Alice Isn't Dead

by Joseph Fink

Love is cooking together. It’s creating together.

the idea that nothing horrible could ever happen to us personally exists not in our thoughts but in the base of our necks.

chanterelle, miss you. go home.

She hadn’t been safe since she was born into this country, this angry, seething, stupid, could-be-so-much-more-than-it-is country.

I’m a responsible goddamn adult.”

The policeman’s glance of comradeship at the monster.

understand. Praxis. Vector H. References to a war, to “missions.” And more than any other, to Bay and Creek Shipping.

anyway. Can’t control feeling fear. Can control what you do while feeling it.

with the usual stab of disappointment in herself,

“The Thistle Man, the Hungry Man, whoever else is doing all this, they should be terrified of you. Because I think you’re going to be the one who stops it.

a constant fear that she wouldn’t recognize a heart attack if it came because it would feel like her panic attacks.

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.

what she really wanted to do was to find her way into Alice’s chest and live there among the bones and blood.

Mass without pity, only brutal physics.

Fuck the Thistle Man.

Not everything can be alright all at once.

“I could dismantle you with just my teeth.

Being with Alice felt better than anything, but there could always be something better. Never accept what she already had. Reach for what she could theoretically someday have.

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.

Companies these days. They value absolute loyalty from their employees but show no hesitation in dropping anyone at any moment.”

They honeymooned in Hawaii, spending more money on the honeymoon than the wedding. Which were they more likely to remember, after all? A big dinner party where they were stressed out and tired, or a trip that was the two of them exploring a place they had never been?

Every good moment is shadowed by the question of that moment’s longevity.

“I need to find that person in the hoodie. Whatever they turn out to be. There is a powerful force of good somewhere. Before I can find the evil that destroyed my life, I need to find the good that saved it.”

she considered that anxiety was irrational, and listening to it was like listening to a child. It’s not that they are never right. It’s that the correct info is mixed in with a lot of imaginary things, and, like a child, anxiety can’t tell the difference between the two.

She stopped at a Cracker Barrel to pee, and when she came out, that yellow truck was there. Every inch of its windows plastered in those signs. “I Not Bad Boy.”

she started howling. Not like an animal. Like an alarm.

The two of them with almost nothing, and still they had everything.

It was innate, requiring no interrogation; even when later they bickered or had quiet spells, she knew that the choice had been right and that their lives belonged together.

There was a history of asses that had passed through this seat, each leaving a few millimeters of depth to it.

“Huh?” he said, through a mouthful of à la mode.

One side of his face started to travel toward the ground, and the other drifted upward.

But like all impossible tasks, it was made of a lot of small, doable actions.

And doing good together felt a little like forgiveness.

Maybe there isn’t some great balance sheet of forgiveness where the equation of guilt can be figured until it’s all equal on both sides.

A gun can only mean so much to people who are willing to die for a cause.

Love is the beat of the heart and the passage of air and it’s the circulation of fluids, and it’s equilibrium.