Inferno Park by JL Bryan

good.” He had never actually eaten here, either. He just wanted to see her reaction.
    “Not hungry,” she said., clearly trying not to look queasy. “Take me to the...what did you call it?”
    “The Starwalk. It’s not what it used to be.”
    “I’m interested in what it is now .”
    They reached Beachview Drive about fifteen minutes later, and Victoria pointed to the first large, dilapidated structure, located on the west end of the old strip.
    “What’s that?” she asked.
    “The Spotted Octopus.”
    “We’ll start there.” She pulled into the weedy parking lot. The entrance had once been blocked off by orange cones and a boulder, but some earlier explorers or vandals had moved these aside. She parked in the shadow of the building and grabbed her camera.
    She left the car and took snapshots of the building’s facade, where a purple octopus with blue spots loomed as a roof over the front entrance, some of its tentacles serving as its support columns. The building was shaped like a wooden two-story amphitheater, one wing of it already collapsed by the weather into an impenetrable mass of timbers and floorboards. The entryway doors had been kicked open, and broken, rusty chains hung from one door handle.
    “What was this place?” Victoria asked.
    “College kids would drink here, and they’d have wet t-shirt contests and stuff like that. You could hear it from the beach. It sounded pretty wild.”
    “You never went inside?”
    “I was like thirteen when it closed down, so no...”
    She turned the camera on him and backed away, framing him up against the building. “Then you don’t have any personal memories here.”
    “Nah.” He didn’t tell her about conversations at the middle-school lunch table, the young adolescent male fantasies of what happened inside the forbidden Spotted Octopus. “Nothing personal.”
    They continued on foot through the old parking lot. Victoria took pictures of an almost unrecognizable snow-cone stand and the Fishbowl, a round building painted blue (badly peeling now) on the outside, with goldfish and aquarium-tank decorations. The serving window was nailed shut.
    “Tell me about that place,” Victoria said. An amused smile played on her lips as she took pictures of it.
    “The Fishbowl. Probably the worst place to eat on the whole beach. They were open later than anyone else, so the drunk college kids would go there when the bars closed. The next day, they’d get sick but blame it on the drinking. Pretty good racket.”
    They eventually reached the Eight-Track, now just a ribbon of concrete and a small, boarded-up building locked inside chain-link fence. Carter drifted up to the fence, staring inside.
    “This was your go-kart track?” Victoria asked.
    “This was it.”
    Victoria looked over the area, taking it in before she raised her camera.
    As Carter looked along the bare asphalt track, he imagined he could hear, very distantly, the sound of a dozen roaring little engines, the air scented with their exhaust.
    “My dad bought it from old Mr. Sheffield...possibly won it in a poker game. We all worked here together, keeping it all running. We took good care of it. My dad, my mom.” He had a glimpse of his childhood, a bright and sunny day with both his parents at the track, all three of them racing against each other while they were closed to the public. Laughing, his dad when he had his long hair, his mom when she had a real smile, not the waxy drunken corpse-smile of later years.
    He heard a soft click as Victoria took a picture of him.
    “What are you thinking about?” she asked softly.
    “How it used to be.” My dad, my mom . “Let’s keep walking. There’s nothing left here.”
    They passed the collapsed tiki shack of Big Billy’s Surf Shop and continued on into the parking lot of Dinosaur Mini-Golf, where Victoria stopped to admire the triceratops out front, its green paint faded down to bare concrete in some places, moss growing in every crevice of