Even as she slept she was faintly conscious of the rocking water, the stones beneath her head, and at the same time she was walking with her father through a ramshackle amusement park. The sky was dark and only a handful of colored lights still blinked randomly in odd locations. One of her father’s hands held hers and in the other he clutched a long strip of paper tickets, but no matter how far they walked they couldn’t find a single ride that was running. Everything was out of order, even disassembled into ungainly heaps of rusty metal parts, and Luce began to get the impression that everyone else had gone home long ago.

“Forget,” a barker called out to them. Luce looked over at her: a slim woman in a red and silver striped vest with her scarlet cap pulled down to hide her face. Long, dark hair trailed out at the sides. Her voice was peculiar, crumbling and wheezy like snarled winds. “Forget, forget. Forget right here!”

The barker was standing next to a contraption that Luce couldn’t identify, something tall and skinny and skeletal. But as they drew closer Luce clearly saw the word “Forget” winking in pink neon at its base.

“You want to play, don’t you, Luce?” her father asked. He sounded inexplicably sarcastic, even bitter. “We’ve still got all these tickets. Might as well use them up. Every last one of ’em. God knows there won’t be any more soon enough.”

Luce glanced at him shyly. She didn’t know why he was in such a foul mood, and she was afraid he’d get mad at her if she lost the game. And she would surely lose, one way or another. But it would be even worse if she refused to try. “Okay.”

Her father tore off one ticket for the barker, and a huge glittery mallet slipped into Luce’s hand. It was too heavy for her, and she staggered as she approached the machine. It had a tall column of light bulbs like grayish vertebrae and a big red button at the bottom, just above the blinking FORGET. Luce looked around for her father, but he wasn’t there anymore. Only the barker still stood behind her, and she was much taller than she’d been before and oddly spiny-looking.

“Forget right here!” the barker breathed mournfully. She didn’t sound encouraging. “Forget me. At least forget me enough, just enough . . . my Lucette, my little light . . .”