Alice Isn’t Dead. Joseph Fink

a Thistle Man. A town of nightmare creatures. Loose skin, boneless legs, jittering movements. None of them talked to one another, although sometimes one would laugh, long and loud, and then return to monastic silence. And there was him, the original him, the Thistle Man, the Hungry Man. He was leaning on one of the pumps at the gas station, reading a newspaper.

      An entire city of them. Creatures so dangerous, so powerful, that a single one of them had almost destroyed her. And here there were hundreds. Were all of them serial killers, uncaught, living together, hidden in this airplane boneyard on a US military air base?

      A US air base. She could have fooled herself that there were some corrupt cops involved with whatever the horrors of Thistle were up to. But this was beyond a few cops. This was a system of violence and laws that protected Thistle from the likes of her, five foot three, a gash down her chest, and a constant fear that she wouldn’t recognize a heart attack if it came because it would feel like her panic attacks. The imbalance of power wasn’t merely unfair. It was monumental in a literal sense of the term. It was a monolith of disparity and she could almost laugh at the sheer lopsided span of injustice she was contemplating now from that shrubby hillside.

      Not that long before, on a highway in Georgia, a wife she hadn’t seen in over two years had left a billboard with some advice, and now she was going to listen to it. Who was she to fight a war this lopsided? Her wife had perhaps decided to fight it, and her wife had disappeared. She wasn’t as strong as Alice. She wasn’t willing to disappear. She was sorry to have failed Alice, although this was what Alice had wanted. She was even sorrier to have failed Sylvia, although she knew that Sylvia would be fine on her own. But this was beyond Keisha.