On their evening walk, they passed the half-demolished bones of the hundred year old church at the end of their street. She stopped, looking at it with a frown.

“What an absolute waste,” she said. “Might as well tear down everything old and great in this city.”

“Oh come on,” her husband scoffed. “It was an abandoned building used by drug addicts as a place to sleep and shoot up. I won’t miss it a bit.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “It was part of our legacy. It told us where we came from, what we could be. We lose a piece of history when it goes.”

“Greatness? Legacy? History? C’mon! In this economy the only thing that matters is jobs. Jobs get people fed, put roofs over their heads. Empty buildings don’t make jobs.”

“You’re right, they don’t. But they might just be better than the alternative.”

She resumed their walk, not bothering to wait for him.

“Alternative?” He called after her. “What are they putting there?”

“A twenty-four hour gas station. The kind with the blinding lights and blaring music.”

That stopped him in his tracks. “History at least had the decency to be quiet.”

Memphis Note
Right now there is an on-going battle between the historic preservation people and commercial developers. One side wants to protect our history legacy for years to come, the other wants to create something new and alive out of something old and dead. Both are right in some ways, both are wrong in others. Me? I’ve always wondered why no one ever tried encouraging people to move into a space as vehemently as they tried to protect it or tear it down.

He sat down on the edge of the empty stage in the abandoned amusement park and peeled back the cellophane wrap from his bologna sandwich.

Above his head, plastic ribbons dangled from the acoustic tiles like a bottom-dollar chandelier. He looked at them as he chewed and wished very much for this place to be haunted.

It was his twice quarterly maintenance sweep of the decaying husk of Celebration Station. He wasn’t actually cleaning the place, just doing things like dumping poison into the pool to keep mosquitoes down, covering up any of the really offensive graffiti, picking up a few beer bottles; things like that.

Enough to no let any potential buyers realize how much of a dump the place is.

He’d been doing it for years. But this time it was getting to him. Maybe it was the way the old windmill on the miniature was creaking, or the erratic flicker of the lights in the empty arcade. Whatever it was, it got him wishing for ghosts, enough to fill the place up.

Because, he thought, this used to be an amusement park. And any ghosts that haunted a place like that were bound to be happy.

Memphis Note
Celebration Station was an small amusement park just off the interstate in East Memphis. Opened in the early 90s, it had an arcade, miniature golf, bumper cars and even bumper boats. No one knows why it never opened up again after it’s season ended in 2001, but in the years since, the park has degraded into one of the worst eye sores in Memphis.

He was very tired these days. Even more so than normal, which was something considering he slept nearly fourteen hours a day when he was a spry, young thing.

When he came here no one cared that he’d been in the movies or that he’d come from across the ocean or that Volney wasn’t even his real name. His new neighbors just looked him over, turned their noses up, and went about their business.

Ingrates, he’d thought at first. They should appreciate being in the presence of a star like him. But, when the meals brought to him were the same as everyone else’s and he was given exercise hours just like everyone else, he realized that he was the same as the rest of them.

And for a while, that Volney made very sad. Not a deep sadness, but an accepting kind of sadness. The sort you get when things have changed forever and won’t go back.

He still had his roar, though. The resonant, primal, echoing shout that had made him famous.

As he headr the gate clank open for their morning feeding, Volney decided that he should remind everyone why lions are the king of all beasts.

Memphis Note
The lion you see at the beginning of classic MGM movies is the Volney of this story. He was born in the Dublin Zoo and originally named Slats. He was brought to MGM by his trainer Volney Phifer, his future namesake. After retiring from the movie business, Volney was sold to the Memphis Zoo, where he spent the rest of the day in the zoo’s cat house, his roar echoing through the building and cinematic history.