Her Name Was Alice

Hell is a beautiful place where it’s warm even in the very midst of wintertime, where the Devil’s cackles drown out all the irksome voices gnawing at your ears and at your wrists. Beautiful flames are always blazing, bathing you in their rich, brilliant hues, there’s plenty of room for everyone, every shattered down-trodden soul, and still no one else can ever reach out their clawed arms with which to pull at you there. No one else can ever pull you back from such a delight; they’ll never plant you back into that dark and dirty place from whence you came; the cold, fearsome place where so many hungry eyes watched you from corners obscured with velvet shadows and misleading, velvet voices; where bittersweet melodies haunted your soul, filling you with ever heartbroken and joyful phrase that would never make it past your chapped and bloodied lips. Hell is home. Hell is safe. Hell will come to meet us all.

Alice was such a pretty little girl, so sweet, so pure. Never a corrupt nor flawless soul would have guessed the secrets hidden in her deep, azure eyes. Never ever, ever did they know what hid under her pristine little petticoats, starched just to perfection, her spotless white gloves. They thought she was always so very, very high…but no, oh no…They’d pushed her down. Again and again, they’d pushed her down so very, very low. Down until her porcelain cheek brushed the first forked, vermillion tongues of that lovely summer getaway in a sparkler’s kiss… But, shhh…we mustn’t tell secrets, mustn’t tell lies…Alice told their secrets, Alice whispered those so-called lies…and felt herself fall down another step upon the ladder, another circle farther into the red realm that was to be her paradise, her escape.

Everything begins oh, so simply, with a whispered name and a place of some secrecy or other, a vague crime and a time at which it occurs, the seeds of secrets and the first curling shadows of doubt, so that well groomed mistrust and pity blind even the wisest among us. And especially those that may be so naïve as to trust…what a pitiful action, what a poorly constructed conception. Trust. Alice trusted. Alice fell.

She fell right through her own darling reflection tinted a fascinating crimson, right through the silver sheen of a blade, spinning past every pastel powder and stinging acid within her grasp. It became an art, a lovely adventure through an amazing, paradoxical land that had never before been known to her. One where the more you lived was determined by how much you could die, how far you would dare to leap, knowing all the while how perilous it would be to fall; knowing that there would be no one left to catch you.