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{objects in a forgotten cedar point lost-and-found locker} john f. buckley and martin ott The opening brought only a smattering of press and a few flashbulbs once the bolt cutters snapped the rusty lock in the unearthed bomb shelter. Here lie most of a once-moist package of vanilla Velamints; a sealed envelope labeled "Baby's First Hair Cut"; a wooden prosthetic chin chipped with bite marks; $47,285,000,000,000,000 in half-burned Hell money, the Jade Emperor winking serenely atop the stack; a generous handful of Day-Glo-headed thumbtacks; a red plastic spider from a .45 record worn by errant ninja tosses; a treasure map to Planet Snoopy where the original Woodstock acid sheets are buried; a pair of size-six Jordache jeans with the smaller half of a wishbone stuffed in the horsehead pocket; a gallon freezer bag holding bedunged underpants; two lime green fuzzy frogs from the second-tier prize shelf; a Klingon-Elvish dictionary; three caramel pops; a small shard of Jimmy Hoffa's fibula in an embossed gold and teak case; a T-shirt reading "Coke Is It!" in Cyrillic script; Fangoria #11, featuring Funhouse; a love note to Nixon in ransom-note magazine cut-out letters to protect anonymity; a funky indefinable smell; 3-D glasses with a tiny coded inscription on the earpiece suggesting that 4-D glasses would be scarier, signed "The Watchers"; a plastic army man imprinted with lipstick; a large plastic novelty dime; an unfilled prescription for 40 mg of Ritalin; a blue tulip wrapped in barbed wire, tattooed on a slice of tanned flesh curled like a potato chip; that missing track bolt from the Millennium Force lift hill; and a taxidermied hamster holding an Ohio State pennant. Every object was auctioned but the wishbone half, now refashioned into an dowsing amulet by the search leader, his true love lost with unreturned kisses on the Ferris Wheel, a tragedy of miscalculating odd hopes as the falling sun flickered through shaking slats of coasters, quivering teens in the fiberglass cars forever looped, lost in time. |
