saw the thin gray streamer of ash running away from it, carried into the sky on the breeze, I let the string go free. I watched the untethered kite go up, and up, and up. Mike would have wanted to see how high it would go before it disappeared, and I did, too.
    I wanted to see that, too.
    August 24, 2012

AUTHOR’S NOTE
    Carny purists (I’m sure there are such) are even now preparing to write and inform me, with varying degrees of outrage, that much of what I call “the Talk” doesn’t exist: that rubes were never called conies, for instance, and that pretty girls were never called points. Such purists would be correct, but they can save their letters and emails. Folks, that’s why they call it fiction.
    And anyway, most of the terms here really are carnival lingo, an argot both rich and humorous. The Ferris wheel was known as the chump-hoister or the simp-hoister; kiddie rides were known as zamp rides; leaving town in a hurry was indeed called burning the lot. These are just a few examples. I am indebted to The Dictionary of Carny, Circus, Sideshow & Vaudeville Lingo, by Wayne N. Keyser. It’s posted on the internet. You can go there and check out a thousand other terms. Maybe more. You can also order his book, On the Midway.
    Charles Ardai edited this book. Thanks, man.
    Stephen King