It was after Alice left that I understood.
The morning light pouring into my bedroom left everything grey and dull. It was a cold, foggy day outside, much like the cold, foggy days that saturated every year in this town. It was very different from my hometown, from Alice’s hometown.
The disappearance of Alice showed me the tiny separations that made up reality. I would watch the dismal, colorless faces as I waited for the morning train to take me to work and see small flickers in their eyes; the wars that raged inside of everyone. Reality is made up of separations and these separations are kept alive through secrets; secrets that grew in bellies, like a newborn child, dividing lives into different little cupboards, each housing a pocket-sized universe.
It wasn’t an immediate realization. The Alice that I knew, with the toothy grin and rail thin figure, had deserted me and I took to this small town, unpacking my possessions into shelves that didn’t quite accommodate my former life, like pieces from different puzzles forced together in a unsightly distortion.
I had coffee, surrounded by the prosaic facets of a small kitchen. The separation started with River. River came after Alice, sixteen, a prodigy and harsh with her words. I met her at a place where no girl her age should have been and I was weak to her advances, like a moth to the flame; She was not a river I was used to.
She was not Alice and she never tried to be.
I put on my shoes, the only pair I had. The support was gone, the leather faded and peeling. “You can’t run in those,” River once chided, her tone uncaring and cold. She was smoking a cigarette on my bed in her pajamas. The daydreamt vision I had of her was sultry, sound, free of the pimples and chewed fingernails. “You know how cowards like to run.”
River was mean. Alice could be mean, and it was nearly similar to River’s mean but Alice’s mean was fleeting, forgotten by the time she kissed me and told one of her crude after-fight jokes.
I straightened my tie in the mirror, feeling it constrict like a serpent. Peaches knew how to fix these. Peaches came after Alice, alongside River but they were separate like different galaxies in the vastness of space. Peaches tried to be Alice, a best friend of the forgotten, simple and confused, a mother with children who could outsmart her and did, often.
She would adjust my ties and try to kiss me, but there was nothing in Peaches that I could grab onto. She was too artless and though tender, like Alice could be sometimes, I would reach out and cup her breasts in my palms, small, the size of apricots, and I would feel nothing but a fleeting familiarity.
“He doesn’t know how to straighten his own ties, either,” she spoke of her husband, with a slight tremor in her voice. She fiddled with the tie around my neck and I pretended not to notice the tear marks on her cheeks.
They both arrived after Alice, like trains in stations I would never think of going to had she stayed.
There were canyons of estrangement between the three of us. River could spit out all the cruel, perceptive words she could and we would make love, but that did not change how she left my world to make her way back to a place that housed an absent father and a mother with her nose in a medicine cabinet. Peaches left me, unfulfilled and fragile, returning to children who never listened as they were encouraged by their father, a man who would not look at her anymore.
Grabbing my briefcase, I headed down the narrow hallway, a ghost floating through a foreign dimension. There was little place for me in the lives of either of them, both troubled and weary. It was after Alice, that I managed to slip through the cracks of separated realities and live in limbo, a coma anyone could slip into to escape for a short while.
These little women were small parts of a separated Alice, an Alice that vanished without a trace when I asked for a forever. I stepped out, detaching myself from the void, molding myself into the comforts of a lie and when the day ended, I’d slip back in the cracks, cold and aware.
by Aliyah Al Awadhi (First Place Winner, Flash Fiction Reading and Writing Competition, 2016 – Organized by BrandMoxie and New York University Abu Dhabi)
To read Aliyah’s interview with Tempo, check it here: Flash Fiction Winner: Aliyah Al Awadhi
