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The Fair and the First Flame

A week after the settlers of Tatooine’s golden desert finished their moisture harvest, the fair–with perfect timing–arrived and established itself for three wild, celebratory nights a few flicks away from the farm where Cliegg Lars had been born and raised.

The fair was equipped with the sort of exciting but dangerous amusement rides that could be constructed or torn down in their entirety within an hour or two by pit droids. Snacks either so sweet they were guaranteed to induce a sugar high in young children or so greasy that they would elevate any adult human’s risk of a coronary by at least twelve percent at a conservative estimate. Game booths where cheap prizes could be won by the lucky at odds that would inevitably favor the fair rather than the customer in true Tatooine scammer fashion. A bevy of guards sufficiently armed to deter any impromptu Tusken Raider attacks.

Sixteen-year-old Cliegg Lars had done everything he could to prepare for a pleasant and diverting evening at the fair. He had saved every credit he earned by the sweat of his brow working diligently to help his parents with the moisture harvest. He had secured his parents’ permission to come here on the family speeder. He had even, most importantly, gathered his courage to ask Aika to join him on a date–their very first–at the fair and had been amply rewarded for his bravery when she said yes.

The sound of her yes had been music to her ears. A song his mind played over and over for him. One he never tired of hearing no matter how many times his brain repeated it in a loop like a malfunctioning holoprojector.

She would meet him, they had agreed days ago when he had mustered the requisite nerve to ask her on a first date, outside the fair gates. He could see her now. Standing apart from the milling crowds of families and couples. Waiting for him.

His throat tightened, and his tongue seemed knotted in his mouth. Speech would be difficult. He was grateful when she spoke first.

“You didn’t stand me up,” she remarked, flashing him a suns-bright smile. A smile that attested to an unshakeable confidence that he wouldn’t stand her up.

“I’d never stand you up.” He took her small hand between his larger one. Guided her toward the line where they could purchase admittance tickets. “I’d be fired into a thousand suns first.”

He had meant the oath seriously–seriously as he did everything else–but she seemed to find something humorous in it. For her smile grew into a laugh that felt precious as water to him. A laugh to be hoarded for hard times. “Being fired into even one sun would kill you, and I do not wish that.”

“Because I didn’t stand you up?” he asked. Responding to her banter with some teasing of his own as the line moved forward.

“Exactly.” She laughed again. Nudged him lightly with her elbow.

They had reached the front of the line. Seeing her on the cusp of rummaging in the purse strung across her chest, he shook his head firmly. “My treat.”

Before she could argue–the women of Tatooine were as fiercely independent as their men as his mom often said–he pulled enough credits from his wallets to buy his ticket and hers. Watching a significant chunk of his moisture harvest earnings vanish into the hungry maw of the fair’s cash register.

They stepped into the teeming fairgrounds. A garish rainbow of neon hololights illuminated the scene, and a medley of the Outer Rim’s latest hits thrummed through tinny speakers at far too frequent intervals for the enjoyment of Cliegg’s throbbing eardrums.

A few meters into the fair, there was a hawker selling cheap, disposable holocams. The kind designed for a single-use. The sort that printed out its holophotos a moment or two after snapping them.

Aika paused. Dug in her purse. Purchased one of those cheap holocams. Explaining to Cliegg with no trace of sheepishness that she wanted them to be able to remember this night forever.

Walking on a little farther, they came to a row of booths with an array of games where myriad prizes cheap as Aika’s new holocam could be won with a pinch of good fortune and a dint of pioneering persistence.

“Anything you’d like me to win for you?” He gestured expansively at the booths and prizes surrounding them. Hoping for an opportunity to impress her with his skill and generosity.

“That stuffed bantha.” She pointed at a large plush toy that apparently could be won with enough accurate darts hurled at the center of a red-and-white target in a booth to their left.

“Challenge accepted,” he told her. Then stepped up to the booth. Paid for the privilege of not being able to win anything as all three of his darts missed the target.

It took the pain of wasting more of his credits on five more rounds of the game before he finally hit the target’s center with all three of his darts and won the stuffed bantha, which he immediately offered Aika.

“It might have been cheaper to take me to Anchorhead and buy me a stuffed bantha from the toy store there,” she commented, but she did squeeze his wrist in gratitude for the plush he had won her.

“I wanted to win it for you,” he grunted gruffly. Cheeks blazing. “And now I have.”

“Now you have,” she echoed. Thrust her cheap holocam into his hand. Beamed at him like a holovid starlet. “Take a picture of me with the stuffed bantha you won me.”

He did so. She stowed the freshly printed holophoto in her purse. Then they continued their progress through the fair. Beginning to make their way through a section comprised of snack vendors shouting their wares.

“That cotton candy looks delicious.” Aika sighed as they passed a cart selling twinning spirals of the pastel blue and pink fluffy candy. Her breath longing and dreamy as a puff of cloud. As cotton candy.

“I’ll buy us some.” Cliegg halted. Waited while a mom and dad bought two sticks of cotton candy for their children, who were bouncing on the balls of their feet in gleeful anticipation of the sweet treat. Watching the children with their parents, he wondered if one day he and Aika might come to the fair with their own children. Then worried–a sandstorm rising within him–that he was planning too soon. A bad habit he had because he hated change and valued his routines.

He paid for a stick of cotton candy for them to share. The saccharine stickiness of it clang to his fingers and lips as he ate, but Aika seemed blissful munching on it. Remarking almost wistfully, “It tastes like we are eating a cloud, doesn’t it?”

“When have you ever tasted a cloud?” Cliegg chuckled. Eyeing her dubiously. Her fanciful talk too much for him who had always preferred to have his boots solidly planted on the ground instead of his head floating whimsically through the clouds.

“All the time,” she retorted. Snapping another holophoto of them sharing the spiral of cotton candy. “Whenever I go hiking on the plateaus and sand mountains.”

Her father, Cliegg remembered, was a great hiker. Finding some sort of strange satisfaction in trekking the rugged paths of the harsh Tatooine landscape.

They had reached the ferris wheel that stood in pride of place at the beating heart of the fair as its tallest structure and most popular attraction. As they waited on line for their turn to ride it, they finished their cotton candy.

When they boarded the basket that was to carry them around the ferris wheel, it wobbled unsettlingly. Once they were seated with the safety strap fastened across their laps by the attendant, the spokes of the wheel spun. Lifting them toward the crest of its cycle.

As their basket ascended, more and more of the sprawling fairgrounds and the nearby desert with its dunes and moisture farms was revealed to them in the bright lights of the ferris wheel. Once they reached the circle’s apex, Aika again whipped out her holocam and took another picture. The golden flash snapping over them. Blinding them for the moment the holocam required to print out the holophoto.

Then, as if spurred to it by the desert wind smacking across their faces and snatching at their tan farmers’ tunics, they kissed for the first time. Long, soft, and slow. Her eyes were cotton candy blue, and on her lips the cotton candy sweetness lingered.

He never wanted the night at the fair to end, but it did as all nights beneath Tatooine’s silver stars did. The twin suns inevitably and inexorably rising, and, when, years later, the twin suns rose on the morning of their marriage, he was grateful for the cheap holocam Aika had bought to preserve the memory of their first date. The sticky sweet taste of their first kiss on the ferris wheel.

They put those holophotos and the memories and sensations they encapsulated into a scrapbook. Aika loved crafting and other creative endeavors.

They had a son. Named him Owen because Aika believed it evoked the liberating sound of wind whistling through a desert canyon. Took him to fairs. Bought him clouds of cotton candy that he devoured with an eager child’s enthusiasm. Rode the ferris wheel with him sitting between them. Pointing exuberantly at every sight he recognized.

When Aika sickened, lying on her deathbed, it was the scrapbook with the pictures of their first visit to the fair that she asked Cliegg to bring her. He stared down at the page of images with tears glistening in his eyes. Images of moments he wished could have been frozen in time. Their first date. Her cuddling with the stuffed bantha he had won her that she still kept tucked beside her when she slept. Them sharing a stick of cotton candy. Them smiling a heartbeat before their first kiss as they sat at the top of the ferris wheel’s spin.

“We were so young when these pictures were taken.” Aika gazed down at the holophotos she had taken along with a piece of Cliegg’s heart years ago when they were teenagers. Her thoughts and words mirroring his as they so often did.

They were so young still, Cliegg noted inwardly. Raging against the injustice and cruelty of a universe that would separate them so soon after they had found each other. They should’ve had so many years left to spend together and with their son. Yet only one of them would live to grow older. Live to see their small son become a man.

“Promise me,” Aika rasped, and Cliegg had to lean close to hear the words fighting to emerge from her mouth. “That you will find love and marry again when I’m gone.”

“I can’t do that.” Cliegg shook his head. Feeling as if his chest had been hacked open with a vibroblade. “I love you too much to ever love anyone else. To even think about marrying someone else.”

“You don’t have to fall in love and marry again right away.” Aika squeezed his trembling fingers with what little strength was left in her body. “Take your time to heal, but when you have, don’t hesitate to marry again. You deserve to be happy with a second wife, and Owen needs a living mother to guide him out of trouble with wisdom and patience.”

“I promise.” Cliegg felt as if the words had been ripped from his chapped lips and broken heart. He kissed her clammy forehead and cold fingers almost frantically because he knew how painfully little time he had remaining to do so.

When she died, she was buried in the warm sand of the farm they had cultivated together. Her funeral attended by settlers from kilometers around. Proof of the lives she had touched. The gaping hole her absence left in the fabric of their world.

For years after Aika’s death, Cliegg could not bear to attend the fairs that sprouted up after the moisture harvest because the memory of her at such an event would be overwhelming. Too likely to risk him collapsing into an inarticulate shell of grief.

Owen reminded him with a child’s precision of this neglect to attend fairs one year.

“Dad.” Owen approached him as the suns set muja on the last day of the moisture harvest. Clinging to the stuffed bantha he had inherited on Aika’s passing. The stuffed bantha Cliegg had won for her when they first went to the fair together. “Can we go to the fair this year? We haven’t been in two whole years. Not since Mom died.”

“We don’t need to go to the fair again.” Cliegg gave a curt grunt. Hoping to curtail the conversation before the thought of Aika made him cry in front of his son. Something he had never done. Not even at Aika’s funeral. Determined to be strong for his boy. “You’ve already been plenty of times.”

“Mom would take me if she were here.” Owen’s lip jutted out with stubborn petulance.

“Don’t pout,” Cliegg barked. Addressing his son more harshly than he ever had before. So harshly that he was certain Aika would have glared at him if she were present to witness his behavior. “Pouting is for spoiled, ungrateful boys. Boys who don’t deserve to go to fairs or anywhere else fun.”

“You’re just being mean!” Owen shouted. Tears shining like stars in his eyes.

The accusation stang more than it should have coming from someone who had not yet celebrated nine birthdays.

“You can go to your room.” Cliegg jabbed a shaking finger in the direction of Owen’s room. “And don’t you dare come out until you’re ready to be more respectful!”

Owen stomped to his room. Slammed the door shut with a rattle behind him once he reached it.

In the subsequent years, Owen never again asked to go to the fair after the moisture harvest.

Cliegg never even considered marrying someone else until a trip to Mos Espa brought him to a used parts shop owned by a sleazy Toydarian. The brown-haired, brown-eyed woman standing behind the counter stole his breath and made his heart patter as it had on his first date with Aika so long ago. A feeling he had thought would never fall over him again.

They talked, and he asked for her comm number, which she gave him with a twinkling smile. Her name was Shmi Skywalker, she said. A name he murmured to himself the whole speeder ride home. Tasting the sound of it on his lips and tongue as if it were a cup of cool water after a day’s hard toil in the broiling suns.

Patience and wisdom. Those were the two qualities Aika had said Owen would need in a living mother. Those were the traits Shmi Skywalker had emanated from behind that shop counter.

They corresponded by comm messages until Cliegg decided that it was time to return to Mos Espa. To see Shmi again. To take her out for a meal and bring Owen along so that his son could meet the woman with whom he was starting to believe he was falling in love.

“There’s a woman friend of mine I’d like you to meet in Mos Espa,” he explained as his excuse for dragging his son with him on this excursion to Mos Espa.

“A woman friend?” Owen’s gaze was sharp as he hopped into the speeder beside Cliegg. “The woman you send comm messages late at night when you think I’m asleep? A girlfriend?”

“A friend who happens to be a woman,” answered Cliegg somewhat repressively. Switching on the speeder’s ignition. “I thought we could grab a meal together.”

“Maybe we could go to a fair one day?” Owen suggested as the speeder rose in the air. Flying out of their farm toward Mos Espa. “You, me, and that woman friend of yours?”

“Perhaps.” Cliegg was astonished to discover that for the first time since Aika’s death he didn’t have the urge to weep into his calloused palms at the mention of going to a fair.

“Dad?” Owen seemed to be a fount of keen questions this morning. “If you marry this woman friend of yours, will I have to call her mom?”

“Marriage is a long way off and may never happen,” Cliegg replied. Brusque and blushing. “All I ask of you now is that you act like you were taught some manners when you’re in her presence."