But a Walking Shadow - A Flash Fiction Collection

Asylum

The air was thick with the dizzying odour of smoke, dancing in the iridescent panels of light that shone through the bars on the window. The Hatter sat in the shadows watching Alice paint the room in absent colours and ghostly lights that shimmered and vanished in an instant. She constructed two lines of white powder on the stone floor and returned to his side. Her eyes faded from purple to blue and back again.

"Happy birthday to me," she whispered to nobody, and the powder was gone. Hatter wiped the remnants from her Cupid's bow and secured her to his lap. Her skin felt like silk beneath his large, calloused hands. Velvet and silk; butterscotch lips. She tasted of strawberries and broken pieces.

"If they find you here, you're as good as dead." He spoke against her mouth with a smile, though he knew there was nothing worth smiling about. The drugs cooled his temper, caressing his system. Alice returned the packet of fairy-dust into her bra and laughed in her ethereal way of laughing.

"If I go down, you're going down with me," she whispered against the lobe of his ear, her body pressed to his like another limb. She knew it wasn't true. "Twentieth century and they're still throwing girls in the madhouse for knowing how to use these," she prodded between his legs with her toe and rose from the ground with a nonchalant yawn. He could see her bones through her lily white skin, like her skeleton was slowly leaving her.

"It's pointless getting angry about it now."

"Angry? I'm livid." She laughed prettily and swirled in a circle, falling at his lap and pawing his thighs like a hungry puppy. "They strapped me to a block of metal and exposed me to the world. They called it a pelvic examination. They're going to take parts of me away and consider me cured." She giggled again, but tears were in her eyes. Hatter dropped his gaze. "You're lucky you're a man."

He retrieved his hat from the ground. The black velvet was coated with a thin layer of dust and the label tucked into the ribbon withered with age. He narrowed his eyes. In this style 10/6.The font was barely visible anymore; it hadn't seen the light of day since the beginning of the war.

"Nymphomania," she stopped to snort. "They're turning me into an animal."

"Don't take it personally. We're all mad here." A lock opened somewhere in the distance and the smell of jam tarts wafted through the hallway. It was blotted out again at the metal clang of the door bolting to keep out the echoes of the starved prisoners... patients, they liked to call them. They stopped crying as Sister Grace began to hum, low and reverberating.

"Here comes Her Majesty now," Alice rolled her eyes and pulled her dress on over her head, trying to hide her trembling fingers. The footsteps stopped altogether outside of the Hatter's door. They listened to her breathing.

"I have a question," Hatter clasped his hands together and looked very seriously in Alice's direction. "Why is a raven like a writing desk?"