It comes every year. For one hot week in August, children arrive for their first, or another, mechanical thrill. Others return for the nostalgia of stepping back in time, because so little changes here. Tattoos fade, ponytails grow, and the hardened faces gain more wrinkles or silver teeth, but all else remains unchanged. The same men who have looked middle-aged for the past thirty years still stand hunched over the control panel, with their blackened hands resting on knobbed levers, as they stare through blue-lensed sunglasses, beyond the skirt hem and into the thighs of countless teenage girls seated on the Ferris wheel, just as they’ve done to these girls’ mothers, aunts, and friends, and as they will to their daughters and nieces, too, if the road and unemployment cheques don’t kill them.

Softer versions of these men arrive as well, to leisurely patrol the grounds, while nursing a coffee, or sipping from an empty Tim Horton’s cup, as they joyfully take in the sights of delighted and carefree children. No child lover stays home when the Exhibition’s in town. There are others, teenage boys mostly, who come for mischief; young women who arrive for neon-lit romance; mothers who are there because someone has got to take the kids; the fathers who arrive to get drunk, and maybe, impress upon the young women; the grandparents there because someone’s got to take the kids, whose parents lost custody; finally, sparsely dispersed among these patrons exists the minority, who come to see the animals.

Beside the fair grounds, there’s an enormous, eighth-of-a-mile-long windowless building, with rust-stained corrugated steel panels, which locals refer to as “the horse barn.” Aside from the horses who are stabled there year-round, farmers from across several counties arrive with sheep, “meat” cows, and pigs, all of whom have plastic tags bolted to their ears, and they either lay or wander aimlessly in feces riddled stalls, as children pet them, while their fathers lean over the wooden pen-rails, posing patronizing questions to the helpless creatures about their final destinations.

The long line to the bracelet booth is filled with anxious or disgruntled patrons, almost all of whom complain about the exorbitant prices. Except for the scores of children who live in regional housing facilities, and for whom case workers from social services provide vouchers, ensuring the poor children can spend an entire week wandering the fairgrounds unsupervised, as they prod animals, pick fights, and mock the “carnies,” who look upon these hapless youths and see themselves.

A local woman named Kystal arrives every year. She arrives early every morning, and she remains seated on a chemical toilet—a blue rocket-style outhouse—which is one of a dozen that stand in a row along the horse barn. She always takes the one on the far end, and this has gone on for so long that most patrons, and all the workers know that that’s “Krystal’s rocket.” Krystal stays in the outhouse until the rides shut down and the gates close at eleven. Sometimes, she retires afterward to a trailer or truck bed, with one to a dozen workers, until morning. On the hottest days, when the chemicals fail to mask the scent, and the shiny-metal blow flies are hatched, and buzzing in a cloud around Krystal’s head and shoulders, she has her most business. She can make one-hundred dollars an hour, relieving the frustrations of the workers, who can endure no more lustful gawking at girls too young to drive. One year, one of Krystal’s disgruntled townie regulars, enraged at having lost another week of cheap intimacy to the circus, snuck in after dark and cut the CV boots on every truck parked on the fairgrounds.

Every hour or so, one of the ride-attending men rinses vomited cotton candy or corndogs from The Tornado, or The Spyder’s sparkly-painted steel seats, with his thumb over the end of a spurting garden hose. Afterward, he beckons a child to come sit. As with every other ride, when he fastens a belt or secures a bar, his hairy and grease-smeared knuckles brush against the bare legs or belly of the child whose life is dependent on the competence of a man with no background in engineering or hydraulic mechanics, and who never submitted a child abuse registry check before starting employment. When the ride ends, despite having a wet ass and bits of semolina-coated hot dog stuck to their wrist, the nauseated kids hop off and return to the back of the line for another.

This year, Izzy the Lizard Man is featured alongside the other attractions. It’s always a great question around town, whether Izzy’s comin’ this year. The kids love Izzy. Izzy is six foot six, three feet wide, and his drooping belly hangs like an apron from beneath the hem of a tattered and stained yellow shirt with his snake-underlined moniker on it. Izzy has half a dozen rotted teeth, a bald head covered with indiscernibly smudged tattoos, and one eye that stays fixed on the crowd as the other rolls about. The lazy eye is made of glass and has become a part of his show. The crowd waits with anticipation every other year to witness Izzy pluck the glass eyeball from his head and playfully force it into the mouth of a small turtle, bearded dragon, or whatever other creature is handy and whose jaws are too small to willingly let the eye go.

Izzy always invites someone on stage to pop his eye back in place, as the crowd jeers and claps, sending terrifying vibrations to the unfortunate assortment of reptiles, who are housed in knotted pillowcases and Rubbermaid containers with puckered slits punched through the lids by the bone-handled pocketknife that Izzy always wears. The bags and bins rest behind Izzy on the stage, and he occasionally turns to them, then returns carrying a Banana Boa, or a venomous snake with its teeth ripped out. This year, Izzy let a young boy named Tucker handle his eye and then push it back in place, but not before turning to Tucker’s teenage mother in the crowd and asking if it’s alright with “mummy.” At the end of his show, Izzy always explains, in a terrifically high and impedimental voice that belies his ogrish face and figure, that, “Whoeva wanths to take a pit-thaw with one of my peths can fweel fwee to do tho, fwo fwive dah-waws.”

Another core attraction to the Exhibition is the beer tent. Without the beer tent, there would be far fewer fights, Travis MacLeod wouldn’t have killed his wife and three children driving home two summers ago, and few fathers would be willing to attend. At the entrance to the beer tent, there’s a piece of Bristol board taped to a plastic gingham tablecloth draped over a homemade plywood folding table. The sign reads:

1 drink = $5

2 drink = $10

3 drink = $15

4 drink = $20

5 drink = $25

By drink three, you realize there’s no deal; this is simply an itemized times table to prevent confusion. Still, you hear people debating the prices in relation to the number of drinks. One man, who’s already drunk and is feeling confrontational, yells at the bartender, “What’f I want six? Hunh?”

Little does he realize, behind him, there are two men in staff shirts, who look like 80’s wrestlers, both with non-ironic mullets and mustaches, oily, broken-out faces, and freakishly swollen chests and arms that they have grown with the help of trenbolone acetate, purchased from a farmer who works with the show. They’re standing at the man’s rear right flank, and they’ve been eagerly waiting for the opportunity to beat the piss out of someone all day. Neither of them are capable of spelling “antisocial personality disorder,” or passing a psychiatric evaluation, nor do they discriminate in regard to the performance of their duties—any man, woman, or child between twelve and ninety is fair game for a horrendous beating, all they need is a nod from the barman, or a beer spilled on one of their shirts.

There are also the games. Few people realize that the games’ vendors are private contractors who bring their amusement to travelling circuses in exchange for giving the carnival’s management a fraction of their earnings. Behind the scenes, these vendors have frequent quibbles with ride attendants, whom they generally treat as lower on the hierarchy of circus folk. One needs only to say the word “carny,” and blood will surely flow. That’s why Patty, who runs “The Wild West,” looks like she has a purple tennis ball for a left eye this year. She wears a perky plastic cowboy hat that sits on the very top of her head, above her unnaturally yellow waist-length hair, and the hat is held in place by an elastic string that cuts under her jowls. Below her plaid blouse is a matching plastic belt with holstered toy revolvers on either hip. Aside from Patty’s wardrobe, no one can figure out why her game is called “The Wild West.”

The game consists of guns fitted with corks, which are shot at empty paper Pepsi cups on the shelf behind Patty. Each cup has a number from one to five on it, and all the fives are glued to the board. Regardless, if you’re a fair shot—which, at five dollars a shot, you ought to be—then you can walk away with your choice of a small to medium-sized brightly colored marine-themed plushie, mass-ordered online from a Chinese-retailer, or, if you’re like most and only succeed in hitting a one, or nothing, after fifteen dollars, you’ll earn either a knockoff Pokémon or KISS keychain. As Patty is fond of announcing several hundred times a day, “Everyone goes home a winner!”

One positive note about the Exhibition is that more lives start here than end. Practically every year, someone is conceived in a ride attendant’s tent-trailer, or on the dusty hay-strewn floor of an empty stall in a hot barn that smells of horse, spruce, and ammonia. In fact, only one death has occurred at the Exhibition—at least, one in this town. Back in the 90’s, while Rod Stewart was asking the crowd if they thought he was sexy, which he’s done every two hours of every day and night in every town that the Exhibition has stopped in for the past forty-odd years, a boy was flung from the Sea Dragon and splattered to the ground. The show went on. Tarps were held in place, free bracelets were offered, a lawsuit was settled, and since the insurance went sky-high, the business dissolved and, for the first time, registered under a new name. The only other serious incident in this town happened back in ’05, when thirteen-year-old Lilac Rose was scalped after her hair got stuck in one of the Ferris Wheel’s rotating mechanisms. Just another smalltown hullabaloo, another trip to the provincial service center, another re-registration of joint stocks.

Though Lilac’s hair never returned, she does, every year, and now with several children in tow. People whisper as they point at the woman with hypertrophic forehead scars beneath the brim of her ballcap. She pretends not to notice as she overhears, “That’s her!” but she does. In the twenty years since her accident, Lilac has come to consider her scalping as the best thing that has ever happened to her. Most locals have to commit homicide to gain the notoriety she has, and, unlike her, they usually don’t get to live in town afterward to enjoy their celebrity status. She even had an appearance on national news. As a result, Lilac continues to receive attention everywhere she goes, especially here.

At the Exhibition, Lilac is treated like royalty. Izzy has invited her to pop his eye in place four times, which is a record; Ginny, who works the cotton-candy trailer, gives her four kids free cones every year; her first fruitful romantic encounter took place back in ’09, with a now-deceased farmhand named Big Bill, on a straw pile beside a sleeping heifer, in a stall that Bill shoveled just for her; and this year, when a boy of about fourteen—one of the ones admitted on a voucher—stole her hat after she agreed to pose with him for a picture, the two most muscular men she has ever seen chased the boy down beside the barn, past the blue rockets, and took turns lifting him over their heads and slamming his bloodied body against the building’s steel panels and onto the ground.

After the crowd of pitying sympathizers who witnessed the ballcap theft left Lilac, Patty approached and gave her the hat that completed her cowgirl ensemble. She assured Lilac, “Don’t you worry none, hon’, I got extras.” When the night was through, Lilac stood wearing Patty’s miniature hat alongside her sugary-cheeked children in the gravel parking lot, while awaiting a van cab. When the van pulled up, Lilac caught a reflection of herself in the passenger window and thought that she looked and felt like a rock star.

The Merry-Go-Round has been in service since the 1950s. It’s so old that its fixtures are made of cast-iron, and its few original colorful features are still dressed in lead paint. The newest piece of machinery is the Star Trooper, which was bought used in ’95. Once every five years or so, a new song is added to the playlist, alongside Rod, Barbie Girl, Pour Some Sugar on Me, and the rest. Most of the people don’t change, either.

Some of the girls who smoke cigarettes while unknowingly sitting for inspection aboard the Ferris Wheel this August will be absent the next, as they struggle tending to infants they didn’t expect; the oversized security brutes might wind up overdosing, or back in prison; if Krystal fails to claim her rocket, her daughter Neveah won’t—she’s been threatening to dethrone her mother for years; the pigs who shivered as kids pressed hot lighter tips to their skin from between the board rails, and the sheep and chicken and cows who stood all week, in feces and terror, will all be reduced to chops, nuggets, or burgers before next season. These variables change, but no one takes notice.

The blue-lensed men don’t look at the faces, the idiot brute is easy to find, the world is rife with nameless animals that need killing, and management has a roster of names eager to become the next Patty or Ginny. The Lilacs, Izzys, and habitually defanged cobras are harder to find, but they’re out there, too, yet the only place you see them is at The Farmer’s Exhibition.