Mr. Electrico had once believed he was going to live forever.

And as he sat on one corner of a spare bed at his grandson’s house–a bed which his pained lower back signaled was somehow far harder than the string of cots which to his far younger self had seemed so soft–he looked down at the sword in his trembling hands, and still, all these many years later, thought…why shouldn’t he have fooled himself into thinking that? He’d told so many kids so many times they’d never die that after awhile it had seemed only fair he should join them in the immortality he’d been extravagantly granting. Check here digitalinnovationshow for more stories.

Considering his decades on the carnival circuit, such wishful thinking was surely inevitable.

Count how often those inviting tent flaps unfolded at the beginnings of his shows, multiply that by the thousands filing in tugging eager children who were then instructed to squat in the front rows, add the host of times he surrendered to the embrace of the electric chair and felt its power pass through him, letting his skin tingle and his hair stand on end, boost it all by the number of slashes he made with his sword while reaching forward to knight the closest kids with shouts of “Live forever!”…

…and a sensation had begun to expand within him which insisted–the words he’d uttered were no con game.

And he’d deserved to taste their power, too.

No one could go through those motions for so many performances, mouth those same two words that many times, without beginning to believe. He dared anyone else to try it. Not that anyone else ever would. They couldn’t. The days of carnivals were long over. Besides, it wouldn’t be fair for the charge to merely pass through him, and have none of it remain. Something had to stick, right? Some small part?

Yet…why should he be so lucky? Those who’d toured with him, the only ones to whom he could have talked about this and have them understand, had already taken their leave.

The Fat Lady had been the first to go, back when they were both still on the road. Her heart gave out in her sleep, the sad price demanded by her trade. At least she went peaceful. (He liked to think she did. Does anyone ever truly go peaceful?) The Skeleton Man, though, hadn’t been that lucky. He was carried away by cigarettes. Last time Mr. Electrico had seen him, when he visited to reminisce about the old days, the man could barely speak above a whisper. Not much reminiscing got done, except in their own heads. Those wheezy lungs had kept them both too focused on the future, short though it was, to enjoy wandering through the past.

As for The Illustrated Man, Mr. Electrico was never quite sure exactly what had happened to him. No one would say. When he showed up for the memorial service, the relatives wouldn’t even look him in the eye. And those tattoos, they didn’t seem quite so pretty when viewed in the open coffin on which The Illustrated Man had insisted. Mr. Electrico remembered how once they’d been marvelous.

How once they’d all been marvelous.

The jugglers, the ticket takers, the drivers, all gone, gone, gone. There had been too many funerals over too many decades, and he’d gone to as many as he could, for his friends deserved to be shown a little respect, but then, after a time, there were no more funerals to attend. Now only he remained.

So … maybe the electricity had done something after all. He was still around, wasn’t he? The last man standing. OK, so the hand which had once held the sword shook, and during the night, he often had to get up half a dozen times to piss, and when he woke in the morning, sometimes–not always, but sometimes–he wasn’t sure where he was. But all that was better than the alternative, right?

Sure would have been nice if one of the others–any one of the others, he wasn’t picky–had still been around, so they could have shared a place. Would have been nice, too, if his son was still speaking with him, so they could have shared a place. No fixing that, though. Mr. Electrico doubted forgiveness was even possible. It was sweet of his grandson to step up like this, even if the kid didn’t understand the carny life his grandpa used to lead. But maybe that was the only reason he was willing to step up.

Josh.

It was Josh, wasn’t it?

That’s right.

Josh.

Mr. Electrico wished he could show the kid who he really was, and why, wished he could explain it all in the way he’d never been able to do for his son, whose empathy had been crushed by having to live through it. And once he could have. The photos would have helped. And the newspaper clippings, filled with awe and wonder. And if only he still owned the costume he’d once worn, red silk with yellow piping zigzagging down the sleeves to make it look as if lightning was about to come out of his fingertips. But those were all gone, all of it, every scrap of memorabilia, each battered souvenir, lost to rundown apartments he’d abandoned with rent unpaid, and evictions which had left his possessions dissolving in the rain, and small-town pawnshops he’d see the once but never again.

And drink, oh, the drink. To that above all those physical manifestations of his memories had been sacrificed, sometimes willingly, sometimes not, as his path narrowed to whatever this life of his had turned out to be.

Only the sword, remarkably, remained. Even he wasn’t entirely sure how.

He held it out before him as he used to do at each show–more an extension of his arm than a piece of metal–and closed his eyes. He could almost see them–the faces in the front row filled with amazement, kid after kid shocked to see what coursed through him as he sat in that chair showered with sparks, faces which would soon themselves be literarily shocked as he tapped their brows and shouted in the tent then what he whispered in the small borrowed bedroom now–

“Live forever!”

And when he had, he truly thought they could.

All these years later, he raised the sword high above his head, and there he was, in front of thousands of people blurred together by memory, forgettable faces with no names to go with them. But there was one face which stood out from all the rest. One face which had gained a name.

Mr. Electrico saw it then, the face of the kid who’d come back, the face of the kid who’d brought him a magic trick, the face of a kid he’d welcomed into the tent and introduced to his friends, the face of a kid which was also in a former life the face of a friend, a friend who’d died in his arms in the Ardennes Forest in 1918, during the Great War.

Or was that last but a lie he’d told, the kind of thing you cough up to a rube to keep them happy and empty their pockets? It had been so long since their last encounter one Labor Day weekend that he couldn’t be sure, couldn’t remember whether he’d been sincere, or was only planting the seeds for a long con which never had the chance to play out.

No, that he couldn’t remember.

But he remembered the day when the carnival stopped by Lake Michigan, near Waukegan, Illinois, and the kid to whom Mr. Electrico had seemed to matter so much.

He remembered that kid, and wondered whether he was the one who’d prove his words more than just words. The one who truly would live forever.

That kid named…Ray, wasn’t it?

Yes. Ray.

Ray hadn’t been the first to come back–kids were always ditching their parents and returning to say the things they wouldn’t dare unless they were alone with him–but he was the first to come back who didn’t also ask to join him. They were always asking to take off, believing that hitting the road with a carnival was the solution to whatever their problems happened to be. Splitting from an abusive household could be a good thing, sure, Mr. Electrico had done the same himself when he was a kid, but having done so, he’d learned the hard way–why bring the carny life into it? That was no answer. But then, it never was.

He kept waiting for the kid to ask him, too, ask for help in running away, the way he himself had once asked for help from another who’d earlier carried his name. First when Ray pulled out that beginners magic trick he’d bought at the Five and Dime and begged him to explain how it worked, and then when he was brought into the tent and introduced to the others, where Mr. Electrico could see the kid’s eyes grow large as he took in the Bearded Lady and the Alligator Boy and all the rest of them, saw how they treated each other when they were by themselves without the rubes around, as if the fantastic were common, and the common fantastic, and finally out along the sand dunes, where they sat and talked of their lives, and Mr. Electrico was moved to say something he’d never said before, about how the two of them had known each other in past lifetimes.

But Ray never asked that question Mr. Electrico had come to know too well. And it was only later that Mr. Electrico realized the thought had never even occurred to Ray at all.

They talked for hours, about ferris wheels and movie stars, rocket ships and life on Mars, about comic strips which promised more than real life ever could, about things that might have been and things that never were…but then it was time for Mr. Electrico to head back for his evening shows–the final performances before he’d have to move on. There were tears in Ray’s eyes as they parted, which Mr. Electrico thought meant the kid would then ask the question, before the opportunity to do so was gone forever…but he did not.

He often wondered what those tears had meant. He wished he could have tracked the kid down and asked him. He suspected if found that the kid would have understood what his grandson couldn’t and his son never even wanted to try. But he’d never learned anything more than his given name, and so a reunion was impossible.

Mr. Electrico wished they had known each other before in the trenches, the way he’d told him, because that would have meant there was a chance they’d see each other again in the future. But he knew now, as he knew he’d known then, that there was no coming back in this life, that once a person was gone he was gone, one reason he fought so hard against his body’s signals that it was time to leave.

He didn’t want to leave.

Mr. Electrico snapped out of his reverie, suddenly aware of the streets down which he walked, realizing he had no idea where he was. What made it worse was that at the same time–he was also uncertain whether this confusion was because he’d wandered, while lost in thoughts of the past, to a neighborhood he’d never encountered before, or if, cruelly, he no longer recognized a place with which he should he familiar. He hoped it was the former, because the latter…well, that was happening more often now.

Closing his eyes and concentrating hard, he remembered.

He’d left his grandson’s home for a walk in the sun–Josh had insisted he go out, said it wasn’t good for him to sit alone in that spare room all day. So Mr. Electrico had headed to the park, starting his rambling there as he always did, because he knew its openness would bring back his carnival days, and thoughts of that moment the caravan would arrive at a new location, and study an open field before beginning to set up. If he could position himself properly, and keep the benches and path lights and playground equipment at his back, he could almost pretend it was still the past. He’d stay there forever if he could.

But eventually, his joints had told him he’d better get moving again, so he grabbed a hot dog that hadn’t tasted as good as one he might have gotten on the midway, then headed on to look in store windows filled with things he no longer wanted nor needed, if he ever did, then studied the posters outside a theater advertising movies he would never bother seeing, his afternoon reminding him too much of things he would never do.

But once he’d spent enough time wasting time, enough to keep Josh happy at least, and was ready to turn back…he no longer recalled how to get home. He stood on a street corner trying to remember, but not trying too hard, because the failure that was more often starting to accompany such trying would be too painful.

So he meandered until he made his way back to the park–he could remember how to get there, at least–and once there, as he stared out across the grass on which one wasn’t supposed to walk, he again briefly tried to decide which way he should turn next to find his way back to his grandson. But he couldn’t choose, so instead, he sat on a bench and wished, as the darkness settled around him, that he could still spread wide his hands and light up the night.

Which is where his grandson found him still sitting the following morning.

Josh wasn’t alone as he walked up the path toward Mr. Electrico. There was a policeman by his side, which told Mr. Electrico that no, Josh truly didn’t understand.

He did not like police officers. It was nothing personal. No one who’d worked a carnival ever did.

“What are you doing here, Grandpa?” asked Josh, as he slid onto wooden slats still covered with dew.

“Just resting,” said Mr. Electrico, unwilling to reveal the truth, especially not with a cop there to bear witness. “Thinking. Remembering.”

“All night? Here?”

“And why not? I can do those things on a park bench as easily as anywhere else.”

Josh leaned in more closely to his grandfather, so only the two of them could hear what he was to say next.

“You forgot again,” he whispered. “Didn’t you?”

“I did not,” Mr. Electrico insisted, hoping he’d been able to imbue his words with confidence. He’d made so many believe so much, surely he could make one man believe that.

“That’s not true, Grandpa,” said Josh. “We both know that. If we didn’t find you, who knows how long you’d have been out here alone.”

“I was just taking my time, that’s all,” he said, his words less certain. The power to pretend, a power about which he’d once been so proud, had long ago diminished. But he still had to try. “I’d have gotten home eventually. I always do.”

“Not always,” said Josh, his voice still a whisper. “This wasn’t the first time. Remember?”

Mr. Electrico felt his grandson’s hand on his shoulder, and though the touch was gentle and though it was meant with love, it brought back memories of other park benches, and other touches, ones not so gentle, which had been meant to make him move along. He stayed silent, and tried not to let those feeling show.

“So you’re saying the officer and I should just leave you here then? You’ll have no problem getting back on your own?”

At first, Mr. Electrico said nothing. He looked off again toward the unbroken stretch of cool, green grass, and imagined a tent rising there. But tents would rise no more. He sighed.

“I guess I’ve sat here long enough,” Mr. Electrico said finally. “We can go.”

As he stood, he could hear his knees crack. He guessed he probably wasn’t the only one who’d heard them.

“The officer said he’d drive us home,” said Josh, gesturing at the police car which had been left idling on the outskirts of the park.

“I can walk,” said Mr. Electrico, even as he felt a pounding in his chest. “I’m not dead yet.”

Besides, he thought, he’d been in the back of too many police cars. Sure, it had been decades since the last time. But still. He remembered that claustrophobic feeling, all those doors with no handles. No, sir. Not today. Not yet. He stretched, partially because he needed it after having been curled up on a park bench all night, and partially because he needed Josh to point him in the right direction so they could get started, and was delaying because he didn’t want to have to admit it.

“Shall we?” he said, and tilted his head in a vague circle he hoped night accidentally approximate the correct direction.

Josh hesitated for a moment, looking as if he was about to speak…then shrugged instead and began walking.

Mr. Electrico followed, trying his best to memorize the streets–some of which seemed familiar to him, and some not, as if buildings had been shuffled overnight–between the park and his grandson’s house. They were silent all the way there, though Mr. Electrico could tell, from the grim expression on his grandson’s face, that a speech was building which he would not want to hear. Once they arrived, Josh waved at the couch in the living room.

“We can’t go on this way,” he said. “I know you know that, grandpa.”

“We?” said Mr. Electrico. “I’m tired. Can we do this later?”

Josh nodded, and Mr. Electrico went up to his room–slowly, as all stairs were taken slowly these days–where he fell asleep immediately, a thing which he hadn’t allowed himself in the park. Oh, he’d been tired, and he’d desperately wanted to nod off, but a life spent on the road had taught him that was never to be done. He hadn’t even been able to bring himself to nap while there, only listen to the crickets and look at the stars, both those present that night and those which existed only in memory. So sleep came quick now, as did dreams of his old life, and an afternoon by Lake Michigan, and a boy named Ray.

When he woke, he could remember little of the dreams, only that he had dreamt, which he did not like. It seemed forgetfulness, which was now so much a part of his life, was spreading to his dreams as well.

How long before he forgot it all?

Mr. Electrico managed to avoid “the talk” Josh kept insisting they have, making him think he still had some of the gift of gab which had served him so well during his carny days, but then, one morning, he woke and looked under his bed for the sword which would allow him to perform the ritual meant to remind him of who he’d once been, and he found nothing but dust bunnies, a sock he’d thought he’d lost, and a depression created in the carpeting by a long, rectangular box which had lain there since his grandson had taken him in.

His sword, the only memento that remained, was gone.

He shouted his grandson’s name, so upset he didn’t have to search for it even for a split second. No answer came, but Mr. Electrico suspected that could have been because his voice was no longer loud enough to carry downstairs. His knees were unfortunately not the only things giving out. He tried again, more forcefully, to use the voice he’d once owned when he’d captivated crowds, but though his mind remembered, his lungs would not.

“Josh!”

There was still no answer, so he headed slowly to the top of the stairs and called out again. His grandson was not normally gone so early in the day, so it was strange he shouldn’t be there now. As Mr. Electrico was about to take his first step down, a figure came into view from the living room.

Mr. Electrico froze. It wasn’t Josh.

It was the kid.

Ray.

He seemed exactly as he’d been all those years before, unchanged by time. And in one hand, the sword. Ray laughed as he made a few passes through the air with the metal, marking the air between them.

“You were looking for this,” he said, his voice as frozen in time as was his face.

“What are you doing here?” asked Mr. Electrico.

“What do you think?” he said, leaping up one step, then back down again, repeating the move several times with glee. Mr. Electrico remembered what it was like to leap, but not when he’d last been able to do it. “What I’ve been doing ever since the day we met–living forever.”

“That’s … not possible,” Mr. Electrico said. Or was it? he thought. “Where have you been? Why are you here now?”

“It seemed as if you needed me,” said Ray, pausing in his prancing to look up. “Needed me to find this. I doubted you’d have been able to on your own.”

Ray flipped the sword in his hand so that its hilt was now pointed up toward the top of the stairs. It was an offering. An invitation. One Mr. Electrico desperately wanted to accept. But in that moment, he didn’t have the strength to walk down to receive it. His knees buckled, and he dropped to sit on the top step, suddenly unable to stand any longer.

Mr. Electrico was glad Josh wasn’t present to see the weakness which had stolen over him. And so, of course, in that moment, from behind Ray came the sound of the front door being unlocked. Ray smiled, a buoyant smile Mr. Electrico recognized, and then looked briefly over one shoulder, unalarmed. He knelt, laying the sword down sideways across the bottom step, the blade so long it stuck out through the bannister.

“There,” said Ray. “It’s yours again. No one should take it from you.”

And then Ray backed out of sight, vanishing into the living room, just before Josh came into view from the front foyer. Mr. Electrico found himself without the breath to speak, so Josh was startled on seeing him there, at first not even noticing the sword.

“Grandpa, why are you sitting up there like that?”

Mr. Electrico heard the love in his voice, but he also heard the exasperation, and knew he should answer immediately. Josh had lately been accusing him of getting slow, and a snappy answer would help contradict that, but he had none. All he could think was — how is it that Josh missed seeing Ray? Before Mr. Electrico could think of anything to say, Josh noticed the sword on the bottom step, and his expression darkened.

“So you found it,” he said. “I’m surprised. How did you manage to do that?”

“You?” said Mr. Electrico. “You’re the one who took my sword? Not…”

Mr. Electrico fell to silence. How could he dare reveal what he’d seen before Josh arrived home? His grandson was already having trouble accepting what he’d become, and that he’d mistakenly believed a boy he hadn’t seen in half a century had taken his sword would be…too much.

“Not what?” said Josh.

“Nothing. It’s just that…for a moment, I thought…never mind. But why? Why did you do it?”

“I had to, Grandpa. You’re not safe with it anymore. Maybe you can be trusted with it when I’m here to supervise, but when you’re alone? No.”

“That’s not true, Josh.”

Mr. Electrico found himself trembling, whether from fear or anger he couldn’t tell. But maybe it was neither, and only the trembling that came with the years.

“Sadly, it is true. You’re not who you once were, grandpa. And after we got back from the park, after you fell asleep, I started realizing … you could get hurt, without even meaning to.”

As Josh spoke, he was hesitant in a way Mr. Electrico had never seen before, at times rocking from one foot to the other, at times seeming about to step over the sword and join him at the top of the stairs. Instead, he stayed in place, continuing to squeeze words out, words obviously as difficult to speak as they were to hear.

“It’s not your fault,” Josh said, louder than he’d left off. “So I had to, you see? And look at you here with the sword again. You could have been hurt retrieving it. What if you’d fallen off the ladder and broken your neck? You shouldn’t be doing things like that, doing the things you once did. I wouldn’t want to find you that way. I love you, Grandpa. You know that don’t you? This is for your own good.”

“What’s this about a ladder, Josh? I didn’t climb any ladder.”

“Oh, grandpa, have you forgotten that already? You had to have used a ladder, or else how would you have gotten it down from where I stored it in the garage? If you can’t even remember that, it’s just one more reason you shouldn’t have it.”

Josh stooped to pick up the sword, then turned toward the garage.

“You can’t do this, Josh,” said Mr. Electrico, rising swiftly to his feet. The sudden movement left him dizzy, forcing him to press one hand against the wall to remain steady. “That’s mine! That’s all I have left.”

“Then what’s it doing down here with you up there? You must have dropped it. Don’t you see? You might have cut yourself. Or fallen and run yourself through. No. No more. If you want to keep living here, please. Don’t try to find this again.”

“Josh,” he said, as his grandson vanished, seeming no more or less real than the boy who had vanished on his arrival. Mr. Electrico would have shouted if he could, but he had no more energy with which to shout.

“Later, Grandpa,” said Josh upon his return from the garage. “We’ll talk more later. We have some decisions to make.”

Mr. Electrico said nothing as Josh walked up the stairs and squeezed past to his own bedroom. He did not want to talk more later. At least, not with Josh. He knew what was coming for him, he knew what those decisions would mean, and talking would only bring that fate toward him more quickly.

Mr. Electrico waited until he could no longer hear Josh’s television vibrating through the thin walls and was sure his grandson was asleep, then snuck out of the house and stood on the front lawn. He’d head toward the park, he decided, where he’d spent most of the previous night.

He loved the park, the way his scanning of the unpopulated vista brought back memories of the beginnings of things–the tents still unrolled, the ferris wheel unconstructed, the rubes asleep in their homes, and he needed that feeling now more than ever. That was almost the best part, those moments of before when anything could happen. It felt as if anything could happen tonight. But which way should he turn?

He could still remember where the park was, couldn’t he?

No. He couldn’t.

As he stood in indecision, fearful of choosing the wrong way, even more fearful of choosing no way at all, his breath turned to mist in the cool night air, and as that cloud pulsed, appearing and disappearing with each exhalation, through it, off on the nearest corner, under a streetlight, he could see Ray, waving the sword over his head, doing mock battle with a moth which hovered above him.

Mr. Electrico’s sword.

And then the kid danced out of the spotlight and into the darkness.

Mr. Electro took off after him, perhaps, based on what his knees were telling him, more quickly than he should have, but he didn’t dare lose him. He could make out his outline in the distance, always on the verge of disappearing, and as Mr. Electrico ran, so ran Ray. They moved through the night this way, twisting and turning along the maze of the subdivisions, the kid continually pausing off in the distance just long enough to be sure he was seen, but no longer, and then taking off again as soon as Mr. Electrico started after him again.

By the time Mr. Electrico arrived at the park, he was gasping, and sure he could not have gone a single step further. For a moment, as he looked around, he thought he’d lost the kid, but there he was, sitting not on a bench, sitting not on the grass, but off in the empty playground, plopped on a mound of sand in front of the rut beneath the swings, a mound kicked high by the feet of a thousand children.

The kid smiled, patting the sand beside him, and as Mr. Electrico settled down slowly, his legs protesting as they bent, he remembered the two of them having been side by side like that before, so many decades ago, when he had been so much younger, and the kid had been…

…exactly the same.

“Why are you here?” asked Mr. Electrico, having to catch his breath to get even that single short sentence out.

“Why are you here?” asked the kid, waving the sword to encompass the park.

And then Mr. Electrico did know, know what he hadn’t known before, but merely suspected.

“Because I can almost see Lake Michigan,” he said. The past and the present rubbed up against each other in this place. It was what called him here time and again. Because if he squinted, and imagined, and remembered, he could see from one to the other.

They sat in silence for awhile, looking off into the distance. Eventually, Mr. Electrico closed his eyes. Sometimes, in this place, he could see much better with them closed. But he could not see far enough. Not yet.

“Did you bring me another trick?” he asked. “Another puzzle to solve?”

“I did.”

The kid rose, pointed the sword to his head, then allowed it to drop to his toes with a flourish, as if by lowering a sword, he was raising a curtain on himself. He bowed theatrically.

“You? You’re the trick?”

Ray nodded and smiled.

“That’s not a trick,” said Mr. Electrico. “You staying the same, me growing older…that’s a joke.”

“So how come neither of us is laughing?” said the kid, settling back down beside him in the sand. “No, it’s not a joke. I wouldn’t do that to you. It is, indeed, a trick. Last time we were together, you showed me the secret to how one worked. This time, it’s my turn to show you.”

Mr. Electrico wanted to learn that trick, that secret. But there was something else which in that moment he wanted more.

“I’d like my sword back,” he said.

“In a moment.”

The kid used the sword to make circles in the air in front of them, then figure eights, then x’s, then finally circles again.

“You said we’d met before in a former life. Was that a lie you were telling me? A part of your act?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. And then, more forcefully, certain for the first time: “No.”

“You said I was your friend. Was that a lie?”

“No.”

There had been no hesitation that time.

“So we were friends in the last life,” said Ray. “We are friends in this one. And we will be friends in the next one as well.”

“I’m glad of that,” said Mr. Electrico. “But you still haven’t answered my question, not fully. Why are you here?”

“Because I wanted to thank you,” said Ray. “I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time, but I never had the chance. I could never reach you, not until now, when you were so close, because though I couldn’t come nearer to you, you could come nearer to me. The day I met you, the day you made sparks come out my ears and told me to live forever, that was the day everything changed. That was the day you gave me the future, the day I learned how strange and wonderful the world really was. That was the day…the day I decided to become a writer. I could never thank you, because I could never track you down. I tried to, I really did, but only now…only now…”

Ray shrugged.

“Anyway…thank you.”

“You remembered,” said Mr. Electrico quietly.

“Yes,” whispered Ray.

“You remembered me telling you to live forever.”

Ray nodded.

“And did you live forever?”

“I did,” said Ray. “Thanks to you, I will.”

“So why haven’t you changed? And why have I?”

“That’s the magic, you see,” said Ray. “Because no one has yet to do this.”

The kid stood, and with a gesture Mr. Electrico recognized as if he were gazing upon it in a mirror, because he had done it thousands of times himself, leaned down, extended the sword, and tapped him on the center of his forehead.

“Live forever!” Ray shouted, with a voice that boomed far too loud for one so small. For a moment, the world seemed on fire. Mr. Electrico’s skin prickled, and his hair stood on end, as he sensed the charge coruscating through him and connecting with a dormant engine within. Then, as the kid pressed the sword back into Mr. Electrico’s hand, the sky–whether it had been truly ablaze, or whether it had been just the old electricity running through his eyes anew–faded.

“It’s yours now,” said Ray. “It always was yours.”

Mr. Electrico leapt up, made a giddy hop, and struck his own slashes through the air. He laughed, feeling complete once more.

“Ready to join me?” asked the kid. He gestured behind them, away from the shadow of Lake Michigan.

Mr. Electrico turned, and in the distance, where suddenly it was daylight, could see the tents flapping in a gentle breeze. He could make out the banners, looking as fresh as the day they were first painted, covered with the images of his friends, images larger than life, but no larger than they lived on in his memory–The Sword Swallower and The Bearded Lady and the Illustrated Man and–

–and look–on the largest stretch of canvas in the carnival–there he was, Mr. Electrico, bigger than life himself, too, but no bigger than life should be, his hair ablaze, his eyes sparking, his fingertips flashing lightning, fully again who he used to be.

Who he was again.

“Live forever,” Mr. Electrico whispered. “Yes..let’s.”

He took Ray’s hand, and together, they headed toward the carnival.

Copyright 2018 Scott Edelman