Alice Isn't Dead

by Joseph Fink

“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?”

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.

Isn’t it better to die in a purposeful, clear way than to stagger on until a superfluous organ starts making its cells wrong?

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.

If a point of view becomes one’s entire identity, what was monstrous on the inside can become monstrous on the outside.”

It made Keisha feel like there was no center to it all, and that what had seemed to be the world was only a temporary arrangement of light.

She hadn’t forgiven her, but they were doing good now. And doing good together felt a little like forgiveness.

“I didn’t get to lead too long of a life, huh?” Her voice sounded like she was shouting from hundreds of feet away. Her breath was going cold. “But I’ll live it all at once forever.”

“I am glad I met you,” they said. “I think I loved you. I don’t know if I can feel something as uncomplicated as love anymore. But I know that there are moments I’m still experiencing in which I love you. I don’t think you will see me again. But know that I am always seeing you, at every moment we had together, forever.”

There would be better kisses in their life together, ones that were softer, or more romantic, or swooned deeply down the spine, but there would never be another that felt like the first clear breath after surfacing with burning lungs from a long time underwater.

Love is cooking together. It’s taking ingredients and transforming them together into a meal.

“Love is the way her neck smells. Love is the beat of the heart and the passage of air and it’s the circulation of fluids, and it’s equilibrium. Love is . . .”

It was and it wasn’t. Everything is the start of something, but the end of something too. Right then, the two of them felt both at once.

Because they were born, they would someday die. Because they loved, they would someday die. It’s only a tragedy if set into the context of grief.

A person is not a problem with a solution. A person is their relationship to the world.

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.

Writing horror is therapeutic, in the same way that reading horror is therapeutic: it provides a harmless way to consider your darkest and bleakest thoughts, dragging those anxieties into the light, and, in doing so, at least partially disarming them.