The End of Alice

by A M Homes

My stomach turns, I’m sure I’m feeling the bones of her ribs against the top of my prick.

  “You’re my precious pony,” she says, stroking my skull. “My best horse.” She slaps my flank and keeps on with her ride.

  When she finally crawls off, she makes the strangest comment: “I’d keep going, but I think I’m out of quarters.”

  She pops off my prick with a thick sound like a suction cup released.

  I’m drenched in sweat. She releases my restraints.

  She goes into the other room, talking to herself all the while. “First, I’ll sponge you down, and then you’ll get a big bucket of oats and, if you’re good, maybe an apple.”

  Delicately, I use the sheet to clean the mess and then rearrange things to cover myself.

  She comes back and begins dabbing at my chest and neck with a kitchen sponge. “Doesn’t that feel good? What do you like on your oats, butter or sugar?”

  I don’t answer.

  She leaves again, returning with two steaming bowls of oatmeal. She climbs into the bed. We eat.

  “Isn’t this fun?”

  I feel nothing but fond of her. Although undoubtedly I’ve not said it before, I do firmly believe it is up to an adult to ignore the attempted flirtations of the young, to allow the child to express her powers of persuasion in a seemingly safe setting. She is asking for it, if only to learn, to practice such; it doesn’t necessarily mean that she really wants it or even knows what it is. She is in fact compelled by the culture. For the first time in my life I feel vaguely paternal.

  But soon I am brought, nearly forced, to the conclusion that if it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else. And quite frankly it’s lucky it was me. I loved her. It should always be one who loves you who is given such a thing; that greatest gift best goes to someone who can truly treasure and appreciate, someone for whom it continues to accrue meaning.

  I know whereof I speak. My sweet concubine.

  “Do you find me attractive?” she asks.

  “Undeniably.”

  “Do you desire me?”

  “Indefatigably.”

  “What part do you like best?”

  “The entirety.”

  “My breasts?”

  She aims the buds at me and all I can think of are those flowers that squirt water into a fool’s eye. Instinctively I duck.

  “No,” I say.

  “But don’t I have beautiful breasts?”

  “Your question was what part I like best.”

  She nods.

  “Your hidden smile.” I aim my finger at the spot— cracked slit.

  She preens, kisses my cheek, and asks, “How do you make a hickey?”

  “How do you know the word hickey ?”

  She doesn’t answer. “Give me a hickey,” she says.

  I shake my head, refusing.

  “You’re mean.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are. I want to know what a hickey is.”

  I pick up her foot and suck on her toes. “That’s a hickey.”

  She laughs and shakes her head. “No, it’s not.”

  I kiss my way up her leg. She squeals, “You’re tickling me.” She grabs my hair. I am in her thighs, long muscle and soft skin, no fat, nothing extra here. I flick at her with my tongue. She stops squealing; I continue. She looks dreamily out the window and lifts one leg so it hangs over the edge of the bed. She is the most lovely thing.

  When we fuck—and we do fuck, frequently—there is something so familiar about her skin, about the way we fit into each other, that it is as if I’m inside out, touching myself. There is something between us not made on earth.

  “No matter what happens,” she says later, handling me her six Schmitt boxes, her butterfly collection, “I want you to have these. Don’t forget, every now and then change the paradichlorobenzene crystals, otherwise they decay.”

  “I’ll treasure them always,” I say entirely honestly.

  “They claim you kidnapped Alice on more than one occasion.”

  Again they’re at me with annoying questions, sonorous statements.

  I shake my head. They have no idea.

  For a break, a bit of an escape, we go on excursions, dainty day trips. I drive us in increasingly large circles round and round the state of New Hampshire—sightseeing.

  “Clam rolls,” she calls to me as I leave the car. “Two clam rolls and some coleslaw.”

  We have stopped at a roadside stand modeled in the shape of an ice cream cone.

  “And don’t forget my soda,” Alice bellows as I reach the ordering window. “And maybe some french fries. Suddenly, I’m starving.”

  Darling Alice, gone despicable, wolfs down everything in arm’s reach, including half my sandwich, my fries, and finally a large ice cream cone, of which she doesn’t even offer me a lick.

  When she’s nearly finished, having indelicately dripped her melting sweets over my interior upholstery, she smiles, flashing clots of clam roll and cake cone pressed between her teeth. And although momentarily she disgusts me—I believe she does it on purpose—I remain in love, still plotting at summer’s end to marry her.

  “Here’s to Labor Day,” I say, making a toast.

  She raises her cone into the air and dabs what’s left of the ice cream onto my nose.

  “How laborious,” she says, licking my face.

  I shrug and have a close look at her. Her skin has gone shiny, become a massive oil slick, a sea of sebaceous secretion. One must blot it before kissing.

  As I back out of the parking lot all too quickly, an oncoming car swerves and hits its horn.

  “Sweet Jesus, be careful,” she says.

  “Pardon me, I was distracted,” I say, wiping the remnants of her ice cream and lick off my nose.

  We stop to shop. I buy her things, not so much what she desires but what I decide she should have, mostly books. Recently she’s been asked to surrender her library card. The matron of the town facility had reached the end of her rope when apparently every book Alice borrowed was returned with its pages heavily marked with bright red pistachio stains.

  While I peruse the Book Worm’s stacks, she excuses herself to the five-and-dime, saying, “I just need something.” Whips and chains and coils of rope, no doubt.

  When she’s gone, I ask the owner for a volume of Ovid’s love poems, thinking they would be more appropriate than Ferlinghetti for dear one’s patent leathers.

  “Finally, a true bibliophile,” he cries, coming out from behind the counter, slapping me on the back.

  I blush. “Hardly that,” I say, and am quickly out of the store.

  Having fast abandoned my professorial pursuits, I find my way to Woolworth’s and unintentionally observe her shoplifting.

  “Don’t you get an allowance?” I whisper in her ear.

  She has pocketed, of all things, a thick padlock. I daren’t ask for what.

  “The new husband doesn’t believe in allowances,” she says, slipping a bottle of nail polish remover under the band of her skirt.

  “What about baby-sitting? Don’t most young women make pin money baby-sitting?”

  “I hate little children. Can’t stand them.” She picks up a Mars bar, peels the wrapper back, and eats it on the spot.

  “You’ve already had lunch.”

  “So?”

  “And dessert.”

  “Well, I’m starving, absolutely famished.” She pops the whole of an Almond Joy between her lips.

  I am beside myself with frustration and attempting to shield her from the eye of the woman working the luncheonette, who seems quite drawn to our argument.

  “If you get caught, you’ll be in trouble,” I hiss.

  “No, I won’t. I’ll say you made me do it.” She turns away, tucking a Chinese jump rope into her shirt. “You put it in my pocket and made me walk out of the store.”

  “I’ll be waiting in the car,” I say, fuming.

  She takes ten minutes more. I’m hardly surpris
ed when she comes out carrying an all-too-new red-plaid overnight case.

  “You lifted that?”

  “Nope. Paid cold cash for it.”

  “Planning a trip?”

  “Shouldn’t we be getting back?” she asks, checking the time on her new watch, having filched a fresh Cinderella whose arms are time’s hands, making the passage of the minutes a slow-motion version of the Mexican hat dance. “Do I ask where you’ve left your beloved Mickey M.?” She shakes her head. “No.”

  Back at the cabin, our quirky campground, she unzips her new bag and feigns surprise to find it filled with little things, “gifts” she calls them.

  “What makes you do a thing like that?” I ask, appalled. “Leave me alone,” she says, opening a jar of Noxzema, smearing a thick layer, a mask, over her face. “Do you have to know every thought in my head?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come here then.” She beckons to me with a finger coated in cold cream—if only it were frosting, I’d suck it off. She digs a hole through the muck on her face. “My first pimple,” she says, showing me a hivey swelling.

  “It’s a mosquito bite.”

  “Zit.”

  Crabby, she goes into the kitchen, opening and closing every cabinet. “There’s nothing to eat.”

  “You’ve been eating all day.”

  She moans.

  “There’s a bowl of fruit on the table, a perfect still life I arranged myself.”

  “Something sweet,” she cries. “I crave sugar.”

  “Wash your face,” I say, forced to surrender my reading. I find her on her knees rummaging through the lower kitchen cupboards, a dust mouse clinging to her cheek.

  I make her a cup of cocoa, which temporarily calms her. She sits sipping it, legs splayed akimbo on a chair.

  All too easily I am able to look up her dress. Her mound is dappled with down, a disgusting dusting of hair, imparting the impression of a milk mustache, something you’d be inclined to wipe away.

  “You know, dear,” I say, “one day you’ll have to begin wearing underwear.”

  “I doubt it,” she answers, draining her cup. “More?”

  I shake my head. “That was the last of the milk.”

  She picks herself up, puts her cup in the sink, and goes into the bedroom.

  I decline to follow, temporarily glad to have her gone, to have a moment’s rest.

  “Yoo-hoo,” she calls after a while. “What’re you doing?”

  “Enjoying my book.”

  “Oh.” There is a pause. “I’m bored.”

  Closing my text, taking care to mark my spot with a slip of paper, I find her in the bedroom.

  With her hair, her long locks, she has tied herself to the bed, dividing her tresses into two pigtails, wrapping the ropes around the frame, establishing herself as quite racked out.

  I kiss her titties, which are beginning to grow like globes, and sit beside her on the bed.

  “I want you to hurt me,” she says.

  “It’s against my inclination.”

  “Please, don’t make me beg. I need you to hurt me.” She pauses. “Make an exception.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  She glances at her hunting knife resting in its sheath on the table by the bed. “That.”

  “No.”

  She nods. “Yes,” she says quite firmly.

  I shake my head. “I have no interest in causing you pain,” I say, walking away. “In fact I have the idea that perhaps you’ve already had too much.”

  “What about the others? Did you care so much about them? There were others before me, weren’t there? Surely this isn’t the first time?”

  “Stop it. Just be quiet.”

  “Make me.”

  I am silent.

  She wiggles her foot. “Tie it up.”

  Using the clothesline that’s hanging off the bed, I bind her ankle. She wiggles the other one. I do the same again. “There,” I say. “That’s all.”

  She shakes her head.

  I look at her spread out, gorgeous wine stain on her thigh. It is not her desire that fails, but my heart. It cannot summon itself to pump blood to the necessary places. I am left to fuck her with my fingers.

  “More,” she says. Already I’ve got two in, but I manage to fit a third.

  “More,” she says again.

  My pinky pokes at the edge of her ass. I’m so unhappy. I’m doing it entirely dispassionately.

  In the last weeks, she has added some extra flesh, a fast seven or eight pounds, her fresh breasts jiggle, like pudding not quite set.

  Transcending the limits of skin—there are moments in sex when you flash upon the idea that she might give herself to you, make the sacrifice of complete surrender, the prospect of death seems quite possible, acceptable, even desired. The most extreme and rare of sensations, true intimacy, something to aspire to.

  I glance down and notice her foot has turned blue.

  “Wiggle your foot,” I shout, penetrating our daze. “Wiggle your foot.”

  She doesn’t respond except to lift her head and blurrily ask, “What?”

  There isn’t time to undo the knot. Reaching for the hunting knife, I cut the rope away. The foot is purple. A thick line shows where the rope was laid. I gently massage the part. “Does it hurt? Can you feel anything?”

  “Who cares,” she says, lying back. “Just keep going.” She raises her hips up and down. “Just fuck me. Is that asking too much?”

  My fingers slide in, one, two, three… . My hand is inside her, her heartbeat on my fist.

  She sleeps soundly until seven when the cowbell is banged.

  “How’s your ankle?” I ask as she gets ready to go.

  She looks at me as though she has no idea what I’m talking about. I say no more.

  While she’s away, I sneak off to the store and stock the larder, purchasing all the makings of a picnic and more, a wide variety of cakes and cookies, two or three or everything. I can’t afford to lose her over the triviality of sweets.

  During the evening I venture out, filling a jar with fireflies. Awake, waiting for her, my heart beats erratically, part broken. She doesn’t return until nearly eleven, as always preferring the window to the door. I’ve fixed a little ladder to make her entrances easier. “Gram wasn’t feeling well,” she says, slipping into bed. “I had to sit with her for a while.”

  We make up tenderly, my heart well primed for the occasion. The green glow of glitterbugs fills the cabin.

  “It’s more than half over,” she says in the middle of the night.

  “Shhh. You’re talking in your sleep.”

  “Obviously.”

  In the morning I pack a picnic lunch and we set off toward the lake. I pull the rowboat out of the scrub and into the water. In the middle of the lake she undresses. “I love to sunbathe,” she says, easing out of her shorts. The boat rocks unevenly.

  My eyes spin along the shore, worried someone will see, still convinced this is a setup.

  She reaches into the basket for a sandwich; a roll of flesh protrudes from her belly. It wasn’t there before. There was nothing extra when this started. “Why are you here for the whole summer?” she asks, biting into a ham salad, pink meat squirting out of the corners of her mouth. I look away. “Why don’t you have a job? Don’t most men work?”

  “I quit my job,” I say, thoroughly distracted.

  “And in the fall what will you do?”

  “Marry you,” I offer softly.

  She eats a fistful of potato chips. “I’ll be in school.”

  I can’t look at her. “We’ll run away,” I say, staring at a distant dock.

  “Where to?”

  “Anywhere you want to go.”

  “To hell in a handcart,” she says.

  I glance at her feet, there’s a mean bruise on her ankle. I ask again, “How’s your ankle?”

  “Oh, I must have banged it.”

  “It’s bruised.”

  “Thing
s happen.” She opens another sandwich. “I forgot to tell you, you were supposed to come for dinner night before last. Gram was looking forward to meeting you.” My ire, my powerlessness, pulsates. I’m at the mercy of a master. “Pity you forgot.”

  “Actually, I told them you must have forgotten. ‘Do we give second chances?’ Gram asked me. ‘Rarely,’ I said.” There’s no way I can win.

  She continues to eat. When she’s done she suddenly stands. “I hate water,” she says. “It terrifies me.” And then she is in. She’s jumped naked into the lake and I haven’t the slightest idea of what to do. Is this her idea of an afternoon swim, another of her juvenile jokes, a devilish game of cat and mouse? Am I supposed to go after her, make a mad dash into the water? Or did she go to escape me, to prove she couldn’t be possessed?

  I take off my shoes. She still hasn’t come up. There is a thunk on the underside of the boat, a knocking that could only be her. I throw myself over. I am under. In the bracing cold, I see nothing but murk. I come up for breath, gasping, fearing it is me who might drown. I draw air and go under again, feeling with arms and legs, deep as I can go. I brush against her, grab, but she slips through my grip. I shoot to the surface, break for air, and go back again, this time finding her, fetching her, hauling her up.

  Unconscious, unbreathing. I raise her torso, hoist her into the boat—which pulls away from me. Taking great care not to capsize the small ship, I then pull myself in. Luck, only luck, and a burst of physical fitness let me do this.

  Establish an airway, chin up, head back. My mouth sealed over hers in total desperation. I fear she’s made me her murderer, chosen me intentionally. I will not settle for this. I am an innocent man. You must know that. Furiously, I blow into her lungs, willing to trade my life for hers. With the full weight of my anger I breathe, I blow, I beat at the breast, and row, row, row, fast as I can, back toward shore. She coughs, sputters, and comes back to life. I wrap her in the tablecloth of our picnic and climb out, splashing through the last few feet of water, crashing barefoot through the woods toward her house.

  I am bringing her home, giving her back. I don’t know what else to do. Breathless when I reach the porch, I kick at the back door until finally Gwendolyn, in curlers, answers.

  “The boat, the lake, her head banged,” I blurt.

  “Mother,” Gwendolyn bleats. “Mother, come quick.”