Brass Ring: When They Were Children

Fifteen years ago…

The mobile carnival smelled of rust and oil. The smell of popcorn and hot dogs barely covered the smell. The lines to the rides were long, but the couples didn’t mind. Men trying to prove things to either their buddies or their dates surrounded the gaming booths as the promise of stuffed animals overrode the knowledge that the games were rigged against them. Kids swarmed the tents, looking for the next great attraction.

Oliver had been looking forward to the Captain Amazing exhibit. He had been tracking its progression across the states, across the counties, and now it was HERE. The nine-year-old was practically vibrating, adrenaline and nervousness fighting for dominance; he wanted to enter the tent but fear of being disappointed kept him outside. Next to him, his older brother Boaz hated this exhibit; if his mother had not forced him to promise that he would take his younger brother to this exhibit, he would be at the rifle booths. Boaz really wanted that stuffed wolf. That stuffed wolf was almost as big as he was.

He smiled at the thought of winning that much proof of his marksmanship, a skill he had spent the last summer mastering. Then he remembered where he was. The promise that he had made.

“Okay, dork, we’re here.” Oliver turned pale, frozen in his tracks. “Figures.”

Boaz grabbed his brother by the back of the shirt and dragged him into the tent, paid the two dollars to enter, and almost tossed the younger boy before his hero. Inside they were met with a plastic table and a man in tired yellows and greens behind it on a metal chair signing autographs. The environment faded before Oliver, as his vision made the yellows and greens bright as flowers on new grass and the man as powerful as when he was fighting the Legion of Evil, bullets bouncing off every bicep as Captain Amazing tore through the tanks between him and Herr Schadel, the Legion’s leader.

Boaz glared at the younger boy as he walked nervously up to the man and gave him his autograph book, purchased just for this meeting, and the requisite $10. The man, the hero signed the book and mussed up the boy’s short blonde hair. He smiled upon the boy as he returned the book now bearing his name, and the boy backed reverently away from the table. He wasn’t moving fast enough for Boaz, so Boaz pulled the younger boy out of the tent.

Freed from the dark and the odor of sweat that permeated it, he could now go where he really wanted to be. Boaz would spend more of his lawn money than he had expected, but he walked away triumphant from the rifle booth.

Oliver would be in a haze for the rest of the afternoon. The book would go up on a shelf, only to be brought down when other heroes and heroines, and even villains, were within his range, but that signature was his first. And that night it would sit next to a purple stuffed wolf almost the size of a ten-year-old boy.

[The second chapter is here.]