Hematoma

I always went to the fairs but I never played the games. I always walked past looking at other kids play. I was never denied a chance to play nor did I refuse to play. I just never wanted to. Watching other kids play was fine with me. It was like watching sports on TV where the stadium was so far away yet the game was right before my eyes. I loved the feeling of not having to suffer the loss or even to celebrate the victory. The feeling of detachment.

Yet a couple years later, I was torn away from my childhood memories and whisked into the chaos that I so quietly avoided. Now games had to be created and worked out for the pleasure of children who I would have liked to watch from a distance. Now I was responsible for their feelings. If they lost, I felt guilty. If they won, I felt even worse because I had just consciously cheated their money for a stupid prize. And yet they didn't even know it.

In the early morning before the fair started, I was pushing a cart of trash cans filled with colorful balloons soon to become "fish" so little kids could go fishing without having to hook a real fish by its mouth and watch it jerk helplessly. Some water spilled out of the trash can and flowed onto the cart trickling down the slant we were trying to go up. My eyes fixed on the fish, my shoe stepped into the water and the current of the river pulled me down and away from the beautiful fish. My knee jammed down into the linoleum floor and my body was reduced to a crawling position. The precious rivulets of blood ruptured from my veins and I could feel the pulse in rhythm with the pain. And yet the fish successfully arrived and swam in the swimming pool while children were blinded by its rainbow colors.
Slowly, the bruise turned red to purple to blue to black. My hematoma.