Alice Isn't Dead

by Joseph Fink

Keisha Taylor settled back into the booth and tried to enjoy her turkey club. The turkey club did not make this easy.

Her life, at the best of times, was a minefield of possible triggers for her anxiety, and this was not the best of times.

He wasn’t invisible. People saw him and then decided they didn’t want to.

Not that she was ever calm, but if she were to be calm, it would look like this.

She couldn’t go home. Because home wasn’t a place. Home was a person. And she hadn’t found that person yet.

At least there was cruise control, and a road so straight all she had to do was make sure she didn’t go crashing off into a billboard telling her the Confederacy still could win, which was an actual billboard she had passed. The subtext of America wasn’t just text here, it was in letters five feet tall.

It wasn’t only Alice who had died. Each death leads to smaller, invisible deaths inside the hearts of those left behind.

Keisha didn’t care. Alice had made herself a mystery, and now everything she left was a clue. She was a missing persons case and everything she had ever touched was evidence, right down to Keisha’s hands, her skin. The abandoned wife, exhibit A.

Giving up felt like a reasonable option, but she shook that off, tried to find determination or at least manufacture a simulacrum of it.

In the dark, with the thrum of the engines, she could almost let her natural anxiety fade into an undercurrent that wouldn’t intrude on her thoughts.

All luck runs out eventually. Otherwise it wouldn’t be luck.

Keisha knew, in that moment, that anxiety is just an energy. It is an uncontrollable, near infinite energy, surging within her. And as the Thistle Man started to kill her, she stopped trying to contain that energy. She told her heart to beat faster and her panicked breath to become more labored. She demanded that fear overtake her. Make me more afraid. I’m not afraid of feeling afraid. Make me more afraid.

“So I still have a job?” was the best she could manage. The commander laughed. “Ordinarily, no. You really fucked up the whole being-a-trucker part of your being-a-trucker job. You stole company property, and seriously messed up affairs with a big client of ours. You, in short, didn’t do good. But”—she nodded back at the town of horrors—“as you can see trucking is only part of our concern.

They kept it a secret. A lot of people knew anyway. Keisha was sure that she had successfully fooled her parents, but her parents knew. Except in some ways they didn’t know. They knew, but didn’t like it, and so made a choice to not know. People are capable of that, of knowing but choosing at the same time not to know.

Not everything can be alright all at once.

At night, in the least lit corners, teenagers learned the best secrets of being an adult, before trudging, the next day, to their cashier jobs in the Target or the cell-phone stores to learn the worst secrets of being an adult.

“You want me scared? Officer, you have no idea. I’m always scared. You think fear is new to me? You think fear is the novelty that will change my behavior? For me, fear is living. And I’ve lived this long, haven’t I?”

Moving in together hadn’t been easy. There were fights, discomfort. Two people with two lives figuring out how to shrink those lives to fit a tiny bed in the corner of a kitchen. Gradually Keisha realized it wasn’t a constriction, but a rearrangement of terms. There was infinite space in that tiny apartment, if they could reorient themselves to find it. Soon they settled into this new way of living, and the two of them became a unit. It was the first step to having a life together.

Why did Jerry Morrisette have three guns? Well, he did live in a parking lot that once was frequented by drug trade and gangs. Or maybe it was because he lived in America, and so for better or worse, or worse, or worse, he could.

There’s no moral to this story, but there is a real human life.

Everyone’s jobs are expendable, except the officer’s. That kind of violent hunger is always in demand.

she felt grateful for people who come to places like this and do things like this: dance, and make food for strangers. Good people deserve good things.

No one could resist the terrible freedom she offered.

This time Keisha didn’t bother switching to a car, just did her best to be inconspicuous in a truck, which on crowded highways was not difficult. After all, the sky is pretty big but people still go whole days without noticing it.

Riding horses was just like walking, she decided, only to go anywhere you first had to persuade a gigantic toddler that they wanted to go there too.

This was still a happy memory for Keisha, despite the pain that came after. Happiness is not negated by subsequent pain. But it does make the possibility for future happiness seem dimmer. Every good moment is shadowed by the question of that moment’s longevity.

This place, for her, was a wound.

Alice had also struggled with anxiety, but she handled it differently than her wife did. Keisha internalized her anxiety, stuffing it down until it buzzed around wildly in her body. Alice projected her anxiety on the world, seeing a place that was as scared as she was, and this paradoxically tended to make her protective, willing to put herself at risk to alleviate the fears that she assumed in others.

“You’re going to have to forgive me at some point.” “Alice, my love, I don’t have to do shit.”

“I want proof of us,” Alice said. There was a moment of quiet. Maybe she had gone too far. She was the cool one. And this wasn’t cool. But Keisha laughed. “That I can give you,” she said. She kissed Alice, and the feeling between them was so evident it was all the proof either of them needed, although they subsequently expanded on that kiss just in case.

Alice had that effect on people, an ease that implied intimacy even if nothing was truly shared.

“I don’t predict the future,” said the oracle. “I only maintain it.”

“They are evil and hatred. They are a point of view felt so deeply that it becomes an identity.”

“Is there a reason you oracles can’t just say what you mean, ever?” said Alice. “Yes, actually,” said the oracle, laughing again. Keisha wished they wouldn’t. “Everything about the human language is tied into time. It is a language by and for people experiencing time in linear order, each moment separated from the one before. When time is experienced all at once, it becomes difficult to express oneself the way that one might like.”

If a point of view becomes one’s entire identity, what was monstrous on the inside can become monstrous on the outside.” Keisha took a moment to process this. “You are saying . . .” she said. “Yes,” said the oracle. “That the Thistle Men are human.” “Most monsters are.”

The kiss was a door to home, and she gladly stepped through it.

The Bay and Creek soldiers were more easily defeated despite their weapons. A gun can only mean so much to people who are willing to die for a cause.

A life does not have to be satisfying or triumphant. A life does not have to mean anything or lead anywhere. A life does not need a direction or a goal. But sometimes a person is lucky enough to have a life with all that anyway.