THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS.
Sin Harvest – Alice centric.
i
Alice has never had a friend.
She sits in her room wearing those lily-white dresses that Mommy sews so diligently until her fingers are rubbed down to the bone and she dreams. She dreams of the big, bad, sinful world outside. She dreams of disgusting things.
(Foolish fairytales.)
Mommy and Daddy try to make her clean but it doesn't ever (never) work - evil is rooted firmly under her skin (crawling like spiders; crawling like flies; crawling like the people in the walls) and none of the blows ever cut down deep enough.
ii.
Alice is a selfish child when she cries – bitten fingernails fisted into her pretty white dress and tear-tracks down her porcelain face – because they're doing it "all for your own good, Alice, dear."
(Mommy calls her "Alice, dear" when she holds her head in the bathtub, water too hot and too deep; they used to drown witches, didn't they, but Alice always sinks.)
Alice doesn't need friends because she has Mommy and Daddy and they love her very, very much, even when she's on her hands and knees getting her dress all bloody, slipping on the slick floorboards because-
-"You deserve it, Alice, dear."
iii.
Alice pictures herself as a bird in a cage, eyes glassy like marbles and hands on her knees, playing the good girl (but in reality she's such a bad girl.
She feeds the things in the walls and loses the silverware and tears her dresses and sometimes… Sometimes she even dreams of escape, but such thoughts are hastily shoved aside because she couldn't, she wouldn't…
She's just too scared.)
iv.
Alice hears footsteps in the hallway sometimes; muffled whispers flitting through the air like butterflies - but butterflies never live very long, do they?
The sound of fear is one constantly flitting about the house like a stuck record; shallow breathing and feet on floorboards and pounding hearts (and somebody slips, somebody screams, gunshots—
-and silence.)
v.
Alice starts to sew, fingers trembling around the thread, around the needle - it takes five attempts to get the thread through the eye of the needle and tie up a knot.
It takes even longer to make her people, felt creations with stitched-up mouths and empty eyes; memoirs of the deceased.
Dolls that hold souls.
Sometimes Alice feels like a proud mother, pawing over her beautiful children with methodical reverence. Other times, Alice feels like a reaper.
All those people, the dolls hidden in her room - they wanted to escape but she sewed their souls in, too selfish to let her friends go even when her dress is clean and the blood is washed (scrubbed) from her hands-
vi.
(& Alice knows that her soul is going to hell when she dies.)
a.n: just watched the people under the stairs (well, most of it) & alice was my favourite character so i felt like writing something.