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The first m&m hit the back of my eye, I saw green and fructose. Everything was sweet, including the pain. My little sister grabbed them by the handful, her chubby fingers letting the rest fall in between like rain. No one hesitated at the idea of loose chocolate candies, we were already starving for them, shoving them in the pockets of our puffer jackets. Then came the beaded necklaces, metallic pink and purple, some with the beads shaped like hearts. We wrapped them all around ourselves, stacking them onto our necks until we couldn’t see. My sister wore them on her arms like pool floats.
The clowns walked down the street spraying us with their flowers, and we opened our arms and called out after them, begging to be doused. And if you were brave enough to open your mouth you would see that the flowers were full of bourbon instead of water. At this point, half the crowd is wasted and covered in accessories, and the balloons start to come through. They take women from the crowd and put them inside, inflating the space around them. And these women join the parade in their new rubber cages, thrilled and hurdling themselves into everyone, collecting the confetti on the sides of their hamster balls. I think about joining them, but I don’t, I’m still hungry.
Next comes the mermaids, throwing sardines into the crowd. They reach their hands deep into metal pails and toss around fistfuls, the oil showering the tops of our heads. We unhinge our jaws and shout for them to come closer, to feed us more fish. A fisherman leads the front of the float, and pretends to be on rough water, steering wildly to nowhere. One of the mermaids has a peppermill she grinds into our open mouths. They lift up their tails to reveal roller skates and follow the fisherman down the street.
Next is a float full of mimes, with faces painted like the French flag. My sister is afraid, so I let her nestle into my leg as they pass. They carry brown paper bags full of baguettes and start hurling them into the crowd like harpoons. One of them places a baguette in his mouth and eats the whole thing Lady-and-The-Tramp-style with another mime. Some of them have cartons of cigarettes and they pop them into everyone’s mouths before lighting matches on the bottom of their shoes. Now the whole crowd is eating bread and smoking, even the children.
Next comes a man all by himself, smiling as if the parade is just for him. And maybe it is? We all wonder. He is wearing a leather jacket and aviator sunglasses and stops to take photos and sign people’s foreheads. And then we think he must be someone because he is wearing a jacket inappropriate for the climate and people want him to write all over them. So we start to scream and scramble to look for pens and digital cameras. But there is a short man right behind him with a red wagon full of them: composition notebooks and black markers and single-use cameras and he starts tossing them into the crowd, hurling the notebooks like frisbees and hitting us all in the chest, but we are thrilled. A cardboard hospital follows close behind, women in nurses uniforms bandaging up elbows and administering flu shots. Two of the nurses get lazy and just start chucking the needles onto either side. I inject one of the needles into my arm and the man next to me asks if I can do the same for him. He rolls up his shirt sleeve to reveal a large phoenix tattoo and I stick him just below the talons.
The last float of the night is Santa Claus, but he doesn’t hand out anything, just holds his belly and waves. Everyone looks at him with the same disappointment. We walk home full of fish and holding all our new toys. I look down and my arms are starting to bruise, but they are the most perfect shade of purple.
