As the Mangle and Foxy the Pirate played games with their new toy, Mike watched empty-eyed from the doorway, remembering his letters.
Letters to family.
Letters to friends.
Letters painfully scrawled on scraps of paper, single words taking days to write, leaving him exhausted in the building which trapped him – filched change dropped in pockets to pay for stamps when stamps weren't pilfered from the business office.
Letters tucked into the man with white hair's pockets in the hopes that somebody, anybody would see them, letting the world know he'd once existed.
Letters to a girl he'd been too ashamed to speak to directly when he had the chance.
Ashamed of his failure, of injuring his back in some stupid, random accident, destroying a career he'd so carefully built, he'd walked past her in silence the day his discharge became official.
Phones picked up, a number dialed, put back on the hook when he heard her answer even after death silenced him. Too ashamed of what he'd become, of taking shit jobs because nobody wants a man with a bad back, but even more ashamed to give up completely. Letters written but never sent.
But still trying.
Still trying.
Of watching those painfully written letters torn up, to blow down the alleyway with others unsent in the man with white hair's pockets, with him unable to tell him what was needed.
The building groaned, shelves toppling as the floor began to subside, water from broken pipes weighing it down as hidden wounds from seventy years or more of earthquakes, of heat, of cold, of dry, of damp where only the rats went taking their toll as the fire department stood outside in the dark, watching the death of a building too dangerous, too trivial to save except to ensure that it didn't take it's newer, more valuable neighbors with it.
The gas main had been turned off as the building crackled and popped, paint cans and light bulbs applauding for performers long dead as the last of the celluloid dreams came tumbling down in what had once been a temple for the likes of Clara Bow, Charlie Chaplain, and Vivian Leigh while cartoon rabbits and foxes and bears walked through the burning dreams, guitar strings snapping, eyes fixed as a clock burst into flames in the heat, heavy pendulum crashing unheard to the floor, the glass fronting it cracking in the heat to the laughter of children and burning confetti - the workroom rising in flames, filth washing across the floor, the growing weight pulling all downwards into the earth.
Jeremy watched as indifferently as he had lived, his own letters undelivered – no one had looked for him, body stuffed negligently into a cartoon dog's – as somewhere on a shelf the head of that dog started to smoke in the heat, polyester phun phurr shriveling, beading at the tips, baring the delicate titanium struts that had closed in on his face, killing him. Edges smoldering, curling in on themselves like so much burning paper, Jeremy looked at Mike and shrugged in a trail of cigarette ash, eyes a feverish after-image as the long-dried blood that had been his anchor in this apathetic little hell blackened and charred, and then was no more - ash rising in the chimney that the theater had become.
Pausing long enough to aim an unfelt kick at the man with white hair where he lay gasping in the muck, Mike followed, eyes closed, face rapt, edges bright, so much twirling burning paper as the shabby hand of a pink and white bear fell burning to the floor, twisting in on itself into the shape of a human heart from the heat, following Jeremy, letters forgotten even as smiling, cradling her coffee cup, Inelda Schnelz and her chair plummeted heavily through the burning floor above.