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I

She lies down on the stairwell landing, then gets up, remembering no one ever goes into these stairwells except to put up no smoking signs and they probably haven’t been cleaned for years. All day she’s been struggling with thoughts that never seem to work themselves out, twisting through endless corridors, what if’s; her blouse is a dirty yellow that at first glance could have once been white. She lets her knotty hair droop in front of her eyes, and through it on the floor she can see a Durex condom wrapper that’s the same color as her blouse. This bothers her.
She tiptoes a couple floors below and finds the condom, crushed up into a corner. Peering at it with a curious indifference for a while, she eventually squats down and pokes it. Then she laughs at herself, slumping back up the stairs, worried that someone might hear her.
There’s not much left at home. They’ve been just moving in for years, and her mother’s still living off of social security checks. Recently, mom’s run into a dead end trying to find a job, and both of them have probably spent too much on clothes. Alice stopped going to school a couple months ago, and although she’s bored her pride prevents her from going back. Later at night when her solitude overcomes her, her pride is replaced by lethargy, and she sinks into the lowest dwellings of ennui.
One of the dwellings she occupies now, roaming up and down the stairwell. She’ll go home and restock on cigarettes, spend the day smoking them as slowly as she can and occasionally venturing down into the lobby. The doormen are friendly but she doesn’t like people, so she ignores them. She knows her isolate behavior is most likely why she’s alone, and at times hates herself for it even though she doesn’t get many opportunities to socialize. She sees people in elevators, every now and then wishes them goodnight.

Alice’s mother spends most of her days not doing drugs. When she was younger she had been an addict of everything, and in aging has become addicted to nothing. As lazy as her daughter but better at making excuses for it, the only time she leaves her room is to visit one of her married friends or cook, rarely ever coming out for the ladder anymore. Every week or so she’ll pull Alice aside and explain to her the impracticality of doing drugs – from being overpriced to the difficulty of finding good drugs – and eventually rambles herself into the pit that ramblers often find themselves after causing their listeners to become uneasy.
Alice returns to the apartment, stealthily entering to avoid a confrontation with her mother. She lobs her pack of cigarettes on the desk, lighter too. On the chair before her laptop she scrunches up her knees against her chest until she can barely see past them. The chair swivels, then after exhausting herself of that position she flicks open the laptop. Immediately she visits the blogging site she uses to grab her ex’s attention, but he hasn’t updated in weeks, and probably has stopped thinking about her by now. They had never had sex.
She’s visited one of those date-service sites, but lost interest during the application process. Her computer decides to shut itself down and she squeezes her eyes together, breathing deeply and swearing at it. It doesn’t feel like turning on again. She wanders into the other room where her mother’s propped up on the couch watching some show about some guy who claims he can talk to dead people. Her mother tries to explain to her that today the guy’s talking to the family of a suicide victim but she stops mid-sentence to laugh along with the crowd. Alice loafs back to her room, holding on to the doorknob too long and jamming her hand.
She throws out all the condoms she’s got stashed in the back of her desk. Her mother will check the garbage later and ask her if she’s been having sex and she won’t know how to respond, probably just make up something about needing them for a science experiment. One she never finished when she was at school, of course. She collapses on her bed, the springs squeak. Outside there’s a rumpled blanket of fog preventing her from seeing the ground, and the clouds look like they’re puckering up to drop another goodnight kiss.
The city’s five minutes across the bridge. She tries to find something to do but her own lack of function presses down against her forehead, immobilizing her. Her body is a useless doll, plastic limbs stuck in their sockets, a mushy brain full of bad metaphors. Useless, she shakes her head, absolutely useless, twitches her arms, rips at the invisible bowtie in her hair. The ceiling swings back and forth, eventually looming down to hold her. She falls asleep, and she dreams reluctantly.
In one she’s the grim-reaper, blonde-hair tickling down to her chest, emphasizing her breasts – perfect – and she’s killing students at the local day-care center, garroting them with an oversized scythe and laughing at the mess she’s made. The teacher, who’s hiding under one of the desks and gnawing at her fingernails, is not being very brave. The students push Alice over, steal her scythe, and together they all kill the teacher, one by one hacking out her internal organs. Her body makes lifeless squelching sounds as the scythe drops in; it requires two of the kids to disentangle the scythe when it gets caught in her lower intestine. Alice lies back and listens to all of this, until one of the students scampers over and shoves the scythe in her throat. The blood spews upwards like a broken toilet, squirting onto the ceiling, and she gurgles, her face remaining expressionless. Then the cops show up, kill all the kids. Actually, no, that doesn’t happen. She just lies there, gurgling, until she wakes up in a pool of her own sweat, hugging her breasts like a boy.
Except that she doesn’t really have any. Their pointed lumps, just defined enough to cause a visible indent. Her ex-boyfriend called them nubs. She wears a bra, but she doesn’t need to, and she’s worn the same bras since she first entered puberty. During encounters, she’s only taken her shirt off in the dark. Someone once insisted that the lights be kept on but they were easily distracted, and over time she started keeping the lights off not even because she was self-conscious, but because it became a trademark routine. Not that she’s had many encounters, enough to count on both hands.
In another dream, she meets a boy who’s died of sadness. He wanders around a deserted well and occasionally falls into it, calling out for help and when no one answers, scaling the walls himself. They are surrounded by forest, and the sky looks like the ground. Alice approaches the well, her bare feet slipping through worms and untamed grass, and when she peeks into it, at first hesitantly, she sees the boy staring directly up at her as if he had already been looking at her through the walls of the well. She waves at him and tries to draw his attention, but he keeps calling out, and eventually starts climbing up the well again, ignoring her completely.

Alice’s mother is taking her to apply to the local public school. At seventeen, she’s applying into eleventh grade again, and although she’s never finished the ninth or tenth grades because of hospital visits and school transfers, no one seems to care. The school’s admissions officer is too welcoming, and the school itself looks like the failed dreams of an architect. Throughout the hallways are half-assed art-project attempts, and the linoleum floors make her queasy. She’s grown accustomed to the drug and sexual fascinations that high-schoolers adopt around tenth grade, so she knows what to expect, but thinking about it makes her feel helpless. She’s immediately accepted into the school. After all, it is a public school, although immediately because the admissions officer becomes attached to her as soon as she enters his office.
On the first day of school she meets a boy named Caprice Marquez, who’s marked by the same intrinsic aimlessness that curses those who are too intelligent for their own age. She finds him attractive due to his remarkable unattractiveness, and stumbles upon him smoking cigarettes in one of the vacant stalls of the girl’s bathroom. Without saying anything he offers her a cigarette, and she plops down beside him, shutting the door to the stall. Instead of asking her who she is, he starts talking about the song that he’s listening to.
They meet up after their last class and begin walking home together; Alice presses her textbooks up against her chest because she’s seen the girls in high school stereotype movies do it. His hair reminds her of dried broccoli. He’s still talking about the song he was talking about earlier, and then all of a sudden he asks her why she’s holding her books like that, against her chest. She can see him staring intently at her, and she lowers them. He tells her that he likes the fact she doesn’t have boobs, and that her blouse looks like the shiny silver ones that twenty-something year-old teachers wear. She blushes stupidly at his gaucheness, and tries not to fall in love with him.

The next day they walk home together again, and as they cautiously bend around the edge of a cliff that overlooks a field of dead trucks, he decides that kissing makes him nauseas, and maybe it would be better off if they didn’t kiss. She says that’s fine, they barely know each other and that wasn’t even on her mind. Yes it was, he says.
“How would you know?”
“I don’t know.”
She squints her eyes and stares at him, shaking her head. He laughs.
“I don’t understand you,” she says.
“I don’t either.”
He tumbles down on the ground, kicking out his legs over the cliff. It’s not too far down, he thinks, and asks her if she’d like to jump. Are you crazy? He presses his heels against the wall of the cliff, and leans back. The sun swelters, breathing deeply. No, just bored.
They gradually descend down to the field, trying so hard not to look at each other on the way down that to a spectator their intentions would be obtrusive.
“So is your hair naturally silver or are you just weird?”
“Hey, at least I don’t have a vegetable sprouting out of my head.”
“That’s an opinion,” he exclaims, raising his brow.
“Sure it is,” she swings around, smacking him in the face with her hair.
“Now now, violence is not the answer.” She swings around again, this time tripping on herself and stumbling the rest of the way down to the field. Immediately upon landing, she gets up and tries to pretend that nothing ever happened, noticing that Caprice is already on the ground laughing next to her.
“Shut up,” she giggles, putting her hand over her mouth. “Just shut up.” She keeps giggling uncontrollably until she’s on the ground with him, her hair shimmering in a puddle on the grass, delicately weaving itself into the myriad ant-mounds and spilling over his shoulders.
She thinks about kissing him, but quickly remembers it makes him nauseous.
The dead trucks are a lot bigger than they looked from up above; Alice cringes as she observes the spine of one twisting into the ground. Caprice smiles, and skips ahead, throwing his body around in time with the song he’s listening to beneath his colossal headphones. To her, the trucks are the colossal skeletons of dead fish, their grills interlocking fangs.
“Fish don’t have fangs.”
“What?” Caprice stops and abruptly turns the volume down. “What did you say? I couldn’t hear you.”
“Fish don’t have fangs.”
His face prunes up and he starts laughing again. “Right.”
As they make their way through the graveyard Alice becomes increasingly uncomfortable, and attempts to get Caprice’s attention again, but he’s already ran off into the distance. It gets darker and she turns back, squeezing her hands. They’re just trucks, she forces herself to think, how stupid are you being? Trucks. You’re scared of a bunch of trucks, stop being silly. She cups her hands together and shouts out “Caprice!” but only the leaves respond. Her hair rustles. She starts running, her arms extending outwards waiting to catch something from the clouds overhead, and at the midpoint between the circle of trucks and the path that lead back up the cliff, she collapses.
She dreams about the boy in the well again, except this time the water’s red.

When she wakes up, her vision is smothered by a pale white blob; when she rubs her eyes, she realizes it’s Caprice, who’s forcing his headphones over her ears and raising his fists in the air praising the gods. She raises herself onto her palms, still dizzy from fainting, and giggles at his emphatic gestures.
“You know what I hate? I hate people that specifically go out in search of pretty sunsets, because it defeats the purpose.”
“The purpose?” she replies, somewhat absentmindedly, trying to show that she’s interested in what he has to say but really isn’t in the position to shape her own opinion. She lets her head fall onto the grass again. He goes on talking about sunsets and the meaning of life and when he commands her to start laughing again, she does.


II

Being young, before one’s vocabulary is completely derived from that of past lovers, everything seems like it was meant to happen, especially if the end result is favorable. However, as time goes on, and fortuity becomes more of a plausible answer for most occurrences, the question arises if it is possible for someone to innately be more fortuitous than others.
Alice stops buying cigarettes, but still accepts them from whoever offers them to her. She makes it a point not to ask – she’s determined to quit smoking sooner or later, if only because the anti-smoking campaigns on T.V. make her feel guilty.
A very green beetle oblivious to its unsuspecting fate scuttles across her desk. Wait a second, oblivious and unsuspecting are redundant, are they not?
She ponders over this until she realizes she’s thinking to herself in the third person and squashes the beetle. Then she realizes that she’s squashed the beetle with a homework assignment she has to turn in tomorrow and stomps into the bathroom. She sits on the toilet, sticking her leg out to turn on the bathwater, but it chooses to knock over the shampoo stand instead. Frustrated from trying too hard to find the source of her stress she eventually leans her head against the wall and dozes off
Her mother walks in an hour later to inform her that the neighbors are wondering if her daughter could snore a little less loudly.

III


Hilda was generally a boring town. The only time Alice ever stepped foot in it besides walking to and from school was when her mother forced her to buy groceries, which wasn’t often because her mother usually enjoyed doing so. In the mornings, when Alice would walk to school, there was always a boy with a corduroy baseball cap on that would fondle the statue in the park outside of her apartment building. The park was very small, but the boy’s heart was very big and was enough to fill the entire town, let alone the park that he confined himself to. It was said that he had done so many drugs that he had become frozen in time; no one exactly knew how old he was, and no one ever asked, but over the years it became apparent that he never aged. The cops occasionally would come by and try to take him down to the station so they could interrogate him and try to find out where he lived or if he had any parents, but they could never convince him to leave the park, and even though it was considered that he was loitering, the boy’s mentally inefficient smile was enough to drive anyone that complained away.
No one ever saw the boy eat, or go to the bathroom. Everyone ignored the boy because the boy certainly didn’t get involved in anybody’s business and in Hilda if you didn’t get involved in anybody’s business then they didn’t get involved in your business. Alice learned this quickly when she first moved into Hilda. She had moved there with her mother because the apartments were thousands of dollars cheaper to rent and an entire bedroom bigger. The view from their place was great, but the birds never shut up.
Some of the other girls that went to Alice’s school would flash the boy and scamper off, and she would watch them from afar swinging their venational breasts that were often disproportionate to the rest of their bodies. She would blush for them. She wanted to cover the boy’s eyes with her hands whenever the girls would pass by but she never had the courage to enter the park, with its glass fountain and Victorian benches. However, the boy didn’t seem to mind, his smile just continued to engulf everything in its presence; it kept the trees in the park alive even during the winter. Sometimes he’d point at the girls while they had their shirts rolled up and make a goofy face, and they’d giggle themselves into paralysis. The attention only made him happier.
The boy couldn’t have been over twelve years old, and one of his front teeth was missing; he’d shout and laugh exaggeratingly, pull up flowers and stroke the statue, though whenever he’d try to speak the words that would come out of his mouth were unintelligible. Watching him prance about in eternal bliss would hypnotize Alice for hours – there was something she found upsetting within his solitude, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, and at times, without knowing why, she would wish to see him frown.

Before the man who sold the robins came, Alice was somewhat content in her misery. She had one friend who she was romantically growing attached to, and she eventually did quit smoking cigarettes not long after she stopped buying them. She could still notice the unintentional beauty that sparked from a mishap in the regularity of her surroundings, from emotion and circumstance colliding with one another, from the smile of a boy somehow stuck in time. The vulnerability and candor that comes with someone who self-imposes solitude upon themselves was intangible to her peers, and no matter how many boys she allured (they wrote letters to her in her sleep), nor how many girls she dismantled with envy, they all ignored her because she was different.
Of course, this is simply what they perceived, and Alice would have loved a select group of friends to smoke cigarettes on the way home with besides Caprice. In a sense, she was so beautiful that no one took her seriously.

IV

The front door creaks, accompanied by the grating slam that means her mother’s home. She usually never comes home this late…Alice is content only eating cereal at night – she can’t cook – but she enjoys arguing with her mother before going to sleep. Her mother drops a six-pack of bottled cokes on the floor and walks with her shoulders hunched into her room, not saying a word. Alice quickly flattens them all to prevent her mother from drinking them: she needs to lose weight to find a job, or a boyfriend who happens to be a millionaire. The door to her mother’s room quietly shuts, and Alice stands in the middle of the living-room, listening to the rain hit the streets outside, the soft pissing sound the droplets make as they drip down the window.
Her phone rings in the other room, causing her to sigh at forgetting to put it on silent. She can hear her mother sobbing through the walls. Now she’s throwing things, or is that just her kicking off her shoes, and soon she’ll spin herself into bed. Alice is still standing in the living-room, drooping to the left, the neck of her blouse cutting into the bottom of her chin. As she walks into her room to reassure herself that she doesn’t have any cigarettes the emptiness of the apartment swallows her, and her ears are filled with the hollow sound of someone yawning.
She picks up the phone and agrees to meet Caprice at the playground, but then she remembers it’s raining and she’s still got work to procrastinate, so she calls him back and calls it off. In her room she can still somehow hear her mother sobbing. She walks into the bathroom, dazed by inactivity, and stares into the sink, abandoning her arms and carelessly lowering her head into it. The sobbing echoes inside.
“I’m a bit tipsy, by the way.” She turns her head and her mother’s nudged against the doorway, chuckling. When she laughs, she still sounds like she’s Alice’s age.
“I know.” Alice drops her head back into the sink.
“I get wild.”
“All lonely people do, mom.”
“Like a horse.” She circles her arms in the air, trying to pantomime a horse galloping, slowing down until she’s simply punching her fists downwards in the air, then limps and sways her head back and forth laughing. “They’re fucking wild, horses.” Alice swears she’s never heard her mother swear except when she’s driving, turning towards her again, the top of her forehead against the faucet. “Have you ever seen a horse up close?” Alice bites her lip, doesn’t respond.
“Alice?”
“No.”
“Oh. That’s a shame. They’re very, very, what’s it called? Human?” She presses her finger to her cheekbone, which juts out so prominently it looks like the boney old fingers of the neighbor across the hall Alice tries her best to her ignore. The sink drips, and both of them listen to it intently for a while. Struck by a lucid moment, the terrifying kind, her mother stumbles in the direction of her bedroom, then stops midway and starts laughing, reaching out to balance herself against the wall.
“Whoops! There we go, okay. Okay. I think I drank too much,” hiccup, “I can’t feel my mouth again.” She stares longingly back at Alice, squints her eyes, purses her lips, and starts laughing again. “You shouldn’t see me like this.”
“It’s okay, just go to bed. Hang your leg off the side else you’ll get dizzy and never be able to fall asleep.”
“Psh, I taught you that, silly. Stupid.” She finishes stumbling into the living-room while pounding her chest proclaiming that she’s drunk, drunk again.
Alice goes back to the sink and sticks her head in it, startled by the complete lack of emotion she feels. The sink drips, and she turns it on, her hair vanishing down the drain.

The next day her mother has guests over for dinner, rich guys and their spiritually enlightened wives, someone brings their cat. Alice locked her door as soon as her mother told her about the occasion, and inside her room she dangles a pair of scissors over her face while lying on her bed. This would be a great bed to have sex in, she thinks. She props herself up against the wall and as she does the springs squeak and she changes her mind. It’s been four days since she’s started school and she’s already neglecting her homework.
Caprice is having an Austin Powers movie marathon at his house, and half the school will probably be there considering that his mom allows them to all smoke pot. She hopes that the thought of kissing still makes him nauseous, and she wonders why she didn’t go. She thinks of calling him and telling him that she misses him, but would that be going too far? And what if he picks up while he’s busy with someone else – she could send a text message instead. What if he receives that while he’s busy with someone else? She imagines him rolling over the person he’s with to flip open the phone to her tactless “I miss you”(does it sound better with or without the period?), and after shaking his head and laughing he goes back to doing everything that she wishes he’d do with her.
It’s still raining from yesterday. She decides to go outside and get a milkshake, then hears the guests in the kitchen and chooses not to. She remembers to turn her phone on silent because no one’s going to call her.

V


Alice was perched on the stairwell when she first heard him. He was on a lower landing, cooing to her from down below. Alice peered down at him and saw that he was strikingly similar in appearance to Willy Wonka. Except that his face was deformed and his attire was much more sinister. He had a top-hat on, vertically striped white and black; a vinyl cane; a mismatched vest: one side was colored identically to the hat while the other was completely white with black underarms. His pants were so tight (striped and colored like his hat) that you could see the shapelessness of his penis and testicles. He wore pointed, suede dress shoes; polished and sparkling—their tips stood up into a sharpened point; she imagined him kicking someone on the ground and impaling them with the point of his shoe.

“Why hello there, Alice,” the man crooned. “Would you mind if I—” and with a flash he had teleported in front of her. “There we go.”
Alice, terrified though curious, noted that she felt no sexual inclination coming from the man. Rather, his approach was rather bizarre. In one hand he carried his cane, in the other four robins flew in circles above his outstretched palm.
Without introducing himself, he asked her, cloyingly, if she would like a robin.
“Excuse me?”
“I asked you if you would like a robin. Or…all of them! You can have them all…but just this once.” Like a circus orator, he presents the robins to her; immediately they swoosh over her head, flying in circles, around and around and around, her vision blurs—she feels utter euphoria; the man smiles menacingly. “Free of charge.”
And in the same manner he arrived, he whisks himself away.


VI


“Can’t you see them?! Oh Caprice can’t you see them!”
“See…what?”
“The birds, the birds! Aren’t they beautiful?”
“Alice…there are no birds.”
“Above my head, flying, flying in circles—oh can’t you see them! Robins, robins, those red birds, you know?”
“…Right.”
He’s worried; she’s been insisting that there are birds flying over her head for an hour now. At first he thought it was just a joke but now her vehement determination to convince him that there are actually birds flying over her head is unsettling.
“Alice…I really ought to get going; it’s been—”
“I know! I’ll see you later. You know I really love you Caprice you’re such a…such a…”
He hangs his head, moping off. She must be on something heavy.
Ecstatic, Alice races home, work in hand (the irony, she giggles); she skips through the playground, taking her turn on the swing, flinging herself off. She feels that the higher she swings the closer she is to heaven. She has heated debates with the children in the playground until their mothers usher them off when she starts screaming.
“Mother! I am so happy; I am absolutely elated!”
“Okay? Haha, from the looks of it you’ve had one hell of a day.”
“No, really, mother, I am so happy.” She hugs her mother with such enthusiasm that she nearly knocks her over. “I am so grateful to have a mother like you. You mean the world to me.”
“Why, I—” But before her mother can finish what she’s going to say Alice has already darted back to her room, slamming the door shut; she names each robin. Frolicking to and fro in her bed she begins to masturbate, meanwhile calling Caprice who ignores her calls.
“Tying my hair into a bun, into a bun, tying my hair, into a bun, into a bun!
“Oh my, it looks beautiful. I must say I’m quite stunning. I must find the camera. I must!”
Caprice, feeling somewhat guilty for simply leaving Alice in such a state, walks over to her apartment announced. The doorman knows him, lets him take the elevator up without a hassle. When he knocks on her door her mother opens it. He puts her finger to his lips and grabs her by the arm, running her to her room. “Well I never—“
“Ssshh!”
“What in God’s name are you doing boy?”
“It’s about your daughter…there’s something wrong with her. She’s acting…”
“You think I don’t know? She nearly bowled me over with a bear hug when she came home today. She’s locked herself in her room and hasn’t come out since.”
“Mrs., earlier today, she tried to convince me there were birds flying over her head for an hour.”
“She must be on drugs. Acid, no doubt.”
“I was thinking ecstasy, as she told me she loved me when I said I had to go.”
“Well I’ll be damned. Ecstasy? This young? Mind me but I thought you kids only smoked pot.”
Caprice laughs. “You’re right about one thing.”
She rolls her eyes. “So what do we do? I’m sure you know what it’s like being a single mother.”
“Um.”
“Don’t answer that.”
They stand in silence, waiting for one or the other to break the ice.
“Maybe it’s just a one time thing.”
“I’m sure it is. Alice was never even one to smoke pot. Ecstasy?”
“I know. Doesn’t that stuff give you heat strokes and dehydrate you? Go check on her; make sure she’s okay.”
“…How am I going to get into her room.”
“She loves you, remember. If she doesn’t let you in here’s a key. She should be coming down soon anyway.”
Turning to leave, “You know, Mrs. Alice’s mom, you’re pretty…you’re pretty chill.”
“Thank God; for a second I thought you were flirting with me.”
Caprice blushes and runs off to Alice’s room. Opening up her bed-stand, Alice’s mother swigs a mouthful of Everclear.

While Caprice was talking to her mother (Alice had overheard the conversation), she had snuck out into the stairwell, hoping to find the man with the striped top-hat again. She leans over the railing, vulgarly smoking a cigarette, scantily dressed. She calls out to him: “I don’t feel anything, anything at all!”
“Except happiness, I see.” She whirls around. The man is leaning on his cane. He doffs his hat and bows. “So what will it be today?”
“I want more. I want more birds. I want to know you. I want to know why no one else can see the birds but me.”
“If anyone else could see them, why, then everyone would want them! I have chosen you; I have been observing you for quite some time now. You seem the type…I can trust.”
“Oh!”
“Yes, you are the one, my girl. However, I do bear bad tidings today.”
“And why is that?”
“I am afraid that I have no birds at the moment. As you can see…they are high in demand.”
“Why, why that’s absurd! Out of birds? Can’t you go out and catch more? Can’t you teach me!”
“These aren’t just any kind of birds, girl. These are special birds, bred from the roots of temptation itself.”
“Roots…of temptation? What are you—”

“I must take my leave now, child. Return tomorrow and you shall be rewarded. Rewarded, albeit a price.” The man whisks away again. Suddenly the rush, the rapture, dissipates. Alice regards her clothing quizzically. An off the shoulder blouse that’s mostly off. Spaghetti stained skirt. Spaghetti? Since when has she eaten Spaghetti? Her hair is matted and tousled. She takes the elevator down to her building’s public washroom and looks in the mirror; her eyes are wan and bloodshot. Her skin is nearly jaundiced, veins varicose. She struggles to tidy herself up before going back upstairs, avoiding her mother’s attention while tracing into her room.
Her hands are shaking violently. Her brain, skittering, thoughts flash-fiction, vision spotted. Nearly delirious, she tries to go to bed but her legs spasm like someone with restless leg syndrome, just a little more restless. She gets back up and lies back down and turns the lights on and off and off and on and locks her door, peaking beneath it. Looking at the window, despair maliciously grinning; she opens it, ready to jump. Twenty-seven stories. She races back across the room and writes a poem but her hands are so unsteady that the words are intelligible. She can’t cry, she can’t panic; she constantly looks behind her shoulder trying to catch a glimpse of hopelessness.

“But…how can you not—how can you not believe me? How can you not see them, the effects they’ve had on me?! Please, reason with me here; I’m not crazy; I need them, I need me I’m not crazy. Don’t you understand? Can’t you understand? Can’t you understand? Can’t you fucking—”

On the stairwell, shivering, she thinks about how she’s unemployed. The striped man hasn’t returned. He must want something he must want money. She hasn’t changed in days; there is a crust of dirt around the crown of her head.
Wobbling down the hallway she musters up the idea of becoming a waitress, a waitress! She’ll buy her own apartment with the money she makes; paint or write or something, the artist’s meager dressed up-seedy life.
At the first restaurant, the manager asks her to please leave. But, I’ll work for free!
“But, I’ll work—I’ll work as long as you want I won’t stop I’ll stay up all night I’ll—whatever you want please I need a—”

After having covered the entire neighborhood and been turned down at every restaurant, deli, and video rental store, she spasms back to the stairwell; the second one, on the other side of the hallway of her apartment so that her mother doesn’t catch her. Suddenly she hears a footloose whistling from down below. She bangs her head against the railing while getting up to stare down the stairwell. The striped man, grinning, winks at her, leaning on his cane, legs diagonally crossed.

VII

“Why hello there!” he chimes, apparently sufficed. “You don’t look…up to your usual par. What can I do for you?”
“I…”
“I know, I know. You’re shaking, child. Here, take this cloak, let me wrap it around you. There. Look at you! You’re an aberration!” He puts his hand to his chin, giving the pretext of thought. “Why, I know…it must’ve been those damn birds! Those birds, I tell you. They wreck all sorts of havoc.”
“What…what are the..y? For God’s sake what are they?”
“For God’s sake? Oh no, child, this is no creation of God. These birds impose a state of absent rapture on their captives.”
“Captives?”
“Yes, well, not so much captives as captivators. I suppose the term could be interchangeable with captive, for often the captivators become captives. To the birds, that is.”
“Where do they come from? How are they bred? How can such birds exist? This is impossible. This is absurd. What have you done to me. What have you done to me?”
“What have I done to you? Why, nothing, my child. I would never want to harm you. In fact, my only intentions are to impart to you more of these exquisite creatures. But they come at a price. A simple one, at that.”
“I want nothing to do with the birds.”
“That’s besides the point, for they want you, and once they have chosen a vessel to impregnate, they only intend to proliferate their particular breed of species.” He regards her expression of despair. “The only way to liberate the abomination you have created of yourself is to reveal the existence of these creatures to others, and to impregnate them.
“Here, take these four in the meantime.” A feeling of immediate relief and radiating euphoria overcomes her. “I must take leave, as I have other matters to attend to. However, I will return, and once I have, I expect you to not be alone.”
Alice, benumbed by her inebriation, lies back on the stairwell, engaged by lucid delusions and hallucinations.

VIII

“Oh! Caprice! There’s someone I want you to meet,” Alice says, painted and wearing her most diaphanous summer dress.
“You know, your mother and I, we thought maybe—”
“Oh don’t be silly! Come with me. It’s not very far. Not very far at all.”
Taking him fondly, albeit exuberantly, by the hand, she prances off to the stairwell.

They’re both lounged on one of the landings, both smoking cigarettes and prattling buoyantly, Caprice entranced by Alice’s acting like herself again; somewhat allured by her farcical nonchalance. They are having a picnic on the stairwell. Caprice, laughing, pulls out a bottle of Corona from his backpack and a DecoColor marker. Alice lunges at the bottle while Caprice writes his personal tag on the wall. Alice, fidgeting, tapping her knee, wonders why the striped man hasn’t showed up yet. She has almost used all her restrained feminine wiles on Caprice; if the man doesn’t show himself soon, she’ll have to resort to more sexual measures, which she isn’t inclined to do. Or maybe Caprice simply enjoys her company.
Doubtful.
“You’ve nearly drank the entire bottle!”
“Oh, I—wasn’t paying attention,” she snaps to her senses.
“Haha, it’s okay. I brought two. I figured one wouldn’t be enough.”
“Enough…enough for what?”
“Enough for us to get, drunk?”
“And why would you want me to get drunk?”
He looks at her warily. “Alice. Sometimes it’s just nice to be intoxicated with someone. I mean, with someone else. I mean—”
“I know. I wasn’t insinuating anything. It’s just. Not…like you. Not like you at all.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry, it must be the beer. My heart’s beating…so fast; here, feel it,” she grabs his hand and puts it above her breast.
“Jesus Christ. Are you alright? Let me touch your forehead—you’re burning up. We’ve got to get you home, right away.”
“I can barely breathe! How do you expect me to…to…” her thoughts drift off.
“I’ll carry you if I have to. Now come on.”
A voice shrills from down below. “Why, hello Alice! I see you’ve brought a friend.”
Caprice looks down from the railing, then looks at Alice. “Do you know him?”
“Yes, I—”
“That isn’t how you introduce a friend! Why, Caprice, I feel so obliged so meet you, and here I have! What a treat this is. Alice talks so, so much about you.”
“Does…she?”
“Oh, yes.” Caprice shuns away from the man’s deformed, crooked nose. The man has quickly stepped between himself and Alice. The man grins. “You have done well, Alice.”
“Wha…what?” Caprice stutters, looking back and forth between the man and Alice, mesmerized.
“Oh, Caprice, don’t you see them!”
“See what?”
“Don’t you see them! How beautiful they are. Flying above my head, around and around, for as long as…”
“You, you both are seriously fucked up. I don’t know what’s going on here but—”
“Such language!” the striped man says, appalled. “Mind your tongue.”
“Shut the fuck up you faggot. Get the fuck away from me—”
“Tsk, tsk. Such reluctance.” The man, presenting Alice to Caprice, “can’t you see them?
“Can’t you see them? Can’t you see them, for her sake?”
“The birds, boy. The birds. Can’t you see the birds?”
“Birds? What birds? All I see are two lunatics. Now back off; if you get any closer I’ll…”
The man, ignoring Caprice, regards Alice. “Well, I’ll be damned. My, my, it seems there are no birds after all!”
“What?” Alice gasps. “What? What are you talking about?”
“The boy is right. There are no birds flying around your head.”
“Of course there are. You—you gave them to.”
“I gave you, birds? Haha. Now let’s be serious here.”
Caprice, confused, teeters towards the man’s rationality. “There isn’t anything flying above your head, Alice. It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“But of course they are! I can see them, perfectly. Why are you doing this. Why are you doing this?” she pushes the man.
“I’m not doing anything, darling. It seems you have conjured some sort of delusion. We must take you to see help, right away.”
“No. No, you sick bastard. How could you. How could you do this to me.”
“Alice—”
“Shut up Caprice!” And with these words, she begins to suffocate. Caprice rushes to her aid, the man rolling his head to the left, as if discerning a painting.

IX

“I think she’s coming to.”
Alice, her vision groggy and incoherent, can see a fluorescent light above her. Assuming she’s in a hospital, she closes her eyes again, pretending to be asleep. There’s an IV slithered into her arm, most likely pumping electrolytes.
“Alice?” She hears Caprice’s voice, remote and troubled. He rushes to her bedside, swiping the hair away from her forehead.
“Don’t touch her,” her mother says, not in the least bit relieved.
“It seems that your daughter…” a nurse’s voice trails off. Suddenly she hears a meek chirping coming from above her; her entire body immediately tenses. She hears blackbirds, blackbirds singing; the cawing of crows. “She’s pulling through…” A jolt of rapture jerks her body. She raises herself up, ruthlessly intrigued by her surroundings. Nearly leaping off the bed, the IV tearing out of her arm, she scampers out of the room and down the hallways of the ward; as far as she can before the guards tackle her to the ground and she is restrained to a bed, shot up with tranquilizers.

“How long am I going to be here, mom?
“Mom?”
“I don’t know,” her mother mutters. “I don’t know.”
“Why am I here?”
Her mother looks at her with vexation and pity.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” she says. “Just get some sleep. I’m sure everything will all be over soon.”
“What’s there to be over, mother?”
“Just go back to sleep. Come now. In you go.”

Caprice visits her on the weekends. He sits in a chair in the corner of her dorm-room.
“I can’t feel the cold anymore…you know.”
Caprice looks at her quizzically. “What do you mean.”
“I just can’t feel it. I don’t feel the cold anymore.
“Look,” she notions him to come by her side. She turns the fan on and the air conditioner and stands directly in front of it. “I can’t feel it. I can’t.”
“But it’s freezing, Alice. Should I tell the doctors?”
“No. No…don’t do that. They’d only, they’d only worry more.”
Caprice gazes at despairingly. “Are they still there?”
“Is what still there. The birds?”
“Yes.”
“Yes but…they’re not circling above my head anymore. They’re outside. Cawing, squawking, singing, chirping, humming.”
“Like…normal birds.”
“Yes but…but I can hear them in my mind; echoes, in my mind, from so far away. Oh Caprice. I wish they’d stop.” He puts his hand on her shoulder. “It’s like they’re trying to tell me something. To save them, or to confront something, something I don’t know. How can I save birds? How can I confront what I can’t see? There is no one to designate any kind of resolution.”
“I’m sure the…voices, the voices of the birds I’m sure they’ll go away eventually. You’ve been through a lot. That man—”
“Caprice. Caprice there’s something I want you to do for me. But you can’t tell anyone, not even my mother. Do it when you’re stoned. I don’t care. Please, just do it for me.”
“Sure, anything, what is it?”
“I want you to return to the stairwell and summon that man. Bring someone else with you. Don’t go alone—I have a feeling, a feeling it might solve this anomaly.
“I will. I will, I will—tonight. I’ll go. For you.” He turns away to leave.
“Wait—Caprice,” she lunges towards him, kissing him with a hint of dread, and also a repressed, undulating affection.

X

Caprice dawdles patiently on the stairwell, headstrong; he notices the condom wrapper on the floor. Against Alice’s wishes he’s brought no one with him. He shouts! “Come out, come out wherever you are. You fiend!”
“Fiend,” the sly, breathy voice of the striped man whispers behind him. “Fiend! No, no. Don’t say such things. I am no fiend. There is no need for such accusations.”
“You—”
“I assume you’ve concerning the welfare of your friend…loved one perhaps?”
Caprice muses this over, then nods. Better to comply, mug the man’s mind as much as he can before resorting to hostility.
“There’s only one way you can help her. The birds will not stop calling her, and she will not stop coveting their temptation.”
“There are no birds. There are no birds; I don’t see them—you even admitted before, you saw nothing.”
“Oh! Not then, no, child. But I see them now. They are…in my hand.” Caprice notices that one of the man’s hands is behind his back. Imagining it to be some sort of weapon, he smites the man in the face, further slugging him in the gut. The man, unaffected, hangs and shakes his head.
“No, no child. Violence will not save her.”
“Then…then what will! Tell me!”
“Why, the birds, of course. Here, let me show you.” He removes his hand from behind his back; four red robins fly in circles above his hand.
“So they…so they do exist.”
“Of course they exist! Don’t be foolish. You should have believed her.”
“I should have believed her—”
“Now is not the time for self-pity. You must save her.”
“How? How can I save her. Tell me. Tell me or I will—”
“Take these birds. Take these birds and your love; ah, I mean friend, will be released from her torment.”
“I…I…”
“Do it,” the man goads, “it’s the right thing to do.”
“Alright. Alright, I’ll do it for her.”
“You have done the right thing, Caprice. Such a name! To save someone, at such a young age, on a whim. Ironic, is it not?” But Caprice is already too demented with bliss to understand a word the man is saying.