“the beast”

by Candice Kelsey

The world’s longest wooden roller coaster is undergoing 2,000 feet of track refurbishment. Aptly called The Beast, it’s been the pride of King’s Island for forty years. An eerie image shows the missing track on the curve into its first tunnel. A woman imagines the carpenters involved in the retracking, how they brave the Southwestern Ohio weather to manually reassemble it. How they converge under silent river-birch trees at one of the noisiest intersections on the map of theme parks. Design imperfections on wooden roller coasters make for large tolerance, a term that simply means the ride is rougher and louder than prefabricated steel coasters. She was one of the first to ride The Beast opening day, 1979 — a rare privilege and probably the only professional perk of her father’s thirty-five years at General Electric. She was nine. He was forty-one. Together they flew forward a historic sixty-five miles an hour. The woman has searched the YouTube footage of that day. She sees him in all the broad-shouldered men; herself in all the jittery-jump little girls who hadn’t the faintest idea that life would require a large tolerance, or that wooden tracks could fail. On the other side of life’s second tunnel was the double helix called Alzheimer’s. She learns there are no carpenters for that beast. 

Candice Kelsey teaches writing in the South. Her poetry appears in Poets Reading the News and Poet Lore among other journals, and her first collection, Still I am Pushing, explores mother-daughter relationships as well as toxic body messages. She won the Two Sisters Writing Contest for her micro story, was chosen as a finalist in Cutthroat's Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, and was recently nominated for both a Best of the Net and two Pushcarts. Find her at www.candicemkelseypoet.com