“Next I suggest #29, the Viper.”
“Does it go upside down?”
“It goes upside down..seven times.”
Clarity looks at me.
“Is that a yes or a no?”
Clarity shakes her head.
“Is that a you’re crazy or a no, I’m not going on the Viper?”
“It’s a you’re crazy and fine I’ll go on the fucking Viper.”
“You will?”
“If I don’t you’re just going to force me to anyway.”
“I’m not going to force you.”
“You’ll make fun of me.”
“I won’t make fun of you.”
“You won’t let up until I say yes!”
“That’s true.”
“So let’s do it.”
“Ok, good, I thought you were going to say that.”
Clarity and I are in line for the Viper, park filling up now, and we’re both looking at our phones and I’m saying:
“Here’s one. King’s Island. Mason, Ohio. 1991. Two park employees jump into a pond to save a park visitor who had fallen in. The park employees are electrocuted. The man they were trying to save was the sole survivor!”
“Ok. Ok. Listen to this,” Clarity says. “The worst roller coaster tragedy in history happened in England, in May of 1972, at London’s Battersea Park Fun Fair. Blah blah blah. Wooden coasters have a track record of wearing out quickly unless they are meticulously maintained. Negligence, as such, was the cause for this tragedy. In the summer of 1972, the rope that brings the cars to the top of the launch hill snapped. Then, the anti-rollback mechanism failed!” Clarity laughs. “With that double whammy, the chain of cars barreled back into the boarding area, smashing into a wall and killing five children!”
She looks at me. I’m rapt.
“And seriously injuring 13 others. The Battersea English Piece-of-Shit Fun Fair closed two years later due to the accident.”
“Good one!” I say.
“Try to find another electrocution,” Clarity says.
This British guy that looks like Jason Statham turns around and says, “Excuse me, but I’ve got two little girls—as you can see—and while maybe coming here is a daily event for you two native Californians, we’ve traveled a long way to go to this specific park and ride this particular rollercoaster. So you’re what..twenty-five? Thirty? To you a story about a beheading on a rollercoaster is fucking hilarious..and to be honest with you, if it was the three of us in a pub I’d pull out my smartphone too, and the three of us could all laugh about the poor girl that got killed at Disneyland when she accidentally got decapitated and her decapitated head fell in some electrocuted water and her boyfriend jumped in and tried to save her. I’m sure that would be a lot of fun. But as it is, the situation’s a bit different. These are my girls. This is Abby and this is Katy.”
“Hi.” “Hi.”
They wave.
“I had a lot of trepidation about bringing my girls on this ride to begin with.”
He points at the Viper.
“That’s some scary shit. I mean I’m personally scared shitless to go on that thing. My daughters—they live for this type of shit. By the time they’re done with me we will have ridden every roller coaster in the world. You might notice that there’s no wife—no mum. Well she died in an accident—not an amusement park accident but another kind of accident..it’s not important. But what we’re doing—because this is what my girls wanted to do with the money—is we’re taking the settlement money from my wife’s death and we’re traveling all around the world—not to every country, but to all the ones that are safe for white people to go to—and we’re riding all the rollercoasters that exist in all those countries. Even have a blog of it with video and everything. Anyway my stomach’s churning just looking at this one and I’ve got a lot of hard talks ahead of me as the parent of two girls, based on your little catalogue of odd deaths, so I’d appreciate if in addition to blunt force trauma and electrocution, we didn’t have to have the talk about decapitation today.”
“Of course,” Clarity says. “We’re sorry.”
“Yeah, man. Sorry about that.”
He smiles and turns back to his daughters.
Immediately one of them asks: “What’s decapitation?”
“It’s when your head gets cut off,” says the dad.
“Ewww,” say the girls.
The dad turns his head to us, nodding and smirking.
“Kids,” he says.
Clarity and I carry on our conversation wordlessly, each of us finding horrible amusement park accidents and just showing each other on our phones.
When we get to the front of the line—almost the front—when this Jason Statham lookalike and his two daughters are packed into the first car, girls in the front, dad right behind them, Clarity waits till the girls are looking the other way and she makes a throat-slitting motion to Jason Statham, one finger with red nail polish drawn all the way across her throat.
Jason Statham gave us both the finger and as the cars left the station I wanted to have the girl who would do such a thing, strapped to a table in a warehouse in the middle of Nowhere, New Mexico, and I wanted to make that same throat-slitting motion then tease her neck with a hacksaw, rubbing shallow lines into her skin as her churchgoing, disciplined little Sunday school-girl pussy gripped my dick like a third grader. I would fuck her, and fuck her, and fuck her till I came and right at that point I couldn’t control my pressure on the hacksaw and I would (accidentally?) semi-decapitate her, but enough that she couldn’t speak and quickly bled out—but I would see in her eyes, in the last moment of her life, that she had liked being fucked like that.
Then the next train was there, and it was our turn to go on the rollercoaster.