Alice Isn't Dead

by Joseph Fink

Love is cooking together. It’s creating together. That’s what Keisha thought. She didn’t know what Alice thought. It turns out she had never known what Alice was thinking at all.

Flour on their hands. Sauce on their hands. Their hands on their hands. Something forgettable on the television. Leg upon leg. That was a life, she thought.

“We talk about freedom the same way we talk about art,” she said, to whoever was listening. “Like it is a statement of quality rather than a description. Art doesn’t mean good or bad. Art only means art. It can be terrible and still be art. Freedom can be good or bad too. There can be terrible freedom.”

“You freed me, and I didn’t ask you to. I didn’t want you to. I am more free now than I have ever been, and I am spiraling across this country. Maybe you are too. I want our lines to cross. Even one more time.” She put the mic back. Switched the radio off. Hand upon hand, she thought, upon leg upon heart upon couch upon a day where we made pizza together. That’s love, Alice. That’s what it’s made of. And so what is this?

Grassland out to the end of it.

When it gets dark over the grass, it really gets dark. Like being on an ocean, the distant lights of towns like ships.

She couldn’t go home. Because home wasn’t a place. Home was a person.

For some time she had been thinking about quitting her job to start a bakery, because the idea of arriving to work at four in the morning to make bread sounded like the best possible job in the world, but it had never been quite the right time for her to do that. All those parts of her were gone. It wasn’t only Alice who had died. Each death leads to smaller, invisible deaths inside the hearts of those left behind.

Because that’s what, as a civilization, we do. We try to talk our way through the ineffable in the hope that, like a talisman, our description will provide some shelter against it. But

But youth is the time for great leaps of faith, and so he packed everything he owned into his Corolla and started the drive from Connecticut because he believed that to experience America is to experience its distance.

Sylvia groaned, an animal sound of despair, and she collapsed onto the hood of the car, a car that had belonged to the man who she thought would save her, a man who, as is often the case, couldn’t even save himself.

All luck runs out eventually. Otherwise it wouldn’t be luck. Keisha opened her window

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

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.

A life does not need to be satisfying or triumphant. A life does not need to mean anything or lead anywhere. A life does not need a direction or a goal. Ultimately, a life merely needs to be lived until there is no more living left to do.

Keisha felt love, right where she had left it, and kissed Alice so hard that it hurt both of them, because what she really wanted to do was to find her way into Alice’s chest and live there among the bones and blood.

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.

These are the only facts that this story contains: there was a man who had gone to war and come back, and gone to religion and come back, and who turned a rest area into a place of worship for a few years, and then his dog died and it all ended. There’s no moral to this story, but there is a real human life.

After all, the sky is pretty big but people still go whole days without noticing it.

shrugging themselves back into the ground.

They were married long before they were married, which is a common enough story. For

He only knew that the few classmates who weren’t like him made him furious. He did everything he could to make their lives miserable. Others in his class weren’t as directly cruel, although they tolerated what he did, and this was its own cruelty.

And the oracles, they’re people transformed by a desire to organize a better world. We’re all just people fighting for an idea of what living as humans should be like,” said

The stories of old women are the quiet, overlooked fabric of history.