We Reach an Abandoned Village, Close to the End
originally published in Cellar Door

We wonder how one constructs a village long before we wound up in an overgrown bamboo grove with hand-painted signs in English and Japanese urging us to push-forward, to see what a Children’s Song Park could possibly have to offer—a hidden youthful melody that melts the hearts of sons and daughters of Satan; a song that would cause hurricanes to turn counterclockwise and stop nuclei from fusing.  Is there a conversation with loved ones about the sanctity of the land?  Who will be the one to fill the cooler with ice and soda in order to make a quick gold coin, or diamond, or whatever currency we have been collecting off of the death of others?  There is no leaf.  There is no typewriter.  There is no saving here.  These are questions that perhaps were once asked during the initial construction of the Children’s Song Park—this crab museum that we traverse through; it is obvious that the brain-trust behind such an attraction has long since packed up and left this area, perhaps even left this world all-together, starting anew in some other locale, far, far away from failed plans of educating the masses on the true kings of the Decapoda and the harmonies of schoolchildren.  We can imagine the park flourishing; it may flourish again after all is over; we might fly over everything after it has turned green, people we have talked to might wave, third-party vendors selling trinkets of crustaceans and cassette tapes of classic children’s songs as families dared to touch the exoskeletons of Ghost crabs while admiring bronze statues of children playing baseball, the metal brought to life simply by walking past, the crackling of a soundbox and the familiar instrumentation, kids holding onto Coca-Cola cans and singing along.  Instead, feral cats, hundreds of them, surround us pleading in chorus to the point where they are drowning out the waves hitting the cliff nearby, joining in with the recorded songs whispering out of an unseen speaker.  We run out of the park and to a raft, a boss, a castle, our legs against cat fur.  We have no way to feed any of them—we cannot stop their cries.