Sense of an Ending

Alice finishes the final installment of J.K. Rowlings's Harry Potter series and feels a lingering sadness. It's over and so is her childhood. Boo-hoo, thinks Alice. At least she still has witchcraft. So she grinds a wooden stake into the middle of the putrescent carpetting in her living room, douses the place in lemon vodka, and has her formerly sunny disposition bind her to the wood as she ignites a spark using only her profound understanding of spatial relationships. As the flames consume her, she despairs, realizes it's no consolation, and tattoos her now-ashy skeleton with the same twisted pattern that adorns her ex-bride's face. Sitting in the living room's smoking remains, she ponders transmigration's metric weight, its proper accenting, utters the word, and, as if in an underwhelming dream, the television turns on. A blind horse gnaws peanut butter and appears to talk. Alice mouths some words too, it doesn't matter which ones. She and horse are speaking the same language. The horse's show ends, but Alice's jaw keeps working, the hinges creaking, soot falling like pencil-scratched lead residue.

Alice Takes A Bride

Rather than concede that, yes, a corpse is the totality rather than the excess of life, Alice gave in to a life-long fantasy and bought a mail-order bride.

The bride arrived two weeks later, still frazzled from the whirlwind cab ride to the airport, then the plane ride with two layovers, then the cab ride to Alice's apartment. Alice took her inside and attempted to make the bride a sandwich, but the bride simply looked at her as if to say, "Not without a ring." Alice pulled off a ring and slid it onto the bride's finger, which seemed to placate her, though the bride's cyrillic mutterings could well have been annoyed talk about home and hearth and such. Alice made a sandwich of various pig parts, and the bride ate it happily, despite her culturally acquired dietary restrictions.

After the bride finished eating the sandwich, a kind of silence fell over the kitchen. Alice picked up the plate, carried it to the sink, and rinsed it off. There was a kind of humming that was always present in the kitchen, and Alice tried to think of a gesture that would express the phrase, "Sorry about the humming, there's nothing I can do about it." Nothing leaped to mind. Alice looked at the bride and realized that she was humming along with the humming sound, humming at exactly the same pitch as the whatever machine in the kitchen's bowels generated that noise. Alice took it as a sign, or omen, or something - a sound preordained, some perverse sphere song. This Russian broad was really something, something mythically tuned-in to the house.

Alice climbed the staircase and the bride followed her, and the door closed behind them, and they both made noises that, thinking back, were pretty hilarious.