A Fool Rides the Wheel of Fortune

May Day, 1970… Annabelle, nineteen and disheartened with her coal-town prospects, meets Walt, who runs a game in a traveling carnival and wins a date with her after the show closes. Wandering McCain’s Magic Midway, she enters a sideshow, where a three-armed man reads her Tarot cards. Their mysterious images echo her reality. Later, at a bar in town, Walt boasts of life on the road, and Annabelle confesses her yen to be elsewhere. She takes a shot at adventure and romance, goes to his hotel room, and the next night rolls out of town with Walt and the show — joining a bizarre troupe of characters, who embody aspects of the archetypal Trumps in the Tarot’s Major Arcana. Annabelle narrates her tale of one week among the strange society of a West Virginia carnival, whereupon her love for Walt takes wing amid blind lust, yet soon flutters in and out of her confused heart.