Alice Isn’t Dead

by Joseph Fink

There were a few cars, yes, some people, but she didn’t expect help from the world, and generally the world met her expectations.

At least there was cruise control, and a road so straight all she had to do was make sure she didn’t go crashing off into a billboard telling her the Confederacy still could win, which was an actual billboard she had passed. The subtext of America wasn’t just text here, it was in letters five feet tall.

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.

Of course, lots of people get murdered every year, but he thought he was different from those people, for reasons he could not have articulated because the idea that nothing horrible could ever happen to us personally exists not in our thoughts but in the base of our necks.

There is some version of the world where he made it to San Francisco, grew lifelong friendships there, found a career, found a partner, grew old. But that never happened in our world, which is a sadder, emptier place.

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.

This was a system of violence and laws that protected Thistle from the likes of her, five foot three, a gash down her chest, and 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.

She had murdered her neighbors by just trying to come home, and there was no to-do list she could work her way through the next day that would make that something she could live with.

She tried to find steadiness, but that was no longer a possibility, and so she tried to find resolve and she didn’t have that either. But she did have stubbornness and desperation, and those would do in a pinch.

He was stronger even than she had remembered. It was like being hit by a car. Mass without pity, only brutal physics.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t afraid. The only way to be brave is to first be afraid.

This was still a happy memory for Keisha, despite the pain that came after. 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.

Mercy’s customer service smiled widened as her brow furrowed. It was an unconvincing combination.

Mercy was lying on one of the study tables, her back arched awkwardly. Keisha realized that Mercy’s shirt had been torn open, and so had her skin, and her rib cage. The entire front of her torso had been pulled apart as though by surgical equipment, and she was lying under the last lit bank of fluorescents like a patient in an operating room. Her face was turned toward Keisha, and Keisha wanted to project fear on her frozen features, but if she were honest there was only the dull glaze of death.

“Fuck.” She said it over and over, filling in for anything she might have thought to say if she were given a lifetime of quiet contemplation, like none of us ever are.

It’s up to nature to tell people that they’re moving. Otherwise each Kmart sign looks like each Kmart sign, every Subway sandwich tastes the same.

“Some subjects are so complicated,” said the oracle, “that even speaking of them plainly sounds cryptic.”

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.

Alice gathered her words, tried to find a way to express all that she felt about Lucy, but all she could find was “fuck you,” and so she attacked.

“We still have it. Or we sometimes still have it. We have some of it, some of the time.”

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

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.