ALICE

Chapter 10 - STONED

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Chapter 10: STONED

 Alice had the dream again, only stranger. Her skeleton was orange, the rabbit’s suit was an odd rainbow colour, and segments of the dream fast forwarded and rewinded again. It was much like the stereotype of what drugs were like in the movies.

Guess they were right. Alice thought.

 Alice had been told by Malone that dreams only lasted a few seconds, a minute, tops. But Alice was sure that every minute in this dream, was a minute in real life. She was lucid, and she could move around, going outside of her own body, which did its usual motions as though on rails. She skipped ahead, flying around as her body realized that she had murdered her father for the umpteenth time. Alice flew to the rabbit, where he stood in his usual position, twirling his combat knife in one white hand, and talking on his cell-phone at the same time. He seemed to take no notice of Alice’s mind, floating lazily about 6 feet away from him.

                                                                                       

 Then he exploded in light, his suit landing on the floor with a fabricky thud. The white light knocked even Alice’s matterless form a few feet back. On the other hand, Alice’s body was vaporized, leaving a bronze hookah, trailing pink smoke from the hose, in its wake. The hookah turned into a fat blue caterpillar, and then into a green cocoon, and finally into a butterfly with a torn wing, the other badly injured, a telltale thumbprint imbedded into its delicate flesh. Alice watched the butterfly flutter away with the equivalent of a dire looking limp, should it have been walking.

 She looked around now, and saw a white space, going on, completely flat as far as she could see. The sky was more of a cream colour, so there was a line that showed some sort of horizon. The only things different from this eternal white plains, were the rabbit’s clothes, Alice’s father‘s, Percy‘s, St. Christopher, and a single, strong looking 9 foot tall tree. Alice looked at the tree. It seemed normal, not really trippy-looking or anything. She placed a hand on the trunk, and felt the rough skin. It had roundish green leaves, and brown, blistered bark. It also had several green fruit hanging from the branches, and upon closer inspection, Alice saw that they were apples. She walked around the tree, and looked at the fruit. Nothing peculiar about them. Then, she saw a red apple.

 Alice thought about this; is it possible for a red apple to be in a tree of green ones? Well, I’m tripping balls of two really hard drugs, and this is the least that could happen, I’m lucky I’m not making friends with Abe Lincoln and Marilyn Munroe as Siamese twins.

 Alice took one last gander at the tree, and took in its more minute details. She noticed that it had a strange shape between the branches when you looked at it a certain way, it was sort of like a small glass bottle.

 Okay, I need to wake up. How do I wake up? Where do I leave?

 Alice looked around the tree, not quite sure of what she was looking for. Maybe a weapon. Malone said that many dreams end if you die, and if you manage to be lucid while dreaming, you can force yourself to do what you think would be waking up, even if you usually just exit the dream and sleep for a few hours.

 So she needed something to kill herself, something to exit the dream.

 The rabbit.

 He had a gun, and a knife. Alice walked over to the pile of his clothes. Alice felt around inside his jacket until she found the shoulder-houlster, which had an oily, black gun inside of it. This was the first time she had held a firearm since “The Incident”, and the reminder sent a shiver down her spine.

 Alice examined the weapon; it was a .45 piece, a Para handgun.

 Okay… How do I do this?

 Alice remembered hearing that if you shot yourself the way that is so often portrayed,  -in the temple- you sometimes missed, only hitting a part of the brain that you could apparently live without. Alice pointed the gun underneath her chin, but her wrist was at too awkward a position to squeeze the trigger properly. Alice put the barrel of the handgun in her mouth. The black metal tasted awful, with traces of sulfur and oil all over it. She pulled the trigger, and felt the muzzle flash burn the inside of her mouth, before the round went out the back of her head, nearly severing the spinal cord where it met the bottom of her skull.

 Alice awoke with a jolt, her brow covered in sweat, and her stoumach feeling so nauseus she thought she would vomit right there.

 Malone handed her a glass of water, which she gulped down, only to gag it back up in a green, watery stream. She had been high, stoned, very messed up. This was the crash, she supposed. Would she become dependent on these drugs? Turn into a pill-popper?

 All that Alice knew, was that these pills were doing strange things to her, for her mother had just popped out of space, just as the rest of the room was.