Read Online Apocalypse by Nancy Springer - Free Book Online Page A

carousel horse, showing its teeth. Had there ever been a carousel horse carved with its mouth closed?
    â€œI wouldn’t never let my children go on no carousel,” Sojourner declared. “Them horses start to go up and down, snakes come out of their mouths. A child I knew once got on a carousel horse and whole nest of copperhead snakes come out of its mouth and stung him. Death took him right there.”
    Cally stood speechless. Over the years she had gotten accustomed to the fact that Sojourner didn’t approve of ice cream (“You don’t know what they put in it!”), books, butterflies, bells, trees (“You don’t know what’s going to drop out of them next!”), puppies, garbage disposals and permanent press clothing, but she had just reached the limits of her belief in the negative: no one could not like carousel horses.
    Oona Litwack, who had long since learned, like a good neighbor, simply not to listen, chirped tangentially, “We used to have a wonderful carousel, right here in Hoadley. At that trolley park.”
    â€œTrolley park?”
    â€œDidn’t you know Hoadley used to have a trolley? And they always put a park at the end of the line, out in the country, with a carousel and everything, so’s people could go out on a Sunday afternoon with their families and have a good time.”
    â€œSo’s the trolley company could get rich,” retorted Sojourner.
    â€œYou know nobody cared so much about money back then. Free and easy, that was us when we was on the trolley, on the merry-go-round. Oh, them days felt good. We felt like there was going to be a future for us.”
    â€œTrolley wasn’t good for nothing but for young girls to go out on a Saturday night and get ruint,” snapped Sojourner.
    â€œThey didn’t get ruined, they got married,” said Oona merrily. “That’s how I got married. Right, Cally? You know what they say, the first one comes any time, and after that they take nine months.”
    Cally wasn’t listening. An evening breeze had come up, and her eyes were caught on the spinning of Oona’s many whirligigs, round and round and round. She waved to the ladies on their porches and started on her way, thinking hazily of Yeats and his turning gyres, of the giant carousel of time.… She looked up at the sky, where a display of sun rays, dusty gilt spokes in a celestial wheel, shone down through the clouds over Hoadley. Cally had been a sky-looker always, since she could remember. No matter what dreary bit of concrete her feet stood on, the sky was always there to look at. She gazed up often, on her way to the shopping mall, the mid-week Bible class, the dentist. The sky made her feel like riding a flying horse, like stretching out her hand for a brass ring always just out of reach. The sight of wild geese flying over in autumn, the sound of their piping, were enough to fill her with a pleasant longing. It was the very song of sky. A sunset, if she had time to lose herself in it, could bring tears to her eyes. And the sun rays, wheeling, always wheeling, tokens of passing time …
    Her children tugged at her hands.
    â€œA person looks at the sky too long, they’ll lose their mind!” Sojourner shouted at her back.
    Gigi Wildasin was the first one to say that something peculiar was happening. She was not afraid, not tough old Gigi, the clear-eyed cynic with the frou-frou name—“Gigi,” she had explained to Cally and Elspeth and Shirley out at the stable, stood for “G.G.,” Gladys Gingrich, her maiden name. (“And who the hell would want to go by Gladys?”) She did not mention that in certain high-school and nursing-school circles she had also been called “H.B.,” for “Happy Bottom,” a paraphrase of “Glad Ass,” a pun on “Gladys.” And not for nothing had her ass been called glad. But those memories of sexual escapades, though they