Reasons to Live - a collection of flash fiction stories

Welcome To My Nightmare

Vincent likes to be alone, except when he is Alice.

Vincent is an armful of disappointments to his family, a black sheep in a herd of prize lambs ready for the slaughter.

Alice is a punch to the jaw. A painful truth of what you really can be if you shoot enough dreams into your veins. 

Vincent hates mortality. Alice believes he will live forever.

Alice's eyes are made up, black, black, black. His lips are smudged in blood red. Alice likes to choke on feathers he's shoved down his throat. Alice prides himself in being some kind of alien-man-woman-thing. Vincent just wants to crawl home and sleep, sleep sleep.

Bottles litter Alice's floor. When he asks who'll get him another beer, at least five different people leap up and race towards the fridge's door. They all like Alice. They want Alice to like them. They want to be Alice.

Needles litter Vincent's floor. When he wakes up twitchy and itchy people look at him like he should be locked up in the loony bin. They all loath Vincent. They like to pretend thy don't know Vincent. They don't want Vincent around.

Alice is being fed, while Vincent starves. Like a dying animal, Vincent lays on the ground howling in pain. Alice feeds off glitter and substances brought over from Columbia, on things he can shove into his nose and into his veins as Vincent begs for mercy.

Vincent's eyes no longer see straight. Rooms curve and swirl. People become ten feet tall! And Alice just whispers, 'Feed me, feed me!'

Now Vincent is fading and they are all crying. Alice tosses his head back and laughs all the way to the asylum where they lock Vincent up among people who really do belong there.

There is a barefoot madman howling at the summer sun. A woman whose gray hair falls to her knees points and him and giggles every time he passes her by. There is a fellow who wants to be called Rubber Jim who keeps tapping on the window sill begging to be let in. There is a teenager with so many scratches across her skin it looks like tiger stripes who utters psalms and hymns under her breath from twilight to dawn. And Vincent knows he does not belong in a place full of The Crazies.

I am not a Crazy. Vincent thinks but Alice disagrees.

'You have always been mad, you just did not know it till I arrived.' Then Alice laughs and laughs till Vincent is taken away.

Vincent lays in a room, strapped to a bed that is not his own, yet it is for his own good. Vincent wants to go home. He wants to sit on his couch and watch golf on TV with his wife and five-year-old daughter. He wants to smile a toothy smile at the sunny sky and lift his five-year-old towards cotton candy clouds. He wants to hear his wife's laughter before she touches his shoulder and reminds him that she will always love him.

Vincent stares at the white ceiling till the meds allow him to fade away. He wishes Alice had never come, but Alice will never go away. Vincent closes his eyes and dreams. 

  © Christine Bottas. All rights reserved 2015-2020.  

Note: I watched a brilliant documentary about Alice Cooper the other day, then this escaped my brain. There was this crazy good vs bad thing going on with this talented singer, so glad he escaped his nightmare.