We stood in line for twenty minutes behind a family whose baby wouldn’t stop staring at me. Naturally, I waved at the baby and the father sneered at me and moved so that the baby faced the other way. It was probably for the best because I have no idea how to entertain children past making faces and looking like a fool and seeing as I was surrounded by people on all sides, that wouldn’t end well. When we finally paid admission, they stamped the word SMILE on the back of each of our right hands in ink that looked suspiciously like blood. But my brother was ready to get on some rides and so we entered Joyland, a dinky amusement park hidden within the largest actual park in town. Everything was funnel cake and screaming children and entirely different songs being played from each ride giving the air this glossy, almost flexing texture. Joyland has apparently been around since forever and maintenance was likely last done shortly after the park was built. On one of the rides, a security bar popped off and the machine started making a horrible thudding sound when our cart was parallel to the ground but the ride operator was too busy shamelessly checking out the *** of his coworker to notice and I pondered, before what I assumed would be my dramatic and terrible death, how often this had happened before over the years and how silly it would be to die over some pastel colored short-shorts. But that’s how these things happen. “No more noble deaths” we had all agreed on at some point and we put down our swords and took up shovels for the earth and everything was good until someone looked at us wrong and there we were again staring at short-shorts and letting an ancient ride disintegrate with people on it because seeing and hearing two different things at the same time is not something that gets covered during the training days at Joyland.