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         Bony birds shriek as the Norman Rockwell sun pistons up into a pumpernickel sky.

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         Suddenly, they are gone. As in abracadabra, presto, alla kazam. Nowhere to be found in The Golden Kingdom among muck-encrusted marionettes, who have ceased to sing their grating song due to the wild wisteria and bougainvillea tumbling overgrown out of their throats in great clots, tufts and tangles. Nor in any of the overpriced eateries of Zinny Yuh’s Neighborhood, or the collapsed attraction booths of Dafty Dill’s Kiddy Corner, with its scads of deflated midway balloons or smashed grand prize goldfish bowls.            Even the stage where they once slept offers no signs of a fire.

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         I stroll through the park, on my own again, darting eyes and scanning the blighted horizon. Pass the grate to hear the grown wolves savagely sneering.

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          I honestly can’t tell anymore if its hunger or loneliness.

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          Somewhere deep in the twisty bowels of Manic Mangoose’s Monstery Manor, I sail adrift on a headless swan. Civilization dances upon the edge of a knife as my wafer-thin raft toggles half a lonely headlight over phalanxes of the incandescent dead.

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           In the center of a labyrinth, upon witnessing a flock of phantoms through warped remnants of a shattered mirror, I find my own reflection has gone suspiciously amiss.      Whinny screams in a dusk-colored sadness twirling in the center of the room as trick projectors twitch.                  Faithless apparitions bound by their bodily exodus.

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            It is not until later, when I am standing in the empty gallery of the Hall of Obscure Dignitaries sans dignitaries, that I really begin to worry.

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