Carla shakes the ferrets from her head as she hits the street. Sometimes she’s tough and good but other times she’s over-sensitive. She’s disappointed by every holiday and by her friends losing touch when she moved. She’s disappointed by Madison, a toy town with its railroad and lakes and State House on its tidy hill, its middle-class straight people smugly slapping rainbow stickers on every naked door. The kind of people she’s afraid to tell she’s pan, because then she has to prove all their prejudices right. She’s disappointed by her job at the library, for not being more challenging without being harder. Even when she was most in love, she was still sometimes disappointed by Dave, by the way she saw him through the eyes of other women, how they so easily laughed with him and swatted at him, even pressed in when they hugged him, right in front of Carla—that’s how unthreatening he was. She was disappointed by the ferrets just now for being what they’re made to be: wild.

As the cold pushes up through her shoes, lifting her, she relaxes. This is the same feeling she gets entering a bar or club. There are so many people, where else could she want to be? Everyone’s here. She can relax and stop searching.

Last year at the fair, two kids were stabbed, one fatally. Sixteen undergrads ended the day in the hospital for alcohol poisoning. By Carla’s supplemental statistics, about half the fairgoers lost their lunch, three quarters got too wasted to walk, and one million beer cans were crushed into silver pancakes on the pavement. The next day, sore and exhausted, she tried to peel one of these pancakes up, but it had fused with the road.

Kids sit on steps and drink, drawing boobs on their foreheads, throwing a foam football so it wobbles on the yellow morning air. Some kids already hold their stomachs, bent over. Two girls fight, torsos leaning apart. No one pays attention to Carla. No one even knows they want to fuck her yet, won’t know until they’re halfway through. Though she’s shivering in her pajamas under her coat, she needn’t hurry. She lets her gaze settle on sinewy arms and beer bellies, breasts pushing at sweaters, chest hair poking from T-shirts, curly thick fuzz she could hold in her fist. A stirring builds low in her stomach.

A thick-bodied boy with a blond goatee passes, stumbling on smashed cans and stretching his arms out to steady himself. The kid doesn’t look much like Dave, except for a quality of movement in the way he swings his arms, some echo in his loaf of solid hair. Her memories activate that easily, rehydrating like beans. She wants to grab the boy’s padded waist, bury her nose in his shoulder and maneuver his penis into place.

“Hey,” Carla calls, reaching out to grab his sleeve but stopping short, teasing.

The kid’s pudgy face shines with questions. “Yeah?”

She laughs, harsh but easy, puffs of steam forming the shape of her mirth. “Sorry. I thought you were someone else.” Her teeth ache in the cold.