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George twiddled his thumbs in his booth and watched how the brown,

clayey knuckles danced overtop of one another. Not as supple as they
had once been, his thumbs -- no longer the texture of wet clay on a
potter's wheel; more like clay after it had been worked to exhausted
crackling and brittleness. He reached into the swirling vortex of the
cotton-candy machine with his strong right hand and caught the
stainless-steel sweep-arm. The engines whined and he felt them strain
against his strong right arm, like a live thing struggling to escape a trap.
Still strong, he thought, still strong, and he released the sweep-arm to
go back to spinning sugar into floss.
A pack of boys sauntered down the midway, laughing and calling,
bouncing high on sugar and g-stresses. One of them peeled off from the
group and ran to his booth, still laughing at some cruelty. He put his
palms on George's counter and pushed against it, using them to lever
his little body in a high-speed pogo. "Hey, mister," he said, "how about
some three-color swirl, with sprinkles?"
George smiled and knocked the rack of paper cones with his strong
right elbow, jostled it so one cone spun high in the air, and he caught it
in his quick left hand. "Coming riiiiiight up," he sang, and flipped the
cone into the floss-machine. He spun a beehive of pink, then layered it
with stripes of blue and green. He reached for the nipple that dispensed
the sprinkles, but before he turned its spigot, he said, "Are you sure you
don't want a dip, too? Fudge? Butterscotch? Strawberry?"
The boy bounced even higher, so that he was nearly vaulting the
counter. "All three! All three!" he said.
George expertly spiraled the floss through the dips, then applied a thick
crust of sprinkles. "Open your mouth, kid!" he shouted, with realistic
glee.
The boy opened his mouth wide, so that the twinkling lights of the
midway reflected off his back molars and the pool of saliva on his
tongue. George's quick, clever left hand dipped a long-handled spoon
into the hot fudge, then flipped the sticky gob on a high arc that
terminated perfectly in the boy's open mouth. The boy swallowed and
laughed gooely. George handed over the dripping confection in his

strong right hand, and the boy plunged his face into it. When he
whirled and ran to rejoin his friends, George saw that his ears were
already getting longer, and his delighted laugh had sounded a little like
a bray. A job well done, he thought, and watched the rain spatter the
spongy rubber cobbles of the midway.
#
George was supposed to go off-shift at midnight. He always showed up
promptly at noon, but he rarely left as punctually. The soft one who had
the midnight-to-six shift was lazy and late, and generally staggered in
at twelve thirty, grumbling about his tiredness. George knew how to
deal with the soft ones, though -- his father had brought him up
surrounded by them, so that he spoke without his father's thick accent,
so that he never inadvertently crushed their soft hands when he shook
with them, so that he smiled good-naturedly and gave up a realistic
facsimile of sympathy when they griped their perennial gripes.
His father! How wise the old man had