The A. R. Morlan Megapack by A.R. Morlan

Author:A.R. Morlan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, fantasy, suspense, short stories, horror
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2015-02-18T16:00:00+00:00

AT FUNLAND BY THE SWINGS, WITH BIG CHUCK

By the end of the first week in August, the kids who visited Funland confided in Big Chuck the Monitor that the new girl who sat alone next to the swings—not on one of the rust-chained swings, but on the blunt grass next to the swings—was really weird.

“She don’t know ’bout cooties, Big Chuck. We wiped them all on her and she went an’ kept ’em.”

“I asked her if she saw The Monkees last night and she didn’t think the zoo was open then—what she mean?”

“Where’s she come from? She never says ‘cool’ or ‘guy’ or anything right.”

By noon, fifteen of the neighborhood regulars had come to big Chuck, the college kid who helped watch over the tiny children’s amusement park each summer, with their tales of how different that “funny-looking” girl was. How she didn’t know about The Dating Game, or read Nancy Drew books, or remember what night Star Trek was on, or even play tetherball.

The first couple of days she’d wandered around Funland with its small assortment of scaled-down kiddie rides, snack booths and simple bottle toss and basketball throw games, no one had paid much attention to her, but by now the other kids had glommed to the fact that she wasn’t just a stranger in their neighborhood…she was strange, period.

But Big Chuck—so dubbed by the elementary school age children he looked after during the day because he was over six feet tall, and called by the same name by his college-age female contemporaries for a somewhat different reason—had noticed that the new little girl was odd long before the rest of the kids caught on.

It was the way she just sat, not running around spreading cooties, or giggling over by the ice cream stand, or just twisting her long dishwater blonde hair around her fingers, the way the other girls passed the time. But she wasn’t cowed—quiet, like some of the browbeaten kids who hung around Funland during the three months it was open each summer, before the real amusement parks and carnivals had long since passed through town, on their way to bigger venues to the south.

This quiet kid was simply content to sit there by the swings, taking things in. As if this was all new to her; the used-car-lot style flag-like banners stringing the booths together, the sweetish-sickly aroma of cotton candy and slushy cones, the needs-oiling squeal of the go-carts in their pen. No parents ever brought her to Funland; Big Chuck noticed that by the second day. He liked that. Parents who cut loose the apron strings got his vote. Best way; open the front door and let ’em go.

Not that the streets were a good place for kids to roam, but that was why the Town Council had set up Funland in one of the town parks, close to the year-round set up of swings and slides. The kids could vent their energies in Funland, and their parents didn’t have to worry

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