Jon Michael Anzalone
87-10 37th Avenue #211
Jackson Heights, NY 11372
917.568.5032
jon.anzalone@gmail.com


About 1,400 Words

     In the morning, just before the sun rose over Jamaica Bay, a cigarette smoldering in a garbage heap set fire to some loose, greasy paper wrappers. The little glowing ember edges darkened them to brittle ashes that blew over the boardwalk, where they joined the sand on the beach. The sea air smelled the same as always, salty and misty and light, and the thin wisps of clouds that hid the stars were spread across the sky; they began to turn rich and colored with the daylight. In a lean-to under the wooden planks, young Sylvester Meade felt warm.

     For the year since he left his home he lived at Coney Island. He earned his money sweeping the grounds, which he spent on games and rides while he awaited the appearance of his idol, George Cornelius Tilyou, patriarch of Steeplechase Park. But here, like in his old home, he struggled to gain the man's attention. But in this place, free of the locked doors and the belt, he was able to dream.

     His eyes were closed, and he was wrapped in the scraps of a cotton parka with his head set on a sandy mound. His eyes stayed closed while he began to find his consciousness, his voice in his head waited patiently for his mind to return from the dark void. He had dreamed that Tilyou unveiled a new invention. The young Sylvester saw him remove a concealing sheet to a chorus of gasps, and, even then in a dream, he had to push between the legs of men and the wide skirts of ladies to get a better view. He scrambled to climb the scaffold over a funnel cake stand in fine time to watch Kai, a diminutive fireman from the Dreamland Midget Village, proudly crowned king before strapping into his seat: a beautiful throne with an ornate Oriental umbrella above it; from each of the wire ribs a piece of meat was dangled, and below, a hawk was tethered to each foot of the chair. The birds flapped their wings and strained after the food, and the throne unsteadily lifted up. It was five and then ten feet high, and then it rose above the Dew Drop slide. The people cheered, Tilyou made his proclamations of wonder, and Sylvester wished he could be on that throne flying to Baghdad or Peking, pulled through the air with the flocks of birds as his highways.

     The gulls began to caw as he laid there in his shanty, the blue tarpaulin billowed in the wind that spread the flames through Steeplechase Park. Now the gulls sounded loud and angry, not like the martial and steady squawk of the hawks pulling his flying throne through the sky of his mind. His eyes stayed closed still. The noise was so common here with crashing waves and early-morning fishermen and the rush of the riders on the Scenic Railways, and his eyes stayed closed as he dozed back into sleep. He would not remember the exact feeling of the moment he fell asleep, but it was like this: he was as though he was within the center of a black waterfall with its currents rushing both up and down at the same time, pulling him both ways, and when the water ran out he was asleep.

     From atop the mighty throne, Sylvester with his arm around the young king Kai flew onward across the Atlantic, the Maghreb, Egypt, Palestine, Persia, and Transoxiana, the places that he had heard of from the sons of sailors and the gypsies on the Bowery, his companion grifters. He could point his finger out at the earth below him and dot the landscape with cities. They would run their roads out like arteries. The people moved through the thoroughfares of Isfahan and Ashgabat, a village would form at its peripheries, and farmland hashed in alongside the capillaried dirt roads between the rivers Amu and Syr Darya.

     Kai put his hand gravely on the shoulder of the boy Sylvester, as he pointed down to Samarkand, his most recent creation, at the heel of two armies, from where arose a choking gray smoke that began to whip through the jet stream. The hawks began to falter, and the throne descended into the fray.

     There on the ground, as he pushed open the tresses of indigo curtain, the clouds of rough soot rushed in and began to seep into the lungs of Sylvester Meade. He coughed and covered his eyes and ran, shaking the dust and dirt from his body. The city was burning, he now knew, and the din was the roar and convergence of the two great armies he had seen from the sky. He crawled on the dirty ground through the winding pathways, as up above the flames engulfed the trees and markets and began to swallow up the Ferris Wheel.

     Sylvester looked up as it made a plaintive, aching sigh as its beams buckled and bowed and slowly bent down. As he watched it come down on top of him, the dropping feeling in his chest felt the same as the time he first rode it after slipping the operator a steel slug in lieu of a coin. As the structure came to rest in the dirt around him, the ride's green cab swung down at him. He kicked his feet into the dirt, pushing himself back and at last up against a metal girder, but it was to little avail. As it slowed to the peak of its swing, the car of the Ferris Wheel pushed its hot metal into his body, singing into his skin the grinning emblem of Tilyou's park, the Steeplechase Funny Face: the countenance of a boy with an awful, tooth-filled mouth. It glowered its frightful smirk as the cab swung back and settled to rest.

     Sylvester climbed under the steel-lattice skeleton of the Ferris Wheel and wrapped his wound in the cotton parka. Now in the great central pavilion of Samarkand, the Registan, with three burning madrassas facing inward, the armies were gathered. On one side, the Dreamland army of little people, and, across, the forces of George Cornelius Tilyou, caped in flame. Tilyou stepped forward and beckoned the champion of the Dreamland army, and so came forward Sylvester.

     Each took hold of a great fire hose, hoisted by their compatriots behind them as they took aim at the base of the first inferno. Sylvester thought of his days playing the carnival games, spraying water into the mouths of metal clowns, and how he had won the toy doll away from the other boys. His body flushed red with adrenaline as the first blaze subsided, and he cheered with the little army as he looked to Tilyou, who called him toward the remaining madrassas with their charred lapis tiles.

     As the morning sun rose and the fires raged on Tilyou extinguished the northern structure, but the eastern flames enveloped the holy land, and the force of the water in the hose slowed to a trickle. The coughing overtook the boy Sylvester Meade who collapsed at the feet of his idol, whose park burned and folded around him. King Kai parted the forces of the Dreamland army and lifted the boy with Tilyou, and the parka rags tumbled to a pile, and there, grinning at them, was the inverted Funny Face of Steeplechase. Tilyou, on his knees, anguished as he saw that the symbol the place he had built to inspire joy and wonder was burned into the skin of Sylvester Meade.

     The boy though, whose thoughts were now dwindling, whose inner voice began to wander slowly around the void, being soothed by the cool mist of the black waterfall, opened his eyes one last time. He looked at King Kai, wearing a crown of birds with the gulls circling overhead, and Tilyou with an ash-covered suit and frayed mustache, carried him out from Samarkand, through the sandy valley, under the Steeplechase Pier, and cooled his burned body in the water. The beats of his heart, syncopated in rhythm with the war drums, came to a halt as the struggle ended. He smiled and closed his eyes and felt the currents pull him both up and down at the same time, when the water ran out his flight resumed, and he began to dream once more.