Nora Lange
The dog days were upon us, and I was one of those unfortunate Figurines that was not gifted eyelids. Not that I ever expected I would sleep in. Not that there was any privacy inside the Spectacle. The Spectacle. Story has it long ago some influential Externals, those existing in nature who made all the decisions about what went on inside, were jostled awake by an overwhelming emptiness. Unable to shake it, desperate to feel again like themselves, they built a coping mechanism in the form of a translucent sphere and stuffed it with miniature configurations, reminders of the past. The point was the Dog Star had arrived. Though I would never see it in nature, I understood it rose in the sky just before the late July sun and that this would be a time of drought and madness. Like things weren't bad enough. I was desperate as ever to wake up an oversized bug because the outcome had been determined. Yet, again, I woke up myself: Honey, aspirational, defective, two sweet younger brothers dreaming beside me. They will never fear being turned into rivulets or genies, I thought, scanning their calm boyish faces. I wanted to smother them. I would not smother them.
I made my way into the kitchen. My mother was standing next to the dishrack. All she'd ever wanted was to be a citizen of the world.
"Honey," my mother said to me, "your bus is outside."
I played my part and ignored her. She'd really fallen apart since Externals diagnosed her unfit. Her arms and legs were becoming dull and patchy in places, which she attempted to hide with concealer. Her office uniform was difficult to make out, much of the design had worn away over the years and she didn't bother mending it. This, plus her being batshit, was the reason External's relocated to this nebulous very special place to be monitored like criminals. I remember thinking their cruelty was breathtaking. Their attention to the specific size and nature of our inside world, their beak-like consideration of every detail, every configuration—a perfected leaf on an inedible apple tree; pink newborns suckling on a mother's cracked, blistered nipple—each assembled with a tweezer's touch. Their violence was a type of immaculate violence.
I looked at my mother because I was a version of my mother. I looked away from my mother because I was a version of my mother. I was me, but I was also her—my mother, and I understood this all too well. My mother then passed me something resembling a banana. I peeled open the fruit, clearly stricken with some sort of disease.
"Like it's not bad enough we've been demoted to Questionable Status!" I said to the diseased banana.
"It's a fungus that kills plants by clogging their vascular system, Honey," said my mother.
"Of course," I said, instead of saying something warranted about her birthing me despite knowing I'd live an incomplete life inside of a glitchy histrionic Spectacle. I covered my eyes with my hands and returned to that brief period upon waking to July's light, pre-trekking through the toxins that constituted our world, pre-mandatory mother-daughter conversations next to the dishrack. In that moment I imagined it would be the day I'd turn into something worthwhile like an octopus. Their bodies are so soft they can squeeze through the tiniest cracks. They're the best. Or a supermodel. They're long.
"Runts, small creatures, they are not to be underestimated, Honey," my mother said.
"Millions of years ago it was the puny that survived the hellscape."
My mother knew exactly what I was thinking. This was the case more and more as I grew older. Further proof the ensuing weeks would be real downers.
"Alice and I are hatching a plan to escape the Spectacle by transforming into reflexive forms, camouflage masters like octopuses are a one body-wide eye," I said.
"Alice is a bad influence," my mother said, going on to play her part and ignore me.
She wasn't a fan of my BFF, Alice. Too much imagining, she'd said like she hadn't had the totality of her youth to imagine a different outcome. Alice, fellow teenager, subsequent neighbor in the nebulous very special place, whose mother like my mother was batshit, and who like me did her best to behave harmoniously and to dress accordingly. At this stage we wore short synthetic paisley puff-sleeved mini jumpers like good girls, which sometimes we still were. Both of our mothers were stigmatized. Both of our families were forced to live in an unincorporated district far from the center of town in surveilled matching apartments, painted a mild pink with a pale grey trim, colors said to have relaxing effects. Even still, Alice and I were expected to continue progressing, to pass through discrete units of time: infancy, adolescence, adulthood. But the truth was we went nowhere. And we were going nowhere.
My younger brothers finned into the kitchen. They picked their noses and demanded goldfish since all the other boys their age had goldfish. They ate the extractions and went on to say they were starving.
"STARVING!"
My sweet brothers had devoured everything.
"Honey—Go," my mother said, pointing again to the bus outside waiting to take me to learn.
"Right. Education."
Last week in Truth Telling we studied Norman Rockwell's Freedom From Want (1943), which depicted a plentiful Thanksgiving table. It was explained to us the stew we failed to make every night (because we're obligated to use cooking techniques inspired by Herodotus from the 5th century, which meant filling paunches made from animal hide and insufferably trying to light the bones beneath them) was an homage to a more bountiful harmonious time, which was why we continually failed to make it.
"I'd like to point out that we're given trampolines, but there's no jumping in the Spectacle," I said.
"Don't forget this," my mother said, handing me my backpack.
The bus dropped Alice and I off at the Learning Center. Before entering, we taped our mouths shut to double ensure we obeyed. (There were tons of conditions in the Spectacle, but The Learning Center had its own rules and we preferred to remain together over being separated.) (Plus, we were determined to surpass our mothers. There was a chance things would be different in a few years' time. Perhaps the Spectacle would be discovered by non-influential regular people or perhaps Externals would discover softer hearts.)
Along with our classmates, we searched the Center looking for images to caption for our Truth Telling assignment.
"You do realize these so-called lessons feed on a kind of perverse mixed messaging where one is expected to grow and to learn and to progress only to suffer for it," Alice said.
"Honey," Alice continued when she should have kept her mouth shut, "we're being subjected to a purity script, which makes it a punishment script."
I'd decided on the anonymous French painting Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters (ca. 1594) because nobody knew what to make of one woman pinching another's nipple in front of a staged background. And the painted women were said to have been real. Alice often said, I'm a Figurine but real all the same, a sentiment that was publicly mocked. Plus, I detected a lunacy inside of the painting like there was inside of Alice—a persistent little green shoot emerging from its seed. And like the two female subjects in the painting, we had faces shaped like upturned tulips and belonged to the powerful.
"What's the caption?" Alice looked at me with her dark beady eyes, her eyelashes so thick and heavy she had to staple them to either side of her face like drawn curtains to see.
"I like to think about coming of age in the 2000s as a little tune, Tick-tock, we'll probably burn because that's what I understand about scapegoats."
"Honey, nothing ignites here."
"Speaking of burning," Alice continued, "God is obviously incredible, in terms of potentiality—here, there, everywhere—but there's something to be said for brevity and souls passing quickly through the night."
Alice said a lot of things I failed to understand. Sometimes her personality got in the way of progressing, but as usual she was on to something. Externals gave us access to the most important texts of the time, but indulging, giving into temptation such as literature and philosophy, could land you in Exile or Away on Permanent Vacation. Or like us, with additional constraints, relocated to a nebulous place on the outskirts of town.
"See what I mean about perversity?"
I did. I saw what Alice meant, and it wasn't because I didn't have eyelids. We were being tested, prodded, and warned at every turn that should we take things too far we'd pay the price.
"We were not designed to last," I said, reluctant to articulate what I held in my heart.
"Honey, you don't even have eyelids!" Alice said.
"Worse," I said, "soon we'll be expected to blow the popular twins the Kevins."
"Have you seen their teeth?"
"I want to be my own kind of female," Alice said.
"I want to be my own kind of teenager," I said.
"This place is a madhouse."
"What a nightmare."
"From today on we will not wear cute jumpers or blow anyone."
One night, I mapped out what I'd been told: I could be break the cycle if I put my mind to it. HA HA. I made a list of pertinent things: It's important to note we too started out as fertilized eggs inside this firmament called the Spectacle. It's important to keep in mind the External's experiment is a tragedy being disguised as a fresh start. It's germane to point out that infants—regardless of their construction and constitution, regardless of whether they're made from compromised materials—are still babies. And whether Alice and I were to become Fully Realized or not, which we were not (females as a rule were excluded from this possibility)—like every baby, we were promised this potential.
"Honey, I can read your mind and it's no good here," my mother said.
"Am I wrong?"
My mother gave me that sad expression, the one she toted around like a miniature toolbox like she'd fix our problems; her face already half destroyed. I should have felt sorry for her, about her raising us kids alone, and the right half of her face looking like a melted plastic. Besides, she didn't need to say what she was about to go on to say, I already knew: I was just one Figurine among hundreds, perhaps thousands, that came to be inside of a perfect circle, Externals explained, intended to restore mankind to a natural balance. A liquid-filled divine shape which predated recorded history; the form that made whole equal whole.
"Let's be honest, this is a bad situation," I said.
"In my day," my mother said, a sentiment she repeated often, "in my day Sick Season wasn't Forever Season. Back then Externals exercised experimental integrity. Now they come and go as they please."
My mother, herself a sensation to behold, began performatively chain-smoking, and propping a boombox up on her shoulder began bloody murder screaming our personal anthem: I am doll eyes, doll mouth, doll legs, I am doll parts, bad skin, doll heart, Yeah, they really want you, they really do!—until she collapsed on the kitchen floor.
"This was supposed to be our song," I said, peering down into her face like a crystal ball despite knowing it was a terrible idea.
I would never be a supermodel. Never long.
My older brother Joey (before blowing up) had warned me parents were designed to invade space and to prefer their generations. Jesus, that was the situation. Somehow, Joey became Fully Realized at the age of fourteen and even that was expected, if it happened at all, to happen much later. With nobody else to blame, my mother blamed her mother who'd said from birth she knew Joey was faulty, which was to say he was unique, and because of it he'd surely go down early. Whoever was at fault, his head exploded. He would never be more than pieces, never a father or a Local Leader. The scene was bonkers. I had to clean him off the Spectacle's glass with Windex. Windex was a joke—you try aiming spray inside a liquid filled sphere. Externals demanded I collect each remaining fragment of Joey and make a pile of my older brother downtown in front of Sears. After, Figurines with unusually small hands, children under the age of six and the capable elderly, were tasked with skewering pieces of Joey on pikes lining our district's periphery. (We had access to modern-day alternatives, but nothing beats a pike in terms of setting the tone. Do you know what I mean?) A few days later, Externals presented what was left of our family with a nude gold man award. From what I can see, it's really chintzy, my mother had blurted.
Apparently, Joey's performance had been spot on. Tap. Tap. Tap, Externals fingered the glass (creating tidal waves, mind you) and explained they would place the hefty gold-plated statue near the very special place for our pleasure. This period—the one involving a glistening naked gold man close by for our enjoyment—seemed like an eternity. Until the shiny nude man was moved elsewhere, it seemed to me there was no night. No peace inside. No peace for miles outside of our surveilled apartment complexes. I wrapped cloth around my eyes, because I had not been given eyelids, but nothing prevented the glimmering sheen of his gold athletic genitals from wallpapering our district.
"We've become mere playthings," I said to Alice, as we moved through a very snowy downtown.
"Is there a sexual position called crucifixion or did I dream that?"
"Alice. Please."
Alice was one of those types where being hungry meant being grumpy and being grumpy could get us into further trouble. But who could blame her? She was employed at Taco Time. The wages were terrible. The food inedible. Nobody working there ate the food even though the managers offered employees one complimentary burrito per shift.
"The Bible says in the last days we'll become voracious lovers of ourselves," Alice said.
"Alice, I'm serious. Externals have gone AWOL. They have no restraint. None whatsoever."
It was bad enough Local Leaders were drinking the Kool-Aid, but these days Externals were entering the Spectacle often, and without warning, which was setting off tsunamis, blizzards, uprooting trees and houses, meticulous designs that had been deliberately installed with care. Now pretty floating waste. Even after sump pumps drained much of the water, oil, antifreeze, their tooling about shin-deep wreaked havoc. Chards of snow swirled for days on end if the bone chips had not been settled in advance. Externals had their reasons. For one, they explained, our facial expressions needed to be imbued with a greater humanity. Sometimes, they needed to break away from their daily lives in nature, which they found increasingly tedious.
"Right," Alice scoffed. "Like when Externals borrow young females to lick the rim of their magnifying goggles or their foreheads."
(They did. Externals had young Figurines lick their sweaty foreheads.)
"Look, another one," I pointed.
Another External hypnotized by our roundtrip train. They were hooked.
"It goes in circles. That's all the train does. Round and round."
"Their commitment is exhausting."
Alice was pissed.
"Have you forgotten yourselves?!" Alice got the man's attention by incessantly biting his shin.
"You look seriously uncomfortable," I said of his posture, hunched. Externals were simply too big for the Spectacle. Believe me, I was all in favor of them making fools of themselves, but really, they looked ridiculous all bent like that.
"We're here because of your desire to resuscitate the integrity of the illusion! Now all you do is make messes! What's wrong with you people?"
I'd never seen Alice so distraught.
"Look little lady, nobody on the outside has access to tinker with this kind of sordid sexy ruthless shit, not in these exact dimensions," the External said.
Crouched, holding a squirming Alice up to his eye, inspecting her figure, flawed, the External made sure to point out, "This is a kind of therapy! An immersive experience. A break from the fallen world. I'm desperate to be good!"
"You people are fucked," Alice said, knowing dirty language was a no-no.
Our troubles solidified Christmas Eve. Alice called me to say image was psyche when she was supposed to be wearing a red velvet dress and praying for our souls. She was tired of being taken advantage of. The perversity, the fraudulence, our so-called existence, so clearly assembled out of a desire to have it both ways had reached a point not even Alice could spin.
"Honey, I hate to say it, but I'm having trouble reading. I can't keep focused on the words. I fear I've lost the meaning."
Alice had uncovered something she wasn't supposed to know. Something had entered her world that had shifted its meaning for good.
"I don't understand the image and psyche part," I said.
(I was attempting to redirect the conversation.)
"IRL a suffering Jesus cried out: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Remember?"
This struck a chord. How could I forget the lesson on Diminishing Returns? That lesson was the best.
"We live in a genre cave," Alice said. "King Lear is about flesh and the mind. Bodies, love, these labors cannot be trapped within a maniacal director's limits."
There must be a way out. Octopus. Octopus. Octopus. Supermodel. Supermodel. Supermodel, I anthemed, hoping to levitate elsewhere.
We told our mothers we were spending the night at the other's house. With our trekking poles we went to get hot chocolate from Starbucks. At thirteen we did not believe in Santa, but we needed hot chocolate. We held onto our Styrofoam cups waiting to feel and we felt nothing. Even with extra marshmallows floating on the top, little cylindrical shapes crying out for help. We dumped our cups and asked ourselves what it would be like to be Mary Magdalen today. How would she be depicted in the Spectacle?
"Portrait of a sinner?"
"Portrait of humility?"
"I can't take this," Alice said, putting on her fins and pulling me along.
Downtown looked festive. The holiday lights were up, and so was Pat Nixon's "1972 tree" inspired by art and nature and adorned with thousands of satin balls. We passed snowmen; Nativity scenes; the cutest little Figurines making snow angels like good children. On the streets, Carolers were loyally dressed in shades of red and green, all the while doing their best to project their voices: All is calm, and all is bright, round yon virgin, mother and child in a liquid-filled spectacle. Alice pointed out the bedazzled suffocating pine trees dying slowly inside well-lit homes of well-to-do Figurines.
"I'd like to think we could be like that one day. Well-to-do," Alice said.
"We're like those balloons that lose air slowly through one tiny unseen hole."
"We're like those Christmas lights that don't work on account of the one unidentifiable broken light."
"We're like those snow globes that show life as it's supposed to be."
"This place is unhealthy," Alice said.
Then we played rock, paper, scissors to determine who'd IRA-drop Revision, our take on the Original Text. I got rock. Alice got paper.
Alice took a plastic bag out of her pocket, proceeded to load the bag with stones and handed it to me.
At home, I did all I could to ignore myself, but it was too late. My landline rang. My middle brother who had reached that pivotal prepubescent age designating himself the house phone answerer bear-attacked me to get on the line. Plan Number One—which included our Revision of The Holy See's Original Text and an outline transforming ourselves into camouflage masters—had been discovered.
"WTF. What's wrong with everybody?" Alice asked.
"I told you this wouldn't go over well," I said.
"H8ters."
Our Revision had attributed to the Original Text certain origins and first instances, i.e., formulas. Namely familial abuse, simulated death, the tragic-epic. Services to power. Before static took over the line, we came to understand pain was proof of despair and nothing amused Externals more. Without which, they'd said, we'd just be fool-hearted trinkets making a go at it and that was not the fate of mankind as they saw it.
"How else can one explain birthing anything from son of man, nations, pumpkins to priests? The authority who proved sentient beings were what they claimed to be?"
"Alice, we live in a Spectacle for Christ's Sake."
The recriminations would reveal themselves in stages, as recriminations must. First, Alice and I were prescribed The New Testament (again). (Which we knew exceptionally well.) We were given Xanax and tons of other unpronounceable garbage. When all else failed, Externals demanded Local Leaders order Alice and I to voluntarily dismantle and concede.
"We will not," we said.
"These are the parameters in which you are to exist. Period."
"Redundant," we said of what they said and refused.
"Take our tongues away!" we told the fascists. "They barely work anymore as it is!"
Our tongues and navigational gear, like our fins and trekking poles, were removed. Our leads shortened to mere inches. Ankle monitors were fastened. They went so far as to confiscate our Hegel and Degas, which posed no significant threat. None whatsoever.
"Oh, now I'll get to sleep in!" I said to zero fanfare.
The extent of the Spectacle was breathtaking. There was no end.
Our mothers did their best. Kids these days, they said, appealing for a lighter punishment, arguing that in the past Local Leaders and Family had some measure of autonomy when it came to matters concerning their own.
"You two are batshit," Local Leaders on behalf of Externals said to our mothers.
Once batshit, always batshit, I thought.
Alice and I spent our last night in the Stadium repenting. Figurines filled the stands to witness our damnation. Who could blame them? Externals, who fortunately for us had decided to remain outside of the Spectacle, wore headlamps to better see what was taking place. (Sometimes those that made all the decisions about what went on inside went so far as to utilize headlamps, key lights, or side lights, like those used in Chiaroscuro art to get the alterations right.) Our mothers were there. As a gesture of good will, they'd been given longer leads so they could join us. They sat idle. Their mouths agape; soggy paper bags with eye holes over the tops of their heads and holding up solidarity posters.
"Hilarious," Alice signed to me.
It was so true. Our mothers were hilarious.
Per routine, Local Leaders would now need to determine our punishment.
"What do you girls want to say for yourselves?" they asked.
"Illusions are tricky," Alice signed.
They turned to look at me, sharply.
Honey, my mother thought, soggy bag over the top half of her head, At least we're doing this in the Stadium and not in the Clinic. That dismal, sad, concrete building that offered to help women, was not a building any female should enter.
If she could read my mind, I could read hers.
"What she said," I signed and pointed at Alice.
The incriminating questions would continue, but I'd checked out by then. I was thinking back to the The Good Life lesson. That month our class paid special attention, hours and hours on this video of a birthday party for former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski's wife, thrown on the island of Sardinia, which featured an ice sculpture of Michelangelo's David spewing vodka from his penis, a cake shaped like woman's breasts with sparklers on top, and guests wearing togas and tight briefs, dancing to a performance by Jimmy Buffett.
There was a message somewhere in all of it. I scanned the Stadium. Here, in the Spectacle, girls were girls until they were mothers or went missing or simply disintegrated. It was explained to us that the lucky became rivulets or genies; such was a deserved afterlife. I prayed, knowing nothing would change the horrors of this world. I heard my mother giggle. Her body a fraction of what it had once been. There was so much light in the space—like an explosion. The Stadium screens depicted demons, and furtive angels (as if they wanted part in an altogether different motif), but mostly demons. Each frame exceptionally well-lit thanks to Externals' use of headlamps. I guess things weren't all that bad in the Spectacle.
Alice and I were banished for an undisclosed amount of time. We were staked inside a fogbound tent that teetered on the edge of a tall cliff and overlooked a roaring sea. There was a lighthouse, unwavering in the distance. Nothing more. No views of residential or commercial areas.
As was custom, one-by-one Figurines were permitted to stop by with offerings: fortune cookies, striped red and white paper straws. The Cult of Identical Dressmakers gave us rolls of heavy fabric. Even some well-to-do Figurines came by. They had the best stuff. And in some irrational state, the one where Alice and I convinced ourselves we'd be OK, we decided to hold onto the fancy items with their original tags so that we might later sell them. Our mothers were the last to visit for the very reason that it was hardest for them.
"Honey, there's nothing more to give," my mom said, pulling up her shirt to peek at her sunken breasts.
I hadn't realized they'd sunken.
"Nothing more to be done," Alice's mom said, her figure—armless.
"Sure," we signed.
We were thirteen. It wasn't a secret we'd run out of room. Then our mothers finned sadly off if they had ever finned in any other way.
For a time, Alice and I got into life staked inside a tent above the roaring sea. We swore like seamen. Scratched at what was left of our vaginas, said: Nothing about the Spectacle was different from any other spectacle and turned our attention to Plan Number Two, which was to build a worldwide white noise machine. We figured if we found a way to penetrate the atmosphere, we could use the satellites in space to blanket Earth in white noise. This had the ability to impact everything. This was a better, more permittable use of time than entertaining correlations between birthing and pumpkins.
Then a dank stillness settled in. Increasingly disoriented, ever bone-weary, Alice had me unfasten her stapled eyelashes from either side of her face. "Let the beasts fall over my eyes like a lid," she'd said. She stopped responding to my calls and I began in my head to form these thoughts. I imagined in this event—the one where Alice was in nature—that there was a purpose and perhaps that was the Spectacle's greatest lesson or curse. I couldn't tell the difference. I held her body and thought about composting. I thought about Kafka's Gregor, his trembling little bug legs, and pictured him gazing out his childhood window desperate to recognize the view. Whenever I'd had the chance to see through the Spectacle, to be that close to the glass, to glimpse something outside in nature, I saw nothing but a marble of an image on the other side. I remember holding Alice and wishing we'd remained savage, carnal babies. Babies were never punished or destroyed, not even in the Spectacle.
Alone, I would listen to the warning sounds in the distance of Externals preparing to enter and outline the canoe carvings Alice had made into my forearms. There was this one little netted "window" on the roof like a skylight through which I'd watch the patch of sky move within the geometry of the fabric. I pictured Alice's face like a handheld mirror and began to sew what I knew of her into the pieces of fabric. The alternative was to suggest Alice did not exist. That none of us existed. And nobody should be expected to be OK with that.
Eventually I was allowed to return. I was hired part-time at an up-and-coming beauty supply chain. I sold eyebrow brushes and lip balm and was also employed in the customer service department for a company selling direct-to-consumer mattresses. There were now tons of these stores selling unique mattresses, each with the same promise that guaranteed the identical outcome. How could that be?
In the space of my mind that remained my own, I invited Alice into my delirium. Like today, I was checking out at Safeway, loading an assortment of canned goods onto the conveyer belt when I saw Alice, clear as day. Please, stay with me. It was our Alice. She was in infant form. Primal savage baby Alice in a porcelain tub thinking, which kept being misdiagnosed as arrhythmia. She was premature, a shallow green, glowing and frightening the nurses around her. Nurses clutched their chests, and not because of Alice's proximity to death, but because of her ideas. Her father was there; I could tell he was her father because he was made from the same dense materials. Her mother was not. Alice wouldn't latch to her breasts to feed; Externals had her removed and put out of sight. Expressive, radical-beast-baby-Alice wanted to live a wonderous life, but had second thoughts after taking stock of her surroundings. There was a clock on the pristine wall she could read, even with those heavy eyelashes that covered her eyes, tiny as needle pricks. Alice wondered why our tendency when considering matters of time was to emphasize the hour. The minute hand was longest, yet the increment being measured was narrower. Why were they called hands to begin with?
I lingered there until I was told to hurry my cheap, bent ass up. The grocery line had grown out of control and agitated.
"Bad weather is coming! Sick Season is lasting longer and longer!" said Figurines.
Nobody bothered to call it Forever Season anymore. We were way past having that kind of energy. Figurines were fatigued. They too needed things to get on with existing.
"You!" Figurines demanded. "Yes—You, Honey!"
Next, I flashed to Alice as an old woman. Her face had aged and in doing so had become more recognizable. More Alice. Layers of Alice. Alice volcano. Just listen. Don't turn away. The afternoon sun was coming through the interstices of the sphere's glass, casting a soft yellow hue over our world inside. It was summer or merely scorching. Hard to know for sure. Alice wore a brown linen pantsuit; one hundred percent linen. The fabric was soft, as if it had dressed women for centuries. She was comfortable, even in her underwear, which from the time of puberty was a big issue. There was a celebration. I knew because my mother was there, untethered, handing out condoms and shiny party hats. Batshit as ever. God, I loved her. Alice was sitting causally on a wrinkled blanket on the dirt, in the middle of the day, uninterested in what would come next. Her friends surrounded her. Each, a different size and shape. I saw vegetables and fruits, most of it torn and badly bruised. Nobody noticed. The flavors were sensational, peach juice dribbled every which way. I didn't hear waterfalls, feel mosquitos bite, or smell conifer trees, but they existed. Alice—ravenous in nature. Alice—expansive, laughing hysterically, cheese gooey from the heat. Her arms, legs, and belly, spreading to every corner like spilled milk.