A Really Far Ways Off by Kirsten Alene
“Learn the seedy details about all the “friendlies” that exist on each of the 7 floors where this girl was born.”
Fiction by Kristen Alene
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I was not born in the stone house, after all. I was born in a “different place, a really far ways off,” according to my father. In my imagination this is a pinkish yellow world full of handsome young boys and girls who are racing down the whirling ramps of a huge seven-story parking garage in the middle of the night. They ride the elevator to the top of the garage. The gears clank and gargle behind shabby metal walls until the doors say “ding” and open. Then they whiz down the floors on their bicycles, skidding around corners and scraping against walls. On floor seven there is a snow bank with one set of footprints that leads up to the top and disappears over what should be the side of the wall, out into the crisp winter air.
On floor six there is a jungle.
On floor five a hermit named Bathusela is stroking the leaves of an African Violet.
On floor four the plumbing is in disrepair and showers of sludge, deluges of brilliant sparkling tap water careen from the ceiling.
On floor three is a centurion sitting near a campfire, roasting a rabbit.
On floor two are some beavers building a damn against a cracked wall, trying unsuccessfully to preserve the persistent flow of water from floor four.
The bicycling young boys and girls giggle and scream as they zoom around corners and speed down the straightaways.
On floor one, I am waiting to be snatched up by one of these bicycle hooligans, barely more than a fetus, swaddled in pink and yellow robes in the darkest, mustiest corner of the garage, in parking space A17.
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KIRSTEN ALENE is the author of Love in the Time of Dinosaurs (2010) and Unicorn Battle Squad (2012). Her fiction and poetry has appeared in Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, Amazing Stories of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, New Dead Families, Rivets, and Christmas on Crack.
She lives in Portland, Oregon with a man, a dog, and a cat.
SEE more things from Kirsten Alene at her site, here.
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