Basement Breakthrough

Waiting for our half-point fathers to wander home after work, we played dust hockey in the dim basement of our Chicago tenement building. We played under challenging conditions. Roaches scuttling away into the corners. Bandanas over our mouths. Jackets arranged beneath the wooden-slatted storage carrels so we wouldn’t lose our only puck. A broken net at one end, a cardboard box opposite. Scoring on the box was considered more difficult.

Once, this Indonesian kid played in her birthday roller skates, falling with barely a shove, her stick whipping up in defiance, driving a wave of concrete dust into everybody’s face and leaving an opportunity for any non-blinded player – even me! thick-rimmed glasses finally useful! – to stickhandle away with the puck, weaving between broken tricycle frames and desiccated mouse corpses, reeling back for a slapshot that froze for seemingly forever in the flickering yellow light before my mummy-wrapped stick arced down through the dancing dust particles, obliterating the fat black puck as it coated the back of the cardboard goal in a splat of ochre goo.

What? A colourful shock. Triumphant hands dropped. Contentious shrieks echoed behind me. The real puck was still in play, but I’d scored regardless with a huge cockroach, later determined to be worth half a point for its vibrant ooziness.

Long after the game I stood alone in the settling dust, feeling bad about the cockroach’s family waiting back home, checking the time, wondering where he might be.

Prompt Author

Chris wants a story but it’s coming out wrong: every character is named Alora and they all live in Willow Springs. Regenerate mysterious secrets. Regenerate shrouded pasts. Regenerate, but let’s delve into some of this suspicious phrasing. Next page.

The Aloras are orphans, of course, which they giddily reveal one after another as they escape through the backrooms of Willow Springs, suddenly a mysterious government lab shrouded in a secretive past. Regenerate, but “genre=spicy STEM romance”.

Alora turns to embrace Alora in a fit of passion, sweeping aside the meaningless science littering the counters. She feels the warmth of Alora pressing back against her, the eagerness of her tongue delving into her shrouded delve-hole, whispering, “I’m an orphan.” Better dialogue here? More holes? Next page.

How can you feel like an orphan, really? So many Aloras, with even more holes. Finding your place as one part of an infinite set; this is satisfying internal resolution. Willow Springs ablaze in the background. Somehow this is the corporation’s fault, or the government’s, with no further delving required. Aloras stacked to the sunset, their loneliness banished forever.

Now fix this mess up and post it on Amazon with a sexified cover!

Chris Clemens lives and teaches in Toronto, surrounded by raccoons. Nominated for Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net, his stories and poems appear in Baffling Magazine, Radon Journal, Dreams & Nightmares, Strange Horizons, Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction, and elsewhere.
Find more at linktr.ee/clemenstation.