Alice Isn't Dead

by Joseph Fink

We try to talk our way through the ineffable in the hope that, like a talisman, our description will provide some shelter against it.

“Don’t you wish sometimes that you could forget? That you could have your memory wiped, and then you wouldn’t be a person wandering but a person who was almost somewhere, a person about to arrive, and when you arrived you could just stay?”

someone had spoken to her as a fellow human being for the first time in a long time and she had responded like a stray dog finally fed.

When a person leaves their home for a long time and then returns, the furniture, books, and appliances are all exactly how they had left them. This doesn’t sound weird, but it is. There was, after all, once a person who left those things in those places, and then months of life change that person, and this changed person returns to all the same stuff, still there. A person lives always in the remnants of the life they’ve led up until the present, making do with whatever they’ve left behind for themself.