But the carpet caught her, and broke her fall, stroking her gently from her face to her hips right down to her toes. She licked lips gone dry and opened her eyes at the ceiling. The ceiling smiled.
Two men on a sofa rapidly growing music notes were musing over a flame and a pipe, and they were doing it so quietly Alice almost cried. Their noises were so BRIGHT...
Gary's cat Simon sidled up to her face and gave her a rough lick on her forehead. His tongue felt like wine, grape wine, swirling on the top like oil rainbows and slicks of black with sea birds and white whales suffocating underneath. "You know," he said, "You really shouldn't be messing with that shit."
Alice gasped and rolled away, tucking her head below her arms and gripping the soft blond hair at the nape of her neck. "Go away!" she gasped, but she wasn't speaking his language. She was speaking in Sentential, and her words fell from her mouth as heavy and gritty as figures on paper. They became 'and, or' and 'if and only if' and suddenly everything she said became a completely logical lie. "PLEASE!"
There was a pair of dead flies on the windowsill above her head. The cool evening breeze ruffled their wings and sucked them back against the closed window as it receded like the tide below the jealous, sullen moon.
"Thank you so much for those who are helping me," the first fly said, rolling across the raindrop-stained wood like a dried-out corn husk. "Fuck you to those who are making it worse."
His brother stared at her with a million tiny eyes that each saw a different station on the radio waves. Then he melted. Alice watched his body transform into just as many points of colored light; red like the blood you could see pumping through the cornflower-blue veins in your wrists, orange like the sparks those made-for-lighting logs made as you lit them, yellow and green like the sickly Northern Lights you couldn't see in the city on the rooftops at night and below the tainted window glass that covered EVERYTHING. Purple and blue erupted from him like spits of bi-colored lava from some fantastic Lisa Frank inferno, spewing every-color shapes like phoenix wings all over that sorry wooden sill.
Gary and Guy leaned back against the couch as their own toys claimed their brains. Gary's stupid match kissed the floor and it was all over.
Neither saw Alice jerk to her bony knees and stumble clumsily away. Her hair fell in her face like spider silk and clung to her eyelashes and salty wet tears. She was no longer in Gary's basement; there were no fucked over teens fumbling with their clothes on the floor; what she stepped in wasn't vomit and beer. Every time she closed her eyes like turning the channels while blinking, a new section of the sad brown basement had changed. Suddenly the garish yellow lights were clean white ceilings washed blue by shadows and the light of the moon...her feet hit cool slick tile and the bathroom opened up to a luxurious NYC loft with black and white furniture and deviantART prints on the walls.
"You're going to DIE!" the man with the dusty background said, and then he laughed. She felt his horrid laughter on her face like burning. But she couldn't get away. This- you could never get away. Don't look back; you can never look back. "Please- " little Alice whispered, tucking herself between the oven and the lazy susan both painted shark's-eye black. "I didn't mean to do this. I didn't mean to come here. Please. Can you help me get home?"
Simon's chestnut fur stuck out in the dream like school on Saturday: with no class. His teeth were HUGE, and Alice became afraid. "Now, Alice, that is just NOT true. You chose the blue pill and you chose to take this chance. You must be held accountable," and as he spoke, Alice in her terror reached out and smeared his colors from the frame, "For your actions. This is you, Alice. This is how you've chosen to do it." Last to fade were his sharp white teeth, which edged closer and closer to the girl on the floor as she tried to melt back into the counter. "Have you ever tried to describe a color, Alice? Tell me what red is."
The cool silence of the loft was drifting away from her, sifting through a vortex in the middle of the room. Like an inverted vacuum with the plugs pulled out and dangling at its sides, the more contentment it sucked the more heat and smoke it spewed. Suddenly her vision warped, terrifyingly: the black-glass cabinets became sickly yellow orange paint; the unlit deco lamps suspended from the ceiling became unshaded 60-watt lightbulbs; the giant picture window through which she surveyed the entire city skyline all black and neon and coldly defiant...became a spit-streaked mirror that slapped her eyes with her own sad face. Tangled blond hair. Running black eyeliner. Such an ugly, dirty blue dress...
But that changed in an instant, too; so entirely was that reality gone that for a moment she wondered if she had ever REALLY been there at all. A small blue butterfly, painted in shades from A-flat to D-sharp, floated on her breath. "I reject your reality, and substitute my own." he said. For a moment he strobed, flashing blue and red in a pattern that should mean, 'run, get out!' but Alice stumbled back from it and lost herself in the shadows of her own mind.
"Why are you running?"
The girl was sitting on the ground, surrounded by hundreds of pens and pencils of every color, texture, and consistency. Strips and sheets of paper cast aside showed beautiful and lithe young men with golden skin and jewel-toned hair. "Are you Alice?" Alice whispered.
She shook her head silently and spat on the piece of paper nearest to her. Another incredible boy bloomed, one so fine she was hard pressed to tear her eyes away.
"Don't bother me," the girl said. Her eyes and hair were pitch colored, and her face was cruel. "Stop your running and leave me alone."
"You can come with me!" Her unforeseen companion cried. Alice whirled and flinched. Fantas's twin, Reality, was portly and gleeful; almost retardedly gleeful. He tried to grab one of her hands but she was too little and he was much too big. Instead of her hand he grabbed her chest- and he squeezed. She fought for breath, fought to breathe, fought to scream-
Oh, god, his hand was so hot-
Outside, blazingly red trucks screamed their fury and rattled the neighbors' windows. Little men with big hoses scurried like ants around the lawn and in and out of the blazing building, half-carrying badly burned and sooty teenagers. Not one coherent word could be spoken from any mouth fresh from the burning house. Muttered phrases, like 'psychedelic' and 'thiz'z a bad batch, Murray- it hurtzz-' abounded the grounds, but most were so far gone they could only laugh. They laughed at the sweet, cold night air and the deadly demons only they could see, flapping around in the sky above them; they laughed at all the people gathered just outside the police lines, though most of THEM were crying. They laughed at their parents, and their friends' parents, and at Alice's parents, who were on their knees beside a police cruiser and begging God that each new victim pulled from the inferno was their daughter's body.
But it wasn't Alice. It couldn't be Alice. It would never be Alice.
Because Alice was on her knees in the downstairs bathroom, pounding on a door that wasn't locked and burning her hands each time she touched it. Alice was in Wonderland- and she'd never leave again.