Joyland

by Stephen King

“Climb aboard, Jonesy. I’m going to send you up where the air is rare and the view is much more than fair.”

I hope she was. All these years later, with those old fevers and deliriums long in my past, I still hope she was. Love leaves scars.

I hope you’ll always look back on your time in Joyland as something special. We don’t sell furniture. We don’t sell cars. We don’t sell land or houses or retirement funds. We have no political agenda. We sell fun. Never forget that.

You think Okay, I get it, I’m prepared for the worst, but you hold out that small hope, see, and that’s what fucks you up. That’s what kills you.

Wanting it to happen, hoping it wouldn’t.

The thing with the kite had just been an aberration, and the apology a bitter pill she felt she had to swallow.

“I can’t understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there’s already so much pain in the world,” Mrs. Shoplaw said. “Religion is supposed to comfort.”

The half-dozen of us in that class had learned beside the YMCA pool, working on a dummy with the unlikely name of Herkimer Saltfish.

Those are things that happened once upon a time and long ago, in a magical year when oil sold for eleven dollars a barrel.

The year a madman almost killed me on a Ferris wheel. The year I wanted to see a ghost and didn’t…although I guess at least one of them saw me.

The world has given me a good life since then, I won’t deny it, but sometimes I hate the world, anyway.

Mike would have wanted to see how high it would go before it disappeared, and I did, too. I wanted to see that, too.