Amanda Trout

Aperture

10.07.2024 12:46 a.m.—Quiet July night. The footage has no sound, but you can tell it’s quiet by the lack of shuddering leaves, the stillness of the fountain, the way the eyes in each bronze statue don’t move. You live the paradox of the watcher through the screen—there but not there, experiencing but not experiencing, watching but not watching. You took this job for ten dollars an hour. You are not paid to do more than watch and record.

10.07.2024 12:47 a.m.—Something flashes by the train shed, again by the crossing, again by the southside curve. You watch as you were told to, scrabble for a pen with your free right hand. It falls from the security desk and lands near your sole, rolls so you can’t let your heel down without crushing the cheap green plastic. Your eyes drop for a second. The sharp heat of a gun against your skull quickly corrects your mistake. You continue to grapple with your head at an odder angle, always watching the screen—yes, always—until your fingers lasso the pen back into your palm. You note the train’s escape in your logbook’s appropriate column, mark checks for “driverless lightspeed,” “sleepwalking,” and “non-casualty.”

10.07.2024 1:13 a.m.—The monitors switch perspective against their will. They do this every 1:13. The pixels glow purple, swirl in metamorphosing shapes—mushroom, horse-eye, music box, carousel—hypnotic, but you’ve practiced not letting sleep take you; the gun is still there. The carousel operator is dancing, weaving in and out of horses and poles with an invisible partner. Three pinecones hit the carousel gates in quick succession. The operator stops dancing, and the pine tree wilts back under his gaze, rains pinecones and needles on the grass. You turn to a new page in the logbook, mark “unsuccessful revenge” three times, mark yourself safe from pixie leading.

10.07.2024 1:42 a.m.—You are alerted to a potential break-in at the concession stand, a breach in the main door defenses. The monitors show the door with fresh claw and beak gouges, a white tailfeather gleaming in the hinge as it swings. You press the hidden emergency button under the desk out of muscle memory, silently pray the morning shift left out an appropriate offering.

10.07.1950 2:00 a.m.—A loud sonic boom outside. The yellow Post-it on the screen corner says “beware train-fueled temporal anomalies” and “rations packed behind golf clubs” and “clock out by 1959.” The gun behind your head has become a Beretta machine pistol. The carousel operator hasn’t aged a day. He’s dressed in a purple suit coat and a tie, has his hand intertwined with another young man’s as he helps him sit side-saddle. The man laughs, eyes swirled with mirth, magenta, and alcoholic haze. You see him mouth something about trees and point to the bare ground just outside the carousel gate.

10.07.1959 2:01 a.m.—A monkey escapes the zoo again, climbs into the engine car of the train and takes it to space. You write a note for maintenance to sweep each seam for stardust in the morning, then another for the zookeepers about potential monkey motion sickness. There’s a TV in the back corner of the security office now running a black-and-white reel of the local news. ABLE, BAKER TO BEGIN SPACE FLIGHT PREPARATIONS, the screen shouts. You slip a pair of earplugs from the desk drawer, flip the cameras from zoo to carousel to train and back again.

10.07.2024 2:02 a.m.—You do not clock out on time. The system does it for you. The peacock in the concession stand hears the gunshot but keeps pecking popcorn kernels from the floor.

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Amanda Trout is a Midwest-based writer with a passion for sound and form. Her work has been featured by Raw Earth Ink, Loud Coffee Press, Locust Shells Journal, and other publications. Her first micro-chapbook, Still Life, was recently published by Yavanika Press. Find Amanda on Instagram (@atrout2972).