I believe he’s asking if I want to risk not performing as well as Bea has.
And the obvious answer is, of course I fucking do.
“Stand back, Bea, and let a novice show you how this is not to be done,” I say.
She stares at me without blinking for another long moment, and then she laughs. “How far back?”
“Oh, very far. I fear I shall be quite unpredictable with my swing.”
Larry takes six steps to his side.
Pinky sighs heavily and pushes Bea back another four feet as well.
I test the weight of the mallet and find it heavier than expected.
Rather unlikely my swing will crack thedid you even touch the target?line.
But I wind up anyway, doing my best to imitate the way that Bea lifted the mallet, swinging it back over my head, only for the weight of the thing to suddenly and drastically change as I attempt to bring the mallet down.
A woman screams.
Larry does too.
When the mallet strikes the target, it’s missing its head.
The sound of splintering glass crashes through the air.
“My goldfish!” someone yells. “Save my goldfish!”
I spin.
Pinky blocks me with one beefy arm while shoving Bea beside me.
Several people have ducked, huddling close to the ground.
And it’s suddenly clear what happened.
The mallet head detached from the handle at just the wrong moment to fling itself into the booth behind us.
The booth of the ping-pong balls and goldfish bowls took a direct hit from the mallet head.
“You would think the fortune teller could have warned us aboutthis,” I murmur to Bea.
She whimpers.
It’s a soft whimper that has me immediately spinning to face her. “Are you injured? Did it hit you? Are you—oh.”
She appears unharmed.
Unharmed and highly amused.
“I didn’t hit it hard enough to break it,” she says between fits of laughter. “This isn’t funny. Someone could’ve been hurt. Butoh my god, the way it went flying—and then you took out half of the goldfish bowls—you might’ve just solved the biggest problem in the carnival game circuit here.”
People have begun helping the gentleman scoop up his goldfish to deposit them into the bowls that survived the mallet attack.
“It’s a single mallet head.” I look at Bea, who’s bent double, wheezing. “How the hell did it take out that many fishbowls?”
“Like billiards,” Pinky says. “They were touching. Hit one right, it’s gonna break the ones next to it.”
