Hello Benicia!
The new Benicia Ferry website is here to serve you with a comprehensive list of community activities and services available to Benicians. If we missed your program, please let us know, and we’ll add you in. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, let us know, we’ll do our best to help. Send us an email to info@newbeniciaferry.org. Also, if you’ve got pictures we can add to liven up your information page, send them along to.
The new Benicia Ferry is also where you can find intriguing made up stories about the wild array of characters who make up our town. This is what the Main Street diaries flash Fiction Contest is all about. Check out the Main Street Diaries tab above for more information.
Here’s a recent submission to our contest-
“In the Drain”
by S. Kuna
Its name was Bryazkitko —or at least that’s what it called itself in its head.
It lived in the places where everything that needed to go away went: gutters, drains, landfills. Its arms were as long as a bus and were covered in thick, black, coarse hair. Its body, however, was as big as a fist with two tiny, round feet sticking out of the bottom. It kept its large, smooth, deep brown eyes buried in its fur when it wasn’t using them —which was most of the time.
Bryazkitko didn’t live where it lived because it wanted to be with unwanted things, it actually thought the opposite. It looked upon the mounds and mounds of trash piled up in landfills, the torrents of gunked up water (made thick with leaves, mud and soot), and the various lost bits and bobs that would fall in after them and assumed this must be the kind of thing the humans found most precious —after all, they kept making more and more of it all.
Bryazkitko felt like the luckiest thing alive being able to live amongst such valuable trash. And it was valuable trash as far as it was concerned, if it wasn’t valuable, they would just get rid of it or stop making more.
Despite how popular and lucky Bryazkitko felt, it knew that it shouldn’t grow stagnant, hanging around the same old trash all the time —as cool as the garbage was. No, it needed to find browner, greyer pastures to enjoy. So it found its way to the town of Benicia. Quite the hot spot for hanging out with trash.
It found itself scurrying around in the drains and pipes of many different places around town before it finally found itself at the bottom of a fountain. It was a nice, peaceful fountain, just off First Street. The people would come and crowd around, high above, just out of reach. Bryazkitko always wanted to say “hi” but it was just too small and too far down the drain for them to see.
However, people kept offering lovely gifts of trash: identical, little copper disks that clanked to the bottom of the fountains. Each one had two sides: one of an odd looking ice cream sandwich with big, evenly spaced marshmallows between the two halves, and another of a man with a fuzzy face.
Bryazkitko felt so honored and loved to be given such odd pieces of trash to add to its collection. At first, it gathered as many as it could, piling them high in its little den. Eventually, though, it got quite bored of them. Sure some were more oxidized, some were more sticky, some had an odd smell, while others were a weird shape, but they were all the same! So, eventually it stopped collecting them, found no value in them anymore, and collected some stamps instead.
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Feeling the urge to write? Click on the Main Street Diaries menu tab above for more information.
go ahead, make our day and send your submission to info@newbeniciaferry.org