Stuck at the top

Text 1: The Bolt, by Imogen Sallow

An original short story extract.

The wheel stopped with their car at the very top, and for a moment Saffie thought it was part of the ride. They always stopped you at the top. That was the point. You sat there swinging gently over the whole fair, the lights spread out below like spilled sweets, and you screamed a bit, and then it carried you down.

It did not carry them down.

Below, the music from the waltzers went on thumping, tinny and far away. The generator droned. Somebody on the ground was shouting, but the wind took the words and pulled them apart before they reached the top, so that all Saffie heard was a vowel, then nothing.

“It’s fine,” said Jordan. He was holding the safety bar with both hands. “They do this. It’s fine.”

The wind came again, harder, from the direction of the sea. It came across the car park and over the burger vans and up through the spokes of the wheel, and the car began to rock. Not much at first. A creak forward, a creak back, like a cradle. Then more. The bar pressed into Saffie’s stomach. The seat tilted, and the lights below tilted with it, sliding up the sky and down again, and her stomach slid with them.

She made herself look at something still. The moon was still. It sat over the pier, small and white and indifferent, like a coin somebody had dropped and not bothered to pick up.

“Jordan,” she said.

He did not answer. When she looked at him his eyes were shut and his lips were moving, and she realised he was not saying anything to her at all.

The car swung. The bolt above their heads, the one that held the whole car to the wheel, gave a short, high squeak, like a trainer on a gym floor, and then it was quiet again. Saffie stared at it. It was a perfectly ordinary bolt, slightly rusty, the size of her thumb. She had never in her life looked at a bolt before. Now she could not look at anything else.

Then, with a jolt that knocked their teeth together, the wheel moved. Down. Slowly, grudgingly, a few metres at a time, the lights rose to meet them, the music grew louder, the shouting became words, and the car bumped to a stop at the bottom beside a man in a fluorescent jacket who looked, Saffie thought, even more frightened than she was.

Explore how Imogen Sallow uses language and structure to present Saffie’s fear when the wheel stops.

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