The Final Alice - Softcover

Ripley, Alycia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1426944780 ISBN 13: 9781426944789

Verlag: Trafford Publishing, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

When thirty year old Alice Pleasance feels her life and writing career going nowhere, she fears her namesake ancestor, a resourceful girl immortalized in a classic novel, would be disappointed by and ashamed of her failures. This fear is abated when Alice is approached by a talking deer who explains that Alice has been chosen to battle the Red King, a manipulative and evil shape-shifter, in order to thwart his plans to infect and control humanity. Mysterious and ominous appearances of the numbers 10:10 convince Alice that although she may not know what is coming, she must relinquish self doubt to defeat it. Joined by a makeshift army of two telekinetic children, a dog who grows to dragon-size, a pair of ex-soldier Nigerian twins, and a bodiless Compass who desperately wants to become a real girl, Alice prepares for a terrifying and unpredictable confrontation. A ring of child pornographers, cruel office managers, sadistic cheerleaders, and a two-headed contractor are only some of the obstacles Alice must face and eliminate in order to own her role in a family well-versed in nightmarish fairy tales and spiritual riddles. Funny, poignant, provocative, and disturbing, the story illustrates the epic details often existing in everyday life, the power of imagination, and the requirements of redemption. This surreal, adult adventure is a new slice of Wonderland for a very modern audience. A lysergic head trip of a novel, The Final Alice is the rare tale that possesses equal measures of heart, wit, and inspired, demented madness. Alycia Ripley's fine novel deserves to be read, re-read, analyzed, debated, and perhaps become the sacred text of a passionate cult. -James Ponsoldt, writer/director of Off the Black, Smashed, and The Spectacular Now

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The Final Alice

By Alycia Ripley

Trafford Publishing

Copyright © 2010 Alycia Ripley
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4269-4478-9

Chapter One

I. Revelations:

Definitely Dennis

For many are called but few are chosen. -Matthew 22:1

1.

Riddle me this, riddle me that. Deal the cards and roll the dice.

Had I a choice, I'd begin with the blonde sand, the wooden boardwalk and the cool autumn wind. I'd start with the image of my hands draped along the last of the swaying green fronds and my shiny black shoes, difficult to walk in on the uneven boards. I knew who waited for me on that beach, probably counting the seconds until my arrival. Had I a choice, I'd begin at the very moment I turned the corner but, as they told the first Alice, it's always best to begin at the beginning and make your way from there.

Of course Wonderland was real but there is a huge difference between knowing something exists and believing in it. My great-grandmother had been the first human to visit. Each of her female descendants developed unusual abilities but by thirty years old I'd accepted Wonderland's decision to exclude me because who could blame them? I was a waste. The story of my namesake, great-grandmother Alice had been as real as the rice cakes she ate for lunch and brimmed hat she wore to work but the closest I came to magic was my writing profession. Terrific at designing vivid people, lousy at being myself. How many times had I heard my family proudly tell stories of what so-and-so were doing, how much money they made, and ask for my plan, already knowing it consisted of getting the kind of job I couldn't seem to attain while working a random job just to afford my own car and move out again. After my second novel was published, friends ushered in congratulations and my parents were quiet, seeing little about the achievement as comment-worthy. My tiny amount of personal space proved there was no way out - all roads had led inside the invisible box made of frustration, confusion, condescension, and disgust.

The thing about suicidal people is that once they make peace with their decision, they're quite jovial. Dying was an adventure away from what I felt powerless to change. I always wondered what the term loser meant but when I held a knife to my wrists and a useless red line lingered for days, mocking my attempts to die, I knew the loser was me, a person with nothing left but empty dreams and the realization that no matter how hard a person may try to make a difference, there were no guarantees. Some people win, some are insignificant losers. Great-grandmother Alice may very well have cringed when my mother named me. Of all the kids, she had to think, this one gets my name? Suicide isn't wanting to die- it's ending the torture of being forever stuck.

Three times was not a charm. Hanging from a tree hadn't worked. At the last minute the branch broke. The garage door also failed. A huge piece broke off the apparatus I chose to hang from and I fell to the concrete, stuck inventing a lie to explain the broken door. I tried jumping from my porch but each time I'd land on my feet. The pills were just embarrassing. Swallowing ten and washing them down with wine, I woke up to sluggish reflexes and an unflattering burp. There was no Wonderland for me. Not even a fruitful life on Earth for Alice the almost-was. In the mirror was only an awkward, lumpy thing that stopped rays of light from reflecting. My face and self were in the damn way.

Nature was on the same page. There'd been a huge shift in how it looked, smelled, and felt. Topsy-turvy, back to front, beauty hiding ugliness I could always see. The evening air had the same asphyxiating weight as town cookouts full of eight grills and hundreds of people and kids eating food off the ground, pushing and shoving. People were tense and competitive. News stories described bizarre and horrific crimes I'd thought impossible outside of books and movies. Something was coming. I knew it in my blood but had no option other than to ignore it and carry on, unable to die, impossible to change. Deep in my bones and blood I knew the old days were irrelevant. No college degrees, no internships could help the world now; in the light of day or dark of an alley it was nonsense. Something was in the air and as much as I'd wanted to make a difference, my years of living inside make-believe were the only tools I had. But you don't have to be related to the Wonderland Girl to know that the most fantastic stories, the most dangerous and deadly, exciting and powerful, were never only imaginary. Whether or not the rest of the world understood, these stories are very much real.

2.

My secret is the kind that sticks like bubblegum to your shoe- flat, pink with a spot of brown in the middle, impossible to shake until you push and prod with sticks. The secret being, I have never liked who I was.

Not a day passed where I didn't wish to become someone else. In nursery school, the teacher's aides stared with pained expressions and held breath as I'd walk to the bookshelves. If I ran through the room, a startled voice exploded with an Alice, don't be such a Wild Indian. The other children listened to story time while I burned to fly into the air, smiling when teachers read from the book of Wonderland but crushed at hearing it described as only a dream. Those days were the beginning of feeling disappointment in the girl who talked too much and said too little.

Then there were the family colors.

I loved to wear red, especially my childhood jumper and Mary Janes that reminded me of The Wizard of Oz shoes. Everything to do with Dorothy and her tale, I loved. Ironic, given I was the scion of the Wonderland dynasty but in the spring of my second grade year my class constructed a time capsule. Our names were written on pieces of paper along with future career goals (AUTHOR, mine said in huge letters) and one interesting fact about ourselves. I wrote that I wanted to be dressed as Dorothy and my boyfriend as an Oz character when he proposed. At seven years old I knew the right guy would have the humor and imagination necessary to understand how every page of those books influenced my desire to do something extraordinary.

I mostly loved red because it wasn't blue. Blue and white were decided years earlier to be our family colors because of the remaining photographs of the original Alice in her blue and white school uniform. The family wore cream sundresses with blue accents, sharp navy pantsuits with a cool white pin, and dark jeans with cream sweaters. Possibilities were endless in a sea of blue and white but I felt I resisted they magnified my wrongness, my sandy blonde hair fuzzy at the crown and smooth underneath, my eager facial features and nervous hands. It was exhausting to feel disgust, dread and anger at qualities you couldn't change or forgive. It doesn't matter who calls you lovely if you know the truth is a charade. In the privacy of my own head, I knew Alice L. Pleasance was eager, weak, wrong, too big, too small, simple, un-suave, and regardless of friends, boyfriend, or proximity to a crowd, very much alone. I believed the strong, stunning, fantastic Alice could exist. And so I wrote to myself when I'd shower, scrawling phrases as quickly as the steam allowed, the cursive letters reminding me of how little time I had to do so much. I am indecisive, incorrect, inert, and awkward. I want to change into someone different. If the steam ran out I'd...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Trafford Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1426944780
• ISBN 13: 9781426944789
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 196
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland