By the Ferris Wheel

The theme park has dried up. The Ferris wheel is rotating with a rusty screech, its elephant-shaped cabins empty and at places completely missing. The concrete labyrinthine paths between the so-called attractions – a shooting range is never an attraction – are marked with a web of cracks that used to host stubborn weeds but is as void of life as everything else these days. Pogo horses rattle from time to time for no obvious reason. A crow flies above high in the sky, and somehow, it does not disintegrate. Maybe, it is too high, that rascal. A northern wind blows lightly, raising dust in the air, making it twirl like a mini tornado, until it reaches a clown-shaped stand post and drops dead. The smell of sweet candy, however, still hangs around, and that counts for something. Then it comes. A metallic pitch grows to a feverish level, two plates of concrete separate uncovering a hidden compartment beneath the ground, and a number of Cyclops soldiers jump up from it. “Let’s shake some dust,” says one of them and off they go. After awhile, an inverse pitch announces shift in the mechanism, the concrete plates close, and the compartment becomes invisible again. The crow flies down to a pogo-horse and upon first touch, it bursts into zillion molecules.