Alice Isn't Dead

by Joseph Fink

At a van driving by on the highway with a cartoon logo of chickens and the name praxis! in bubble font.

van driving by on the highway with a cartoon logo of chickens and the name praxis!

billboard, well lit and maintained. It had a picture of a smiling family, and against a soft pink background it said a company name. praxis.

had a picture of a smiling family, and against a soft pink background it said a company name. praxis.

The subtext of America wasn’t just text here, it was in letters five feet tall.

hope eventually she would arrive somewhere. A conclusion, a great transformation, or, failing that, Atlanta by the afternoon.

billboard that said in tall white letters, hungry?

sylvia parker

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.

Sylvia Parker.” Keisha glanced at her. “I’ve heard that name somewhere.”

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

praxis.edu.

I think you’re going to be the one who stops it. No, I mean it. I think you haven’t even grown into the force for good you could become.

US military property. The sign said thistle.

This was a system of violence and laws that protected Thistle

monolith of disparity and she could almost laugh at the sheer lopsided span of injustice

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.

Once or twice she saw a person in a hoodie,

Praxis. No one seemed to know what Praxis was, what it stood for, if it was real or a fiction whispered by drunks with their elbows propped on sticky bars

story from the Civil War, a vision of motley-dressed dancers seen in the sky above a bloody battle, led to an academic paper no one had requested in over forty years that mentioned agents of Praxis carrying out missions of uncertain purpose during that war. Even which side those missions were meant to support was unclear, and the authors of the paper dismissed the reference to Praxis as a distortion of history through years of retelling.

Thistle Goods and Butchering.

A hundred years ago, and fifty years ago, and ten years ago. “Perhaps we can help each other,” said the woman with many names, to the government official who frowned. He didn’t ask how she could help him. He knew. There were always troublemakers. People who didn’t go with the program. Communists. Civil rights agitators. Even plain old liberals. A government can only do so much directly against these degenerates without risking the title of democracy. But a band of serial killers with this woman at the heart of them? They could cause all sorts of useful chaos.

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

being in control of the place that she called home.

Thistle Limited

Even if they wouldn’t succeed in acting, at least they were acting.

A good person doesn’t matter if they’re working in a bad system.”

“There are always bad people. Thistle is merely a focus for that. For the world to move forward, the good people must struggle to organize a better world. Praxis is merely a focus for that. We did not start this struggle, but gave ourselves entirely to it.”

“They are evil and hatred. They are a point of view felt so deeply that it becomes an identity.”

Thistle Men are human.” “Most monsters are.”