Alice Isn't Dead

by Joseph Fink

In 1873, a traveling doctor and salesman of cure-all medicine arrived in the town of Okmulgee, Oklahoma. The sign on his wagon said thistle modern miracles of health! He spoke and sold in town for a few days and moved on. His assistant, a small woman who introduced herself variously as Miss Wheel and Miss Night, took the coins and offered in exchange vials of a dark blue and bitter medicine. Three weeks later, everyone who had tried the medicine died of a lingering and painful condition that manifested first as a red bulging in the skin and then incurably infected the brain. The town doctor died himself before he could give an educated opinion of the plague, having disbelieved in the medicine but having sampled it for his own edification, and by the time another doctor was allowed to see the bodies, they had disintegrated into a marshy sponge that smelled peppery and sour.

1901. Chicago. Thirteen missing children over one summer. Disappearances traced to a new shop. Thistle Goods and Butchering. Staff and owners disappeared before questioning but were described by neighbors as a crew of oddly shaped men acting under the orders of a small, frail woman who called herself Madam Tile. The evidence found in the shop required the complete demolition of the structure, as the horrors there made it beyond rehabilitation. 1955. Missoula. The only synagogue in town burned down by a group of men with faces that no one would admit they recognized as their friends and neighbors. A federal investigation of the crime was cursory, and most of the witnesses were deemed unreliable due to their repeated insistence that a woman was seen walking through the flames in the building, passing through the heat and singing. The case was closed with little investigation. Most of the Jewish community moved away. People didn’t talk about the burning much, and soon even the witnesses wouldn’t say that they had been there. Many saw the woman from the fire again and again, drinking in local bars, talking in low tones with groups of local men.

1983. Olive, Montana. Elizabeth Harris, one of the last children to grow up in a town that would soon fade from existence except as a name on a map. She was playing in a field near her house when she came across a deep hole she had never seen before. Peering into the hole she saw at the bottom a small, frail woman. The woman’s face was covered in blood, and her eyes were looking back up at Elizabeth. The woman began to sing, in a sweet, high voice. “O, martyrs,” she sang. “O, soldiers of a lower cause.” Elizabeth turned and ran. She would not put together until later that evening, but subsequently would be unable to forget, that as the woman sang she had been slowly floating up out of the hole toward the surface. Elizabeth moved away from Olive as soon as she was old enough and dreamed of that woman’s song and the whites of her eyes floating slowly upward at least once a month for the rest of her life.

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.