Boys In Love [Solangelo One-Shots]

Abandoned

The front gates are enough to put me on edge.

They're built to look like the entrance to a grand palace, all towers that jut into the sky, trying to punch holes through the clouds with their teeth. The stone is streaked with dark trails of water damage like ink. Scattered over their face, decorative and once lovely windows are now shattered and cracked, caked with muck. Pretty iron gates block the way to turnstiles and twist and wind in on themselves, mottled with rust, sealed with thick chains that hang like dull threats. When the winds plow through, they clank and rattle loud enough to wake the dead.

It's like standing in front of a boneyard.

But that's why I'm here, the lifelessness of the place, because sometimes humanity is too much. It's a reliable escape sheerly by virtue of its chill.

The only way in is up and over, tennis shoes thudding against cement on the other side, and the interior is no more welcoming than the entrance.

In its prime, Olympus was a wonder of lights and people and sound. It whirred with activity and lit up bright enough to paint the night in swirls of color so vibrant they drowned out the stars.

It all came crashing down in the early days of October in 1932, when The Great Depression had hit its peak, throwing the park's employees and thirteen million other people out of work. And it shows for it; the whole place reeks of something shattered: a dream come true turned into a ruin.

There's not an inch of space that's not been mutilated by time. Cracks cut through the pavement underfoot and greenery thrusts itself out from them, food stands and game booths are hideously abandoned, faces of plastic clowns, dirtied and cackling, rise up like things of nightmares, and roller coasters, ancient skeletons of wood and steel, chip and cave and split.

The only sound is leaves skittering across the pavement, swept along by a dull autumn breeze. And now, my sneakers scuffing over the earth, drawing me out from under the cover of the archway.

My breath shudders quietly, too loud in the silence of this place, and my gaze catches unexpectedly on a dark shape in my periphery. I freeze and lock my eyes onto it, feel my whole chest seize up because there's a person poised on top of one of the stores, tall and regal against the watery greyness of the sky and still enough to be a statue, but there's never been an effigy there. (My mind protests, thrashes because logic says that people do not have wings.)

After several long beats of silence and my breaths coming in short bursts, I take another small step forward, lick my lips nervously. "Hello?"

My voice was barely raised, I don't expect them to hear it, much less whip around in a blur of blacks and greys and dark, wings flying open to fill up the entire world. He is all I see in the seconds that follow and the image is so clear it defies all logic, just as the feathers sprouting from his back do. At this distance, I should barely be able to make out his face, but I see every fleck of color hidden in his irises, the raging fire, I see his piceous hair whip around his head and across his brows, I watch his lips part in slow motion and his eyelashes flutter and strain with shock.

He disappears so quietly I don't even register it as it's happening, but when he's gone, I'm left reeling. Stumbling, choking on my own voice, heart tripping over itself in its rush.

In the air is a premonition.

I stand, heaving, for seconds or minutes, trying to make sense of what just happened. I can't. He is not there, there is no signs that he ever was. My best explanation is that he never was.

I collect myself. Push out a breath. Shake my head. Continue forward.

Every background thought in my skull is still trying to convince me that it was just a strange lapse of imagination. I do not really believe it. Every flutter of leaves becomes the flap of wings, every shifting shadow is a pursuer.