dang, I'd love to live in a theme park. Ideally an abandoned Seaworld, partially because Seaworld is literally Hitler and partially because then you'd have these massive empty tanks lined with blue and turquoise that you could just climb down into and put some fuckin vaporwave on the speakers and just lay there at night and look up at the sky and turn off all the lights in the whole park so there's very little light pollution and just chilling there for hours

and then during the day you just play whatever music you want over the speakers and you'd just go around watering all the plants and dusting off the arcade machines and restocking the store with food to sustain yourself (crates of food keep showing up in unmarked delivery trucks that don't seem to have any drivers, even though Seaworld has been closed for years at this point and the company hasn't been heard from since then) and occasionally glancing outside the outer fence to see if you can catch a glimpse of a person, or a car, or anything.

You haven't seen other humans in a while, even though all the streets around Seaworld used to be bustling with activity. Occasionally, you'd hear airplanes or helicopters going overhead, but you could never seem to find them when you looked up; perhaps you just imagined them. You're slightly concerned about the lack of apparent civilization outside of the Seaworld, but every time you think of it you soon forget, and go back to your daily pleasantries. You can still hear the ocean, distant though it may be, but the sound of the waves fills you with inner peace.

Then, one day, when you're cleaning out the filters of the only pool that's still full of water(you keep it like that because you like to have somewhere to get your exercise now and again), you hear a faint squeak coming from a little deeper in the filter tube. It's not the squeak of plastic rubbing against plastic (you know what that sounds like from all the old Splash Zone ponchos you've had to fish out of this thing), nor do you suspect it to be a mouse or any other kind of rodent, partially because it seems as though all other life has ceased existing, and partially because mice can't swim. You turn on your headlamp you keep on at all times and peer into the uniform tube, and see the glint of an eye staring back at you.

Is it a dolphin? the thing's tiny, see, and even baby dolphins are probably bigger than this. You admit to yourself that you've never really seen a baby dolphin, and now wouldn't be the time to look it up (besides, contact with the Internet was one of the things you lost when you took up residence in Seaworld), but you assume it's abnormal to see a dolphin of this size. It has a short, compressed snout and two eyes that seem slightly misaligned on its head, and one of its three fins (the one on the top of its body) is ragged and creased, resembling a wet, pointed tarp.

It makes the squeaking sound again, and it endears itself to you. Despite its alien appearance, you somehow see a bit of yourself in those strange eyes and ragged fins, and you pick it up. it croaks again, sounding somehow melancholy, like it knows that you and it are the sole survivors of some silent apocalypse, or perhaps, that you two were the only ones it claimed. perhaps the rest of the world lived on without you, leaving you in this limbo in the Seaworld to protect your own sanity. You don't despair, though. It was enough having the premises to take care of to keep you busy, and now that you have another living creature in your ranks, you don't foresee yourself getting bored any time soon.

You close your eyes, and inhale. You can smell chlorine, and you have a slight, almost soothing headache. The creature settles in your arms, and you feel more at peace than you ever were in the populated world.

You can still hear the ocean.