by Nicholas Michael Ravnikar

His kids kept asking for funny cake on the drive up. He wasn’t sure what that meant, but he promised it anyway. 

He usually complained about how they don’t listen, but compared to some of the others he saw, they were on their best behavior. 

Everywhere around the pool, little bodies in wet swimsuits streaked past whistling lifeguards and pool rule signs. Most of the adults didn’t bother with caution, either. 

Where the lazy river curls around the hot tub, he saw more than a couple almost bite it on the wet footprints and person-sized puddles that decorated the pocked concrete.

Every time he turned around, he braced himself for a sudden red blossom to follow the thwack he expected to punctuate the shrill children’s screams of enjoyment and parents commiserating in more languages than he could understand.

For all his anxiety, though — and for all of the noise — none of the lines took more than five minutes to queue through — not for the slide where everyone rode in a big raft together, or the one that emptied out into a big funnel after swirling you around like a toilet bowl getting flushed. 

Even outside in the light rain, under the steel awning over the go-karts pit, nobody waited longer than it took for the last group of racers to hit the track before a fresh supply of rumbling engines took their places.

But someone had parked a stroller close to the exit gate on the south side of the intermediate race track. They had turned it away from the sun, with the visor pulled taut to keep the baby shaded by the cloth vinyl shell. 

The gate opened into the track, so it didn’t knock the carriage over but racers kept side-stepping until one of them tripped and the whole stroller flipped. 

He didn’t think; he just spun around and reached out for the plastic handle, but it was too late. 

But there was no baby — just a paper plate with a lattice of fried dough, covered in powdered sugar, spilled out onto the tar-patched asphalt.

“Look, Daddy,” his daughter said. “Funny cake!”