255 - Carousel

Unnatural Phenomenon: Carousel

People don’t tend to remember much of their early childhood. The brain is still a half-formed soup at that age, not yet baked by life into something solid and set. In adults recollection of childhood events is fragmentary before six to eight years old and practically impossible before the age of three or four, for all but a few rare outliers these formative years are a lacuna. Aids to recall can dredge the cloudy depths of the past to give clarity to pieces of these lost moments, places, smells and people setting off mental connections that trigger dusty, disused parts of the brain. Emotional associations are one of the strongest correlates for recall, it’s part of how the carousel works.

Marcus Green misses being a little kid more than anything. He had a good life: loving family, good home, friends, a bright future. Then dad went to prison for embezzling the money that had made their lives so easy and mum got sick - one of those ugly neurodegenerative conditions - and they had to move into her sister’s cramped apartment two states over. Some people would thrive or at least persevere given that kind of situation, more wouldn’t. Marcus has found his own way of dealing with it.

He ended up at Maestro Shelton’s Travelling Circus as a ride operator because it was one of the last places he remembered being happy before all that happened. The antique carousel that has been with the carnival for nearly 150 years has been his pride and joy to run for the last 20, it’s given him back what he thought he’d lost forever. Literally.

Riding the carousel, as Marcus first did about 35 years ago, cements a part of a child’s history inside of it. Some find it distressing but it’s nothing they’ll ever miss as adults, small splinters of time chipped away from each of them. For every 333 children that permanently give over a piece of themselves riding the carousel, Marcus has discovered that he can turn back the clock: using it alone himself to re-experience an entire hour of that lost time. It’s genuine time travel of a sort, he’s legitimately experiencing that night over and over from the perspective of his 7 year old self. Aside from the limitations of being that young and at a carnival with his parents, he doesn’t have the imagination to do anything terrible with it.

The trouble is that having done this for so long some of those people whose childhood memories aren’t just locked away by neurology but by magickal splintering are now returning to the carnival with children of their own. Only two have ridden the carousel while it held enough charge to transport them back to the time it originally stole from them, but more are inevitable. Marcus doesn’t care so much about being caught, he’s more distressed that these interlopers are robbing him of his childhood. He may do something drastic.