Joseph Fink - Alice Isn’t Dead

Fuck the Thistle Man , the feeling said.

She kicked and screamed with all the energy she had left. Perhaps she would go down, but it would not be quietly. Other people in the parking lot were finally turning, finally seeing. Even if she couldn’t beat him, she could get them to look. A family, a father and two kids, and the kids were pointing, and the father was on his phone. He was talking urgently and gesturing toward her. She fought until the Thistle Man’s arm on her throat lowered her into a quiet darkness she had apparently always carried somewhere in her mind, and then there was a siren, and the arm was off her throat, and the world returned to her, and a police car pulled up.

The police officer got out. A white man. No partner. Big. Not big as in muscular or big as in fat, just big.

She stumbled a few paces away from the Thistle Man, out of his reach. The policeman sauntered over. He was a man used to the world waiting for him. He must have seen the Thistle Man attacking her, but he didn’t seem worried about that. He examined Keisha with heavy-lidded eyes.

“What seems to be the problem here?” he said.

She did her best to tell him. The noises, the stopping, the Thistle Man, the air, the lack of air, the struggle. He frowned. Made no notes. He turned to the Thistle Man, who hadn’t moved, hadn’t interrupted, had leaned with crossed arms on her truck.

“That true?” the policeman asked him.

The Thistle Man giggled, a high, childish sound.

“Doesn’t sound like it’s true,” said the policeman.

She didn’t know what to do. On one side, the police. On the other side, a literal monster. The policeman nodded to the Thistle Man. “If he has to come talk to you,” he said, “then you’ve been asking the wrong questions.” He lumbered back to his squad car, opened the door. “My advice,” he said to Keisha, “is to stop asking the wrong questions.” He tipped his hat at the Thistle Man. “You have a nice night now.”

The Thistle Man did a lazy wave in return, as the policeman folded his towering frame into the car.

“I will, Officer,” the Thistle Man said. “You know I will.”

The police car drove away, but the Thistle Man made no move toward her.

“You see now. You see how it stands. Go home.” He made a face of concern, worry even. “You can still go home.”

He turned and stalked away into the night. To the lit edges of the parking lot, and into the sparse landscaping, and the vacant grassland beyond. Keisha stood frozen until she found it in herself to get back in her truck and drive away. No one in the lot talked to her or checked to see if she was alright. They looked at her and then looked away.

Police cars followed her for a few days after. No siren, no lights, but staying close on her tail. She had well and truly gotten their attention now.

But the Thistle Man was wrong. She couldn’t go home. Because home wasn’t a place. Home was a person. And she hadn’t found that person yet. After five days the police stopped following her. They had let her off with a warning. It was a warning she was going to ignore.

It’s a long and desolate way from Florida to Atlanta. The landscape is constructed of billboards. There are no natural features, only a constant chatter along the side of the road. A one-sided conversation. Lots of anti-evolution stuff. Advertisements for truck stops with names like the Jade Palace or the Chinese Fan, written in racist faux-Chinese fonts, and wink-wink language about the massages available. Keisha winced. Lord, get her to Atlanta. 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.

Business wasn’t booming. Many of the ads on the billboards were ancient. Announcements of local fairs from 2005. Fire sales for stores long since buried under pitch and concrete. A lot of vacancies, phone numbers to call for renting the space. She wondered how much an ad on a stretch like this would cost. Even on her wage she might be able to buy herself one, maybe this bare one between an ad for dog grooming whose tagline was DECADENT DOGS and yet another thinly veiled ad for sex work. She could reach out to Alice that way, even if Alice could never respond. Shout at the passing cars long enough and maybe someone somewhere would hear it. Or, hell, she could pick up her radio again and tell her entire story to every bored trucker in range. But instead she would keep driving, keep moving, and hope eventually she would arrive somewhere. A conclusion, a great transformation, or, failing that, Atlanta by the afternoon.

She was weighing the merits of stopping for a coffee when she spotted a billboard that didn’t fit. For one, it was spotless, installed maybe in the last week. It was a black billboard that said in tall white letters, HUNGRY? Was it advertising the concept of food? The idea of eating? If so, it wasn’t effective, because when she looked at it her gut twisted. The billboard pointed her somewhere bleak and horrible, even as her conscious mind hadn’t picked out why.

Another billboard, a few miles later. Same design; black background, white text, plain capitalized letters. BERNARD HAMILTON, it said. Then another that said SYLVIA PARKER. With each one she felt sicker and sicker. Someone was sending a message to someone, and the message felt to her monstrous and wild.

After Alice’s funeral, Keisha had mourned privately for weeks, refusing to see friends, missing work. She had sat at home and allowed the grief to weigh on her, a physical pressing on her chest that strained the muscles if she tried to get up or even turn her head. If she had had someone else to look after, a child, an elderly relative, even a pet, then maybe she would have forced herself into something resembling the person she had been before. But even then, inside she would be a vessel of fluids and mourning. She wasn’t the person she had been before and she never would be again. Sure, she had always been anxious and shy, but it had never been what defined her. She was able to relax when with friends and family. She had her hobbies and dreams. For some time she had been thinking about quitting her job to start a bakery, because the idea of arriving to work at four in the morning to make bread sounded like the best possible job in the world, but it had never been quite the right time for her to do that. 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.

Alice never called Keisha by her name. This is true for many couples. Chipmunk, Alice would call Keisha. Chanterelle. Often Chanterelle. Walnut Jones. Alice found that last one especially funny. Now everyone called Keisha by her name. “Keisha,” they would say, in soft and worried voices, and Keisha just wanted someone with a laugh in her voice to call her Chanterelle, to call her Walnut Jones.