Sketch: The Broadway Beacon

One day, as I was digging my way through even more coursework, this time in a seaside town along the Maryland eastern shore, some locals told me the story of two boys, twins, who had stopped going to school and began building a tower from anything they could find and re-use, old rakes and broom handles and wooden deck chairs and planks from doors and broken ladders and the blue-hued tops of desks, they built this day and night until one day it was too tall for their ladders, in fact, too tall for any ladder, and so they erected scaffolding, then stitched together a tarp using the same general model—these two boys who were previously only remarkable for their shared stupidity—and after the tarp was included one could almost see the spire from space, or so the twins had insisted, and yet because of their ambitious plans, they had also completely run out of supplies, the tower stopping midway through the next level so that the last post from a neighbor’s fence stood naked, its splinters hard and bristling from the afternoon winds, and in fact the winds themselves had become a menace, as with every gust the structure moaned and creaked and whistled throughout the cul de sac.

When a retired insurance adjuster happened upon the structure, he was immediately filled with thoughts of making it an attraction, of removing the tarp for all eyes to behold the grandeur after paying the appropriate admission; he bought it outright, he went to work on a name, first the “Pikesville Pylon” then the “Recycled Tower of Babel” then the “Backyard Broadway Beacon”–not that it was anywhere near a Broadway, but rather he felt the name added a certain strength and panache, so enormous were his thoughts that he had already christened it the Eighth Wonder and placed ads as far as his pension would allow, he had booked radio time and local news and a photographer to record, and in a sixty mile radius had papered all available billboard space because the adjuster was dead set on making this thing a sensation, he had plans made to have it gilded, or if not gilded, then at least strung with lights—meanwhile the rains had wilted the ground and the twins had vacated the house and along with the rest of the neighborhood, now gushing its residents, none of them waiting for the sheer slope of the tower to collapse under the weight of all this bluster.

As the story goes, on the day the last one left, the tower did.