Page 26 of Torn

Quickly, he goes rigid from the confession. His joints fasten in place, impervious to the wind brushing his hair and rustling his shirt, and the lambent cords of light bouncing off his frame.

While that pageantry occurs, Merry promises, “But you don’t have to be afraid here.”

He studies her in a way that provokes her to squirm. Suddenly, she’s the center of the universe, simultaneously baffling and fascinating.

Merry’s unsure if she wants to be in this position, yet she’s never been surer. It’s miraculous, how stricken he appears, like nobody’s ever made such an offer to him, nor any offer involving his safety.

Hasn’t anyone ever been concerned about that? Concerned about his wellbeing?

He acts like she’s handed him an object that he doesn’t know how to operate, like he doesn’t know how it works. But he does start talking. While the carousel wheels, and while the music sways from one song to the next, days spill out of them. They share pastimes and wasted times, tastes and distastes. And those days turn into decades, filled with random musings, absurd dreams, and lucid nightmares.

They rest their heads against the oscillating bars and debate what makes the stars magical, and what makes them scientific, and what they mean to mortals, and what they mean to deities. They calculate what destiny could be, and should be, and might be.

Anger discloses why he chose iron for his arrows. “It’s responsive to human temperature. It reacts to heat, which is a mortal embodiment of fury.”

“That makes it pliable, able to change,” Merry says. “So maybe you’re not as inflexible as you think.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. Iron doesn’t break.”

“But it bends.” Merry dismisses his growl and explains why she skates. “I’m my own shooting star.”

She stands upright on the stirrup, compelling to Anger to do the same, and they flip their heads back to observe their reflections in the ceiling. And the carousel keeps spinning, spinning, spinning.

When they’re ready, the whirligig stops. Merry hops off Sagittarius’s arrow seat, intoxicated by this whole experience. Anger stalks off the dais, his face slack with a conversation hangover.

She pulls him into another discussion, and the dizzied look vanishes, and he’s lucid once more. Down an avenue of phosphorescent stargazer lilies, they drift into quiet reflection, then become engrossed in dialogue.

He’d been unimpressed with the Carnival of Stars, but while they tour the place, she annotates the history of each ride. As she tells him stories about events that she’s witnessed here—a marriage proposal, a break-up, an elderly couple wishing upon a star, and a child’s first gelato—he judges it less and makes more inquiries.

He issues requests. “Let’s go this way.”

And then he follows her own requests. “Come see this!”

The hours tick by. The Ferris wheel is idyllic but too obvious. Instead, Merry escorts him through the Serendipity Tunnel, a crystalline chasm for lovers, and the Levitation Dome, a cylindrical encasement enabling a person to defy gravity and ascend to the cosmos.

She picks a trail sparkler and takes it with her to the comet ride, holding the stick as they free fall from the meringue of clouds. To her amazement, Anger screams all the way down. “Whaaaaaat theeeeee Faaaaaates!”

The sparkler remains intact, still blazing when they touch down.

They lose each other a few times, then find each other by whistling or guessing. Merry turns their search into a game of hide-and-seek, taking cover in the Globe Garden bushes while Anger searches for her. The archer pretends to issue threats, partly in earnest, partly in jest.

Merry challenges him to a race—his feet versus her wheels—through the Enneagram Maze, both of them propelling at exquisite speeds, knocking shrubbery out of the way. At the finish line, her cheeks turn into rosettes, and his skin flushes. He accuses her of cheating.

At one point, she attempts a sultry pose against a lamppost while Anger’s not looking. It’s fortunate, since she slides right off the pillar and almost twists her ankle. Technically, she should be a specialist in wooing, naturally attuned to the intricacies of courtship, but she’s a dud for a reason.

That doesn’t mean she can’t keep trying.

Merry uses magic to churn blueberry lemonade in the fountain of a vendor’s kiosk. When she gets Anger to try some by shoving the cup in his face, he sucks on the straw in annoyance, and gives amehshrug. A nonchalant second later, he takes another long sip and then hands it back, their fingers momentarily sliding together. In the reflection of the refreshment cart, Merry sticks out her indigo tongue, which matches the rims of Anger’s lips.

They find a spot on the picnic lawn. Dropping onto the grass, they drink while chatting.

What are the most grandiose myths on earth? Are their deities amidst other planets?

Merry doesn’t like his pessimism. Anger doesn’t like her optimism.

This disparity gets in the way during a debate about fate versus free will, whether there should be a greater balance, whether humans deserve to make their own luck and choose their own destinies.

“Fate is an illusion,” Anger quarrels. “Your birth, your appearance, your kin, your name—they’re assigned to you. From the start, you don’t have any say in those components.”

---