Otto’s Palooza by Alyssa Aung
Mavis Slaughterhouse was fifteen years older than us, a greying redhead and a former professional wrestler once known as Crimson Slaughter. When I was back in town, Danny took me for a drive and told me this was the woman he loved. Danny met her the night he got beat up for shortchanging a customer at the auto repair shop. Mavis had come to Danny’s rescue, dealing with the bald-spotting penny-pincher in a single devastating chop. I said she sounded like a real keeper. Danny agreed.
In Danny’s car, I swiped through Mavis’s photos on Facebook as Danny espoused his admiration of her broad, muscular, womanly chest. They’d been dating for a month, had watched all Mavis’s box sets, and wanted to one day adopt a baby girl together and name her Danica Maverick. I wondered if it was too soon for them to be thinking about children. Danny disagreed.
Danica Maverick Slaughterhouse would take her mom’s last name –– not Danny’s, not Danny’s dad’s. Danica Maverick would wake up her parents as she jumped in their bed, and she would be loved, and she would always know it. His eyes steady on the road and his hands steady on the wheel, Danny told me he had been reading about cycle breakers, the children who became the parents their own parents hadn’t been. The articles he’d read made him believe things could be different, and that he could be the one to make them that way. I thought of the Danny I’d known in high school, what he’d once told me, how I’d thought I was going to cry or throw up.
“Danny,” I said. “I’m so happy for you. Just don’t rush into anything, yeah?”
Danny tapped the steering wheel and said, “I’m going to propose to Mavis at Otto’s Palooza next week. It’s where we had our first date.”
Otto’s Palooza was the local amusement park. I hadn’t even realized it was still standing. But of course Danny would remember the Palooza. In those days, to the neighborhood kids, Danny had been the king of Otto’s Palooza. Under his guidance, we leapt off the old pirate ship and into the green pond, crawling back to shore with thick muck sluicing off us. We dug for animal skulls behind the petting zoo, declaring any misshapen clump of dirt the real thing. Once, we even tried to climb the broken roller coaster, though only Danny actually hauled himself all the way up and down its hulking metal frame. When he stumbled back to earth, he passed out and smacked his head open. Palooza employees called his parents, but no one picked up. While I waited with Danny in the first aid station, sat on dingy blue plastic chairs, he’d picked at the gauze on his forehead and told me the view had been worth it. The whole world rotating out and around a run down amusement park.
Danny said, reverent, “I told Mavis I’d climb the coaster for her.”
Alyssa Aung is a writer and Barbie collector originally from Hong Kong, currently studying English at UCLA. Her love of storytelling began in childhood, when she would use stuffed toys to enact complex family sagas exploring guilt, betrayal, and the suffering of outcasts. Since then, Alyssa has exchanged the medium of doll monologues for the written word. They have also lost all their baby teeth. Alyssa has participated in creative writing workshops at UCLA and at the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. Their work has previously appeared in The Madison Journal of Literary Criticism and samfiftyfour.
