217 Babel Street | The Seventh Floor
The yarn wiggled below the crack of another door marked "Private". Alicia hardly knew what "Private" meant. When she'd asked her father if he might try harder to love her mother if her mother didn't drink and didn't cry and didn't cook only in the microwave, he had carried on shaving. "I don't know, Alicia." She stood with specks of toilet paper stuck to each of her fingers. "Why don't you know?" she persisted. "It's private," he said, as if that gave him permission to turn up the radio and rinse his razor under the tap. She waited quietly. Then, when he turned to her and bent down, she stuck the specks of paper, gently, one by one, to the bits of his face that bled, and he kissed the top of her head.
She took a deep breath, pushed on the door's metal bar and tumbled forward into a bowl of darkness, into a falling dream. Pebbles dug into the palm of her hand, and her knees stung beneath her tights. But at least she hadn't dropped the box. She stood falteringly, like the newly reprieved, and tried to understand.
A purple bruise of a sky. Not a breath of wind but still, the smell of the sea. Overhead, seagulls cried, inconsolable as babies. She blinked and peered, her eyes adjusting slowly. No one, not even Vivienne, had ever told her such a thing was possible. An entire garden in the sky.