Teddy Duncan Jr.

I'd been to six flags before and I knew that there was a ride called goliath that you could manually unbuckle the seat belt even after the ride had begun. I don't fully understand what I was thinking at the time but I don't think anyone does when you get away from a sickness like that, like when you have a stomach ache and forget what it feels like for your stomach to be normal and you wish and hope and pray for it to be normal and for the stomach ache to end, so that normal becomes a glorious thing. But when you're normal again you remember there's nothing great about normal, it's just the absence of bad but not necessarily good and when you're normal you don’t even understand why you made such a big deal out of a stomach ache. That's the position I'm in now. I did something drastic over something I now see as ordinary. I went to six flags by myself so I had to get in the single riders line with families and couples who intended to get through the line quicker but really didn’t want to ride by themselves and didn’t actually expect someone to come to a theme park by themselves and to actually ride a ride by themselves. I wanted someone to know, and I didn’t care who was on the ride with me. I knew I wouldn’t have to deal with the result and that everyone would just know I was dead or momentarily think I was just really hurt. The one’s that do it alone in their rooms are the brave ones, the one’s that can just pull a thoughtless trigger or put their heads through a loop in a rope, I just didn’t buckle my seatbelt. Well I did at first when the bored 16 year old employee came and tugged at everyone’s crotch to make sure that their seatbelts were secure. After he checked my row and went onto the next I just pressed the button and put my arm over the belt to make it look like it was still clicked into place. I could have waited until the ride started to unbuckle my seatbelt so I wouldn’t have to risk an employee seeing that my seatbelt was off and maybe seeing my bloodshot suicide eyes and making me leave. I was too pussy to do it so close to my actual death. I was just going to ride the ride like normal and try to forget that I wasn’t fastened by anything and when the first sideways loop came instead of being pushed up against the seatbelt I didn’t push against anything and went sprawling through the air for maybe 2 total seconds of fear before impact. I just really didn’t want to feel alone when I died, no matter how fucked up it is if I was going to do it I needed an audience.

This micro-story is part of an unpublished fiction chapbook that no one's fucking with, so if you like this and publish small books/chapbooks hmuuuuu here.