mainsqueeze's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - We drive there always in the white pickup truck we had when I was a kid, doesn't matter that there are usually three or four of us, too many to fit in the two seats. The building is on the short edge of a mesa that is cut in the shape of a perfect pair of right angles, a boxy "u" with a ramshackle nightmare mansion framed by the steep drops on either side. The second story has a balcony that wraps around the face of the building. It hangs over the edge of the cliffs. We arrive--the people with me change constantly but my sister is almost always there--and I am the only one who knows the way around the place. Each room is different and terrifying. You push panels of the wall to reveal spiral staircases to rooms full of straw with dead men buried underneath. Floors open into ceilings. Ceilings spit you over the cliff. Once I was chased by my family turned into alligators by my step-father, another time they were cartoon wolves with big teeth. I watched my best friend fuck my boyfriend from inside of a closet in the staircase room. I was grabbed by rotting corpses in the straw room. We leave, my sister and I, and I cannot drive still in the dream but I drive the white pickup across a narrow strip of road that is literally a free-floating piece of rock exactly as wide as the truck. Sometimes a bear chases the truck, an unrealistically huge bear. Sometimes the bear turns into a boulder that is always just inches behind us and I can barely steer and I get us away safe by the skin of our teeth. I miss the turnoff to home every time and have to circle back on that road and it is thinner and full of cars honking and speeding the second time. The first street we turn on back home in one that doesn't exist, but I know exactly where we are. It is a cross between my childhood neighborhood and downtown where Charleston and Maryland Parkway hit each other. This is where I wake up. 11:56 p.m. - 2010-04-01 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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