You meet the first one when you win a purple stuffed bunny at the ring toss and give it to his little cousin who is visiting from Georgia, up past bedtime. She’s won nothing and is wailing. When the older cousins return from riding The Scrambler, he ditches everyone and the two of you end up in the family car, a cherry red Chevy Suburban with soft leather seats and Livingston’s Last Man Standing playing on the Bose stereo system. Those beginning piano notes—you have never heard anything so lovely and you wish you could just lie there and listen, but this boy is expecting something.

You meet the second one working at the churros stand and you tell him you love those ridges, how they keep the cinnamon sugar taste coming, how they have a fascinating mouthfeel. He tells you he’s off work soon and you ride the merry-go-round for kicks, then The Scrambler, knowing but not caring that you’re risking a barf fest, and finally The Zipper, that small metal death trap, and you wonder if he’ll be disappointed if you fall out and you die but there you are, hale and hearty returning to the churros stand, and his car has old tools, fast food wrappers, empty beer cans, and a pacifier on the floor. I have her every other Sunday, he says. You share some gin and his hair feels greasy and as he peels off his clothes, you realize that sugary deep fried smell is baked into his skin.

You meet the third one when he is showing his Nubian dairy goat at the fair and the other goats look calmly at the judges while being inspected while his, number 7, fidgets and then when it’s showing time the other goats walk calmly in a circle with their owners but his runs off and he looks a bit ridiculous chasing after it. His truck smells of hay. You learn you both were forced to kneel for punishments—you on uncooked rice and him on the jagged edges of bottle caps and you agree he had it worse.

At a certain point you stop counting, you stop remembering, except for the fried pickle guy, the tip a troll guy, and the fried ice-cream guy who brags about going on the Kingda Ka roller coaster which reaches speeds of 128 miles per hour in 3.5 seconds. “I wasn’t gonna pussy out,” he said.

You dream about a mother with pink cotton candy hair and chocolate covered banana arms and legs and a voice like those blue lake piano notes rising in the first one’s car. Your cotton candy mother moves slowly and deliberately. Although she’s a little sticky, her touch is a lantern prayer, cuddling you at the edge of this flat Earth.