Alice Stays Home

Ch. FIVE Bleach

The rest of the day is spread open in front of me.

I'm lying on my bed trying to herd my thoughts back inside the enclosure, but they're worse than frightened gazelles at the sight of a lion. They're jumping everywhere.

I sit down to stop the chaos. I have to do something.

I look at my bass guitar resting in the corner. It tempts me, so I grab it and start strumming notes that don't really sound like anything, but in my head play like the beginning of The Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes.

A catarrhal noise fills the room.

I stop before the god of music comes down from heaven to punish me just like I deserve, shoving me to the centre of the Earth, forbidding me to touch anything that produces sound.

I hear my cell phone vibrating. I grab it and unlock it with a swipe.

A WhatsApp text from Franc.

Here's my punishment, worse than I thought! I'd have been better off near the planet's hot core.

I don't even read it, I block him. In fact, I've found a great pastime: deleting him from all my socials. I remove him with the same care my mother puts into removing vermiform appendixes from bowels.

When I'm done I feel a certain lightness that reminds me of the old man's house in the movie "Up" when the balloons uproot it taking it to higher skies. I think it must have felt pretty much like me now.

At least homework is just a fading memory now.

I take a look at my "Zimbo wall."

I came up with the name in one of my creative fits. It's basically the wall in front of my bed that I've filled with multicolored sticky notes. On each of them there's a sentence from my one and only immortal and infinite love: Wisława Szymborska.

Everyone thinks she is just a great poet. You've got to be kidding me. She's so much more than that.

To me she is the Prophet.

She has all the answers. She's the one who shows me the light whenever I find myself groping in the dark. When I try to say her last name, my teeth get shuffled in my mouth, my tongue gets tied and I start spitting everywhere, it's a real mess. So I decided to call her Zimbo.

The Zimbo wall.

In moments like this I resort to her words. I entrust myself to chance, the arm of Destiny. I sit on the bed and take a dart out of the bedside table drawer.

Yes, one of those you use for playing darts, it has a metal tip.

I throw it without taking aim.

It hits a little orange piece of paper.

I go to read what Zimbo has to say.

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won't