I wrote this today as part of my commitment to the Clarion West Write-a-thon. A dedication means that person sponsored it by donating to CW, and then provided me a writing prompt that sparked the piece. If you would like something written especially for you, please consider sponsoring me.
Here’s all the work of the 41 days. You’ll also find these pieces cross-posted at Sterling Editing as incentive for writers to practice their editing and story-building skills.
Enjoy.
Allie Allie In Free
For Jeanne Magill. Thank you for your support of me and Clarion West.
Alice Watts found the house on Larch Road when she was ten; already old enough to imagine herself in someone else’s life, already old enough to yearn; already sure she would never be more than she already was, the silent, watchful child of people that other people called trash. So much already in her life.
And so the industrial road that separated her Walton Springs neighborhood from Larch Road might as well have been a mountain that she could never climb: no native guide, and too many ways to slip and fall. People from the Springs never crossed Walton Road. But on this summer afternoon, Allie was on her bike on the Springs side of the road, pedalling furiously away away away, her face stained with tears, her mouth and chin smeared with blood where Teddy had slapped her aside when she’d tried to put herself between him and her momma. “Leave her, she’s just a child,” Momma said, and pulled Allie up and whispered, “Go on now, and don’t come back for a while.” And then Teddy grabbed Momma and she said Teddy, don’t make my little girl see this, and Teddy shoved Alice out the door, slam, Allie on the outside —
Then the noises began, and she grabbed her bike and did a running start out onto her street, and all she could do was ride away, away, until she found herself on Walton Road with its deadly blind curves and its dangerous traffic of semitrailers loaded with enormous steel pipes or doomed cows bound for slaughter, pickups with biting dogs in the back beds, souped-up beaters that looked like nothing but had it where it counted, like the hard-eyed boys who drove them. There were no sidewalks, just the huge parking lots of the warehouses and the big-box stores, the junkyard and the auto repair shop. Everything on the Road moved fast, and a small girl riding too close to the edge could get knocked down in the windslap of their passing.
She should have turned into the factory outlet mall and made her way back to town. But she was full of something horrible and huge, some feeling like teeth eating her from the inside, and all she could think was away, away, go go go! So she worked up as much speed as she could, and then she pointed her bike toward the other side of the Road and shut her eyes and went.
Air horns. Air brakes. The stink of diesel and rubber and when she opened her eyes, the looming toothy grin of the chrome grill ready to bite her in half, and the shocked O face of the man behind the windshield as he wrenched the steering wheel into the four-inch swerve that saved her life. The bumper and the great grinding tires squealed past her and her bike thumped over the grass verge and down toward the railroad tracks below. She flew up from her seat and for a moment she thought she would go right over the handlebars; then she came back down hard and her left pedal smacked her in the calf, and her feet found their purchase and she rode bump bump down the hill and across the tracks, thud racketaracketa THUD and it slowed the bike enough that she could put her foot down and scoot to a stop and finally stand, trembling. It all happened so fast that she could still hear the truck driver’s final shout of fucking crazy KIIIIIIIID! fading away.
Her bottom hurt where she’d come down on the hard rubber bicycle seat. Her calf was aching like sweet jesus billy-oh. Her jaw was tender. But the chewed-up feeling was tucked away somewhere inside her, like a balloon in a closet: it would pop out as soon as she opened that door, but right now… right now, where was she?
About a hundred feet away was a bright yellow barricade with a sign: Larch Road. No Trespassing. On the other side of it, a road began, winding away underneath tall trees whose branches interlaced to form a thing-opy, a canopy of leaves through which the sun sparkled and danced.
She pushed her bike across the weedy dirt and around the barricade. She knew what trespass meant. It meant her and her momma and the guy in the truck and the boys in the old cars. It meant what Teddy was doing right now. And Allie thought away, away, and set her bike upon the road, and went.
Another intriguing beginning that got me well and truly hooked in… Thank you Kelley; you’re inspiring.