The man smiled sadly. "You don't. You just become the one who buries the box for the next Joey. 1997 wasn't a date, kid. It was a loop."
"Don't go to the fair."
He pried it open with a tire iron. Inside: a cracked Polaroid of a boy who looked exactly like him—same cowlick, same gap-toothed grin—but wearing baggy jeans and a Spawn T-shirt. Beneath the photo, a handwritten letter: joey 1997
The next morning, the carnival was gone. Under the sycamore tree, a fresh patch of dirt. And in a little boy's bedroom across town, another Joey woke up with a strange feeling, a scar on his palm he didn't remember getting, and a whisper in his ear: The man smiled sadly
The carnival music swelled. The mirrors flickered. And Joey—1997—felt himself folding backward through time, becoming the boy in the photograph, the writer of the letter, the ghost at the bottom of the slide. 1997 wasn't a date, kid
"How do I stop it?" he whispered.
He slid for too long. Minutes. Hours. The mirrors on either side didn’t show his reflection—they showed other Joeys. A Joey with a black eye. A Joey holding a gas can. A Joey crying in a parked car, 1997 written on the license plate. At the bottom, he landed in a pile of dried leaves and ticket stubs from a summer fair decades old.