The array of sound effects humming behind Jonas swallows his mother’s panicked voice. Autumn crunches beneath pounding sneakers as he breaks the carnival’s perimeter. Into the darkness, into the stillness of summer’s end. He snickers between gulping breaths, slipping behind the thick of a tree; his head taps the cool bark. Eyes closed, he focuses his breathing, then squints into the night.

A dim glow peeks around overarching branches ahead. As Jonas navigates the woods, he discovers the illuminated outline of a maroon tent. He stops at its entrance, though his mom’s calls have silenced, before pulling at the velvety canvas.

A solo attraction sits at the opposing end of the tent. Legs pretzelled, hunched and hooded in black, the individual is still. Jonas creeps towards the glass that boxes the slumped figure, down an Egyptian runner that separates two columns of antique benches. He lingers where the seating ends; in front of him, distanced from the enclosure, is a thin tower with a cartoon-like button inside. He lifts the clamshell lid and traces the red cylinder with his finger.

“That’s it. Press the button.”

Jonas leaps back. A face, sharpened by the cast of low lighting, smirks underneath its hood.

“Don’t you like surprises, kid? Go on, press it.”

Jonas frowns, eyebrows furrowed.

The smirk remains, and the silhouette tilts its head, exposing its glistening, skinless neck. “Please?”

“Tell me what it does first.”

The upturned lip wavers, then drops––the partial face sinks into the shadowed recesses of the hood again. “I shouldn’t be here.”

“You shouldn’t be…at the carnival?”

The hood shakes back and forth. “I don’t remember how I got here, and they won’t let me go. This is what they do to me….”

The body winces, sucking in air as a draping sleeve is peeled up to a blistered elbow. The arm trembles against the pain of weeping burns and infected flesh.

“…So I can do this.”

That same bloodied hand lifts, and its wrist gives a small flick. Jonas’s eyes widen as a quivering flame sprouts from the charred palm, which quickly extinguishes the fire within a closed fist.

“Please”––the hood collapses, exposing a young, tortured face, the balding left side of his mottled scalp and blood-dripping half-ear––“I just want to go home.”

“What does the button do?” Jonas stammers.

“It lets me out of here.”

Jonas’s gaze falls to the contraption that’ll set the boy free. Let him run back to his parents, instead of away from them, like he’s just done himself. He raises a flat hand, and the boy leans forwards in anticipation.

“Jonas!”

He startles at his name and faces his mom as she stomps across the hollow floorboards. She snatches his arm, yanking him away from the button and the burnt boy like she sees neither. Jonas protests to no avail, and when he cranes to see the attraction behind him, all he finds are the kicks of struggling feet disappearing into the maroon backdrop.