[#046] Whirling Lights

Whirling light and cotton candy stained the night blue and pink above the boardwalk. The music of the carousel and the clanking of the coaster anchored to the cove meshed into a siren song of shouts and laughter echoing through the beachside park, and every face passing under the entrance marquee lit up with happiness found or anticipated.

But that was memory now. Only ghosts tread the planks of the boardwalk tonight.

Legends always layered over the Baywalk Bonanza park: Rumors of death on the ferris wheel or monsters swimming under the Tunnel of Love, stories of kids who disappeared from the mirror maze inside the Paladin's Castle funhouse, sinister yet dubious gossip about the old fortune teller... These were the trails still walked in the park by echoes in the schoolyards and whispers in the taverns.

Some say the Bonanza still lives late at night, when the last light dims over Main Street and the last window shutters on Clyde. Adults pretend they don't hear it, but kids who live near the edge of the sand still sit up late at their windows pressing ears to the glass and listening to the music pouring in from the beach and wondering...

Who runs the machines at night? Who rides them? Who's voice is that we hear on the wind, whipping through the sky on the Whirlpool coaster or dropping from the top of the Vertigo Tower with a mouthful of shock and joy? Who's popping corn on the walk if nobody goes to the old Bonanza anymore?

And every now and then someone fed up with the lies will pull up their window, climb down into the street, and walk out to let the park swallow them up. Parents stand at the gates the night after and watch for them, listening for their laughter in the spinning gears of the Ferris wheel or the roller coaster.

But they're never seen again.

Until the day the lights came on before dusk, and the wheels spun up and the coaster roared and all of us could see it from the crowd in front of City Hall. Scents of cotton candy and buttered popcorn and pizza filled the air as we gathered before the gates of the Baywalk Bonanza, brothers and sisters and parents of the vanished all staring at each other and yearning for the temptations of the boardwalk and our missing children, pleading with ourselves and with each other:

Do we wait and see if they return? Or do we run ahead and join them in mystery?