The Brilliantly Rainbowed Adventure

- Chapter 39 -
Those Broader Gates

I beseech you, gentle readers,
To forget the manner borne
By those most recent prating words
Presented to your sight.
Far better to forget those crude,
Belabored hooks and lines,
By which the feeble mind, ensnared,
Is brought into foul fealty
To the tyrant-bard of that insipid band
Known as the Hootenannies.
Rather rest, I now implore you,
In this benign estate:
The incidents to which our tale relates,
Inflated in your fertile mind,
Shall now conspire to clash and fight
As no mere penman may claim to cause,
The reader animating this
Into its grand conclusion
And the climax of our quest.
Come, see what fate awaited us
There at the broader gates.

                The Watchman of Wakefield (iv. 1-21)

        At the gate they turned us back. It may have been our rough-hewn looks, befouled by nights spent in the wilds: our casual indifference, our careless liberty. Or perhaps it was Stink who caused our fate, who set the seeling seal strong-stamped upon the tongue that bid us leave with cold words cast like iron knives that dripped unsheathed disdain.
        "All Rednecks and Crackers employed by Florida World will use the Servant's Entrance," the guard had boomed, and so sent us away from the shining walk of that preponderant gait.
        Yet as we left the broad entrance-mouth that led into the dragon's nest, I looked again, beholding this: an arch sent forth a steely skein into the predawn sky. It stretched above those broader gates, returning to earth in the illuminate distance.
        Beneath the heavy, brooding arch, streaming through like lemming-ants, they came. They swarmed, they marched, they came in waves. They arrived in neatly ordered hordes; they came, and saw, and were swallowed deep into the ultimate sucker bet, Florida World the Great. This was the beast that had trapped our friend and held him bound for shipping sans sale.
        The people were entranced, bewitched. The Wilderness Walk, the Redneck Encounter, the Howdy Hail-Fire Rocket Ride: rich, moneyed treats that left FloridaWorld's belly distended with tourists: swollen to bursting with burgeoning grief.
        They flooded inside to devour fun with their hungry, insatiate eyes aimed like guns: their mouths all aflap with their globulent gapings, inhaling a fest for their minds, their hearts, and their sick, sodden souls. The gates yawned, gaping wide as they entered its belly. It blighted the landscape with plastic and steel; the poor were hidden deep in its bowels, fodder for foolish exhibits.
        Oh Florida World, holding promise unfathomed, potential untapped! All of your labor had served for your greed, surfeiting on poor, gaping gulls stuffed with love for the lies you provided so tastefully here.
        They poured, they rushed in haste through your gates; they rolled like filthy rivers through the channels of your streets. How soon, how soon were you to end your life on that sad, fated morning when we turned away from your front gates and wondered at your flawless skin and falsely weighty scales.
        Away now! Quickly! It is enough!
        Turn the page, and behold the fall.