by J.M.C. Kane
The carousel turns in slow loops, plastic-wrapped souls swaying. A sun-bleached sign above the counter reminds us to remove everything from POCK TS. Clothes set to travel.
A woman tears the plastic from a suit and smells the collar. A man collects three shirts, already counting the days until he’ll be back.
My ticket’s been in my wallet three months, coffee staining one edge. The numbers are still legible.
When I hand it over, the clerk checks the date, then me. She doesn’t comment. Torsos whirr and swing until she halts the carousel with one practiced palm; it shudders, and she draws two things from the procession: a charcoal wool coat; the dress she wore to our daughter’s wedding—still blue.
“These are ready,” she says—the technical answer to no question asked.
Behind her, a side rack carries the unclaimed: a tablecloth from a party that lost its nerve, jackets whose owners moved during Summer, a tuxedo that learned to wait. There’s another section in back, she once told me. Items gone dizzy from spinning and taken off the ride.
“Forty-two fifty,” she says.
The price of ready.
The dress lifts a fraction in the conditioning current, as if remembering breath. The coat keeps the shape of her shoulders. A trick of the light, or polyethylene.
I consider leaving them—to orbit with the other silvery ghosts, to be gently forgotten by a room built for forgetting. I could leave the haunting here, let the carousel keep custody.
Instead, I pay. She lays the coat and dress across the counter and smooths the plastic the way nurses smooth sheets. The receipt prints a name in block letters that no longer seem to trust me; she checks the last name again.
At home, I’ll hang them with the others. Still wrapped. Still ready.
The carousel starts turning again as the door closes.
The haunting slips out behind me.
J.M.C. Kane is the author of Quiet Brilliance: What Employers Miss About Neurodivergent Talent and How to See It (CollectiveInk U.K.), a celebrated nonfiction work on cognitive patterning and inclusion in the workplace. Disabled, he writes from this learned experience as an ASD-1. His prose work has been published in more than a dozen literary journals and magazines. Kane admires compression the way some people admire tightrope walkers: from a safe distance, practicing only at home. He lives in New Orleans with his family in a house filled with paintings, dogs, and stories that unfold slowly.