Good Morning, Mr. Pluto

This book ponders the inner workings of the multiverse

Two men stood in a crater on Earth’s satellite watching the little blue planet like its concerned parents. One man was awkwardly tall and wore a blue suit with a puffy white ascot tucked in the collar. He had dark hair and thick black eyebrows. The other man stood much shorter and wore a plaid vest and corduroy khaki shorts that were stretched tight beyond his knees. A small gold watch hung on a chain from his belt. A similar chain hung from the man’s thick circular glasses that magnified his dark golden eyes beyond question. He had white, patchy hair and looked to be at least ninety years of age. The diminutive man was even hunched over on a walnut cane that struggled to find solace in the powdery and clumpy dirt.

      “What’s done is done Arthur, we shall see how it plays out” the tall man whispered.

      “I find it surprising how much you have detached yourself from your origin Benjamin, don’t forget you were once stuck on that hopeless planet too,” Arthur replied steadily trying to water down his thick accent that sounded almost British.

      “But I found a way out” Benjamin hastily whispered back.

       “I brought you out of that world Benjamin, don’t forget it” Arthur snapped.

      A dead silence hung between them. Arthur repositioned his cane and stood up a little straighter. He turned to face Benjamin who appeared to be in deep thought as he gazed out at the gibbous view of Earth.

      “Perhaps you can reverse it through time?” Benjamin wondered aloud.

      “I have tried already. It happens every time.”

      “Well as I said, we shall see how things play out”

      “No, because they don’t play out Benjamin, unless you find Clemence and kill him”

      “Who is Clemence?”

      Benjamin, who had taken a few steps past the old man, turned to face him once again.

      “I am not going back there,” Benjamin replied sternly.

      “Yes you are, that is the only way it works” Arthur affirmed monotonously.

      “How many times have you argued about this with me?” Benjamin mumbled looking at his worn out leather shoes.

      “Nine hundred and twenty two times, now if you are going to stay here I recommend Peruvian Gravity Supplement and Madjack’s Airlock; otherwise you better come with me to Earth.”

      “I don’t want to go to Earth” Benjamin replied as he looked up.

      The warm air had subsided and he was now suffocating. He tried to breathe in but no air was to be drawn in. His whole body felt like it was being crushed by an unfathomable amount of pressure. He knew he had fifteen seconds to do something about it. He murmured one spell and was instantly relieved of the pressure; it was the Peruvian Gravity Supplement that Arthur had recommended. He suddenly realized he didn’t even have enough air to murmur a spell so he did the finger motions and concentrated hard. He hooked his ring finger wrong and had to start over. He fell to his knees in sudden asphyxia and just as he hit the ground he hooked his thumb around his middle finger and ah, there it was; Madjack’s Airlock. Sweet, salty ocean air filled his lungs rapidly to the point where he choked and almost coughed one of his relieved lungs up. 

Chapter One

Matthew Clemence sparked his orange lighter and lit his freshly packed green, grav. The smoke swirled up the greenish, translucent two-liter, illuminated by the setting sun, and whirred into his lungs as he inhaled it deeply. It was harsh, coming from a plastic gravity bong but hey, whatever did the trick. The window was already part-way open so he stood up and blew it out without having to choke on it too much. It was almost silent, which was quite abnormal for a Monday on Main Street.

After having glared at the window,-and literally at the window-as in inspecting the little bubbles and warps that old glass has-Matthew did it again. He noticed it almost immediately this time because the dark, red leaves on a stout, old maple tree had gone from thrashing every which way in a violent wind to just being frozen in a suspended state, exempt from all forces. The leaves weren’t the only thing frozen in place; a young bicyclist was perfectly balanced but also perfectly still on the sidewalk in front of his house. Matthew shifted his focus to this frozen bicyclist. He wore the whole biker getup; the bright yellow, skin tight jersey and the matching, skin tight leggings; Matthew thought he looked more like a super hero than a suburban bicyclist. Matthew observed the man for quite a while, thinking about what he had just done. This wasn’t too strange for Matthew; he was quite used to it by now. Last week he froze time in the middle of math class. Which turned out to be sexually enlightening, as for all the girls in his math class were decently attractive. It’s not like he did it on purpose; this was some raw, untapped power that had been culminating and fermenting deep within himself that he just so happened to tap into.

Matthew was standing there, towering over his window sill, staring at the bicyclist, when he got an idea. He tore down the hard, wooden stairs and burst into the kitchen. No one was home so he couldn’t play any “I can freeze time and you can’t” games that he had played last week in math class, which involved all sorts of pranks that were thought out at least for a couple days. Matthew was in his own little science experiment: a time lab and he was in his element. Matthew had been suffering through the rigors of A.P. Calculus when he mistakenly stopped time by twiddling a pencil. Or that was what he thought had triggered it for he wasn’t doing anything else, he wasn’t even listening to the teacher or even his own thoughts. Matthew was spacey like that ever since he had stopped taking Adderall XR 30 Mg and it probably wasn’t reflecting so well on his grades. Anyway though, he didn’t even notice that he had frozen time until probably ten minutes after he had done so. He finally looked up from his desk and the student in front of him, with dark brown, greasy hair was still sleeping soundly. Matthew hadn’t looked up from his desk in a good, twenty minutes and the boy in front of him was just starting to lay his head on the desk to rest; that didn’t happen in A.P Calculus, Mrs. Haven was too much of a hard a*s. Mark had a special knack for falling asleep in class but not even he could go unnoticed for a whole twenty minutes. Matthew kept watching the guy; Mark was his name, waiting for him to suddenly lift his head at the sound of Mrs. Haven’s “discipline scream” which sounded more like a Russian lesbian torturer entering a wrestling arena. Mark didn’t move. And neither did Matthew as he steadily observed him. Than Matthew realized it was completely silent; no one was talking, not even the teacher. Matthew looked up at her. Her mouth was wide open and Matthew had a feeling she had just said, “Ummm”. Mark and Mrs. Haven weren’t the only people frozen in time; the whole classroom of twenty-two students looked like a picture, a single frame; and that’s exactly what it was. Matthew stood up suddenly and ran out of the classroom. He tore through the halls, glancing in every classroom as he passed them, just to make sure they were frozen to. Once he got through the dreadful math wing, with the sorrowful faces of his fellow classmates, Matthew climbed down the stairs to the exit and yelled; “Hallelujah mothafuckkas!” as he kicked the door open.

The school was setup so that the auditorium was directly adjacent to the parking lots, and the math wing was right above the auditorium. So when Matthew kicked the door open and saw all of his classmate’s cars sparkling in the afternoon sun, he was instantly tempted to snatch the keys off one of his classmates. Matthew didn’t have a car yet so he had an urge to drive, only rarely did his dad let him drive his Camaro and his mom didn’t have a car. So Matthew went in through the auditorium and luckily there was a sophomore class meeting. His temptations pulled his legs like puppet strings as he walked over to the vice-principal. The dude’s keys were just hanging there on a little key ring, begging to get stolen, Matthew figured as he transferred them onto his belt loop. Matthew ran out of the building like he had just planted a time-sensitive bomb. He knew exactly what car the principal drove and where he parked it; of course he did; it was a 2013 Jaguar XF, and all of his friends had dreamed of driving it since he drove it into school the first day of their senior year.

 Matthew always believed in all the supernatural/sci-fi stuff: ghosts, magic, time travel, aliens, et cetera. If one was to name something in a fantasy or sci-fi novel that Matthew has read, he’ll tell you it exists somewhere in the multiverse. And oh yeah, he believed in the multiverse as well. It was an arguably sound theory that no one had disproved yet, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch for Matthew to take the theory up and begin studying astrophysics. But even when he was arguing that ghosts do in fact exist; stoned off his a*s with his friends, he would appeal to the logic of it all. He wasn’t about to just believe in something that entertained him every night until he got too tired to read on just because it was entertaining; no, Matthew needed more than that. He would research, gather together different supporting and disproving articles and decide whether Harry Potter or whatever else he was reading at the time existed or not. Such an obsessive devotion to late night research and even later night reading, led Matthew on to become well-versed and well-armed in defending his childhood dreams. And damn, would he have to defend them a lot. Often after a blunt or a few bubblers between him and his friends, out of the blue, Matthew would make a reference to one of his childhood heroes-turned-fulltime research project. His friends would slander his hasty beliefs and criticize him for spending so much time researching them; but Matthew was used to this, he would offer his evidence and a little under-the-influence rhetoric and trigger these hilariously long, high-debates with his friends. Matthew loved these debates, partially because no one cared enough to ever put him in his place. He was in his element when he debated with friends; he felt like he belonged on some world-wide debate team or involved in a crazy scientific research projects that needed to convince the government to provide funding.

 Ever since freshmen year in high school it was evident that Matthew would smoke weed for the rest of his life. He smoked it every day, maybe about five to six times on an average day and as many as twenty or thirty on a fun night.

Matthew had smoked weed out of bongs, bowls, bubblers, joints, hookahs, blunts, gravs, breadbags, waterfall gravs and even this fancy piece of engineering called a vaporizer that saturates the oils out of weed and leaves the remainder over for a healthier and smoother smoking experience. His parents knew that he smoked, of course they knew; he used to fashion these stoner-engineered devices called dry gravs or a breadbags. It is similar to a normal gravity bong but it used a plastic bread bag, instead of water to create suction; all in all it was pretty unhealthy. Matthew would sit up in his room with a towel under the door and take two or three hits off of one of these things and lay back in his bed and swear he was tripping, (probably from the plastic).

 

Back in the days of breadbags, can bowls, and post-it note joints, Matthew never got caught. He was like a full-time stoner-ninja that crept down the stairs late at night to go blaze and silently disappeared through thin air when his father would come around the corner following a scent trail of marijuana, (or a skunk-his dad never could tell the difference anymore). When Matthew, or stoner ninja, was off duty, he would let his guard down too often. He would throw old breadbags in his closet and toss grav caps under his bed in jaded apathy, begging to be caught by his parents but figuring, “ehh they won’t look in my closet.”

One morning, his father was replacing his air conditioner after a long, dry winter and was trying to locate a 2x4 that he needed to seal the window tight around the awkwardly-shaped air conditioner. Matthew was standing over his shoulder trying to get in the way of his father’s path to the closet.

“Where’s the board that goes underneath here?” Jim asked his son. “I thought I put it in the closet last year,”

“No, I think it is in Sadie’s room,” Matthew replied hesitantly, lying. “Or maybe it’s in the garage”

The 2x4 was in the closet. Matthew remembered seeing it in there. When Jim went to open the door Matthew desperately stepped in his way again and told him that the board wasn’t in there. His dad formed a worrisome grimace that depicted his knowledge of something fishy with Matthew’s behavior. His dad left the room and Matthew opened the closet door and reached for the board. He secured the board in the window and turned back around to grab the remnants of a dry grav that he had stashed in a cardboard box on the closet shelf. Matthew threw the breadbag, the grav cap from under his bed, and an empty Jack Daniel’s bottle into his backpack. He zipped it up and went into ninja mode.

He was high, so he sort of clumsily climbed down the side porch roof right outside his window with too much confidence and his jeans caught an edge of the gutter and he tore the aluminum down with him as he bumbled down the porch column and on to the ground. He half-assedly restored the gutter to its already crappy condition and started to walk towards the forest.

Matthew lived on the edge of the Hopkinton state forest in Massachusetts. It was mostly pine, oak, and maple trees but a few birch trees remained half-skinned alive by passing hikers. Matthew crushed a ladybug crawling on a shard of this birch bark as he stepped into the lively forest. Hopkinton state forest was fairly large and was home to much wildlife. Few hikers marched around these parts due to local stories of meth labs and their beloved owners who would do anything to remain hidden in the forest. Matthew disregarded those stories a long time ago for he had never once seen any sort of meth lab or drug addict anywhere in the nearby forest.

 Matthew climbed over caves that had once been the perfect size for him and his sister to crawl in and set up camp and sleep out. He decided to keep going north which he knew to be the way he was facing thanks to his father’s dire attempts to turn him into a hiker. Matthew was no hiker. He was a wonderer. He usually went whichever way he felt to be the most accepting of his presence but today he had risked going on past the caves to a stretch of forest he didn’t often go to. He and his sister only would climb up past the caves when they were accompanied by the children’s oldest sibling, Micaela. When they did come up this way they wouldn’t go any further in that direction.

It wasn’t clear to Matthew’s mind, which was now engaged in thinking of the subject, why they hadn’t gone up this way before. Matthew couldn’t figure it out, but it was obvious it was just because of aesthetics. Below the caves, there was a trail where Matthew would see hikers every once and a while.  It was very appealing due to the pine tree ceiling that stretched over most of the trail. Matthew had gone out that way hundreds of times and it was fun and all but it was not for today’s journey. The way Matthew had decided to go was violently uphill or up-cliff really and at the top the ground was covered in lively undergrowth of blueberry bushes and decomposing leaves. It was hard to walk through; the bushes grabbed at Matthew’s ankles as he sunk in with every step deep into this undergrowth and then out again as he trudged through it.

It wasn’t clear to Matthew why he had gone this far either, regardless of the direction. He had only sneaked off into the forest to dispose of his old grav parts and an old alcohol bottle from last weekend. There was no need to go this far, for his dad would never even be caught in the forest without a little kid at his side anymore. He was too advanced for such mundane, unskilled hiking that was the best that Hopkinton state forest had to offer around these parts. His father was on to climbing mountains in Europe and Southeast Asia and following in the footsteps of his father. Matthew threw the grav and the alcohol bottle one at a time at the jagged cliff below.

It was on a similar day like this that Matthew’s life changed dramatically, as if it hadn’t already changed enough when he learned he could freeze time. He had gone out in the woods again to dispose of an alcohol bottle from the other night. He got extremely wasted at his friend’s graduation party and met a cute girl that frantically left the party early after having puked up all the alcohol consumed that night on Matthew’s brand new shirt. Matthew wasn’t that pissed but he was really grossed out because he was irrationally high after three, stuffed-full blunts that his friend Al rolled up for everyone to hit. She apologized and started to cry, Matthew assured her it was truly alright and he didn’t mind but she still stumbled out the door sobbing off the rest of her Raspberry Smirnoff out.

The day was beautiful. It was the time of the year that even after a long rain storm, the next day was sunny as all hell. Even the leaves were dry on the trail Matthew walked on. He looked up at the sky which was partially blocked by tall pine trees and observed two dragonflies mating, either that or it was a dragonfly paramedic transporting an injured patient. Birds were crazy this time of year. All attempt at a harmonious, in-sync forest melody had been long forgotten once spring sprung into the forest and the snow had finally melted. Matthew made out the distinct sounds of woodpeckers knocking on insect’s doors, baby robins celebrating their first flight, and mallard ducks conversing, secluded in the dark, green lake to Matthew’s left. The other maybe twenty different bird calls Matthew heard as well were too faint to sound anything different from a scene out of “The Sound of Music”.

 As Matthew made his way up the steep, jagged cliffs once again and started thinking about the last time he had done this almost a year ago, the same day his father was installing the air conditioner and Matthew had to dispose of some paraphernalia. He laughed to himself about the fact that he had to hide his smoking habits from his parents back in those days. He had come all the way out here to dispose of a dry grav and a glass bottle and came back to a can bowl and dry grav accompanying his parents at the dinner table. His father was pissed, or pretended to be, and his mother was crying. They scolded him harshly but couldn’t bear to punish him; they never could for some reason. After that stoner-ninja had retired. He made little effort to hide it from his parents anymore, as he wanted them to just accept it. His friend had advised him that that was what he did with his parents; the same friend of his that would now ask his mother for weed. But still, Matthew moved his grav station out into the garage and waited to be caught again…and again…and again. By this time, almost a year later Matthew’s parents stopped scolding him when they would catch him they would just pretend not to see it. But they, as in ninety nine times out of hundred just his father, caught him a lot; his mother rarely was seen in the garage and when she was she would pretend to not see him in mid pull of a puffy, white grav and walk right by humming a catchy tune.

Matthew didn’t journey into the forest just to dispose of the alcohol bottle. He had decided he would set aside some time to think about what the hell was going on with him lately; so he came out here to think. He was that type of person; he had a hard time focusing on one thing for too long so if he really needed to, he had to be in absolute silence and free of any communications with the outside world. A bit exaggerated but all the better for attention deficit Matthew. He shut his phone off and sat cross-legged like he was about to meditate. He laughed to himself as he realized what he would look like to a passerby on the trail below.

“How the f**k can I just stop time” he said aloud to no one but himself.

The birds talked over him as he asked this to himself again.

“What is the mechanism, there must be some science behind this”

He continued thinking about this, only being interrupted twice by other flooding A.D.D-related ideas and observations.

“I need to learn to control this”

“That you do!” a small but firm voice resonated from behind him, definitely female.

He jumped a little and then whipped around to see where the voice came from. Nothing was there.

“I can’t show myself at this moment I am in too many places at once”

Matthew was looking all around him spinning in circles trying to locate the voice.

“Stop smoking so much f*****g weed and figure it out” the voice said with a high school bitchy girl attitude.

“I know you can do it I don’t know why it is taking you so long this time” the voice drifted off seeming to do so in all directions at once.

Matthew was left there, rubbing his eyes, trying to insert some logic into what just happened. In too many places at once? What the hell was that supposed to mean?

The voice sounded far too familiar, he wondered if he had tripped out a little but he assured himself he wasn’t even that high. It pissed him off that the voice blamed his lack of progress in controlling his new-found power on smoking too much weed. He had proved to his parents that it didn’t affect his life negatively and he would prove it to this b***h too, or so he thought.

Chapter Two

Alice’s feet froze the minute the minute she stepped out of the foggy, warm bathroom and into the hallway. It was like crossing over into another climate zone in the blink of an eye. From Bolivia to Antarctica in a split second. She felt her long, dark hair begin to freeze. She immediately began to regret taking a shower after showing up in her mother’s apartment so randomly, but she needed one badly. An orange towel only kept the rest of her body warm for so long as it too, soaked in Alice’s runoff water, began to freeze. It was that cold. She had begun to shiver as too few goose bumps rose to stand guard against the frigid air. Alice used to blame her mother for the freezing apartment as she couldn’t afford to keep the heat on in the daytime.

It used to be times like these that Alice would play out conversations with her mother in her head and say, “Mom, I know you are addicted to cocaine again” and she would take a guess at what her mother would say in return; something like, “Oh my God! You know I would never do any drugs Alice! How could you say that about your mother?” but this time it was different. Her mother didn’t own this place anymore and by the looks of it no one did. Then why the hell was the water working, shouldn’t it be shut off? Then Alice remembered someone owned the apartment with her mother. They split the rent half and half until her mother had gone to the hospital and never came back. Alice wondered if the other woman still lived here. Fresh towels, new soap in the shower, she must. The realization made Alice jump a little but nowhere near as much as she did when the woman came around the corner to the upstairs bathroom and Alice simultaneously retreated back into the warm, foggy bathroom.

“Alice dear, is that you?” the woman said obviously a bit frightened of the potential intruder.

Alice shrieked. She turned around; wearing only a towel, to face the direction the voice came from.

“I’ll call the damn police, I will!” the woman yelled hesitantly outside the bathroom door.

Alice opened the door to see the poor old woman, scared as a baby rabbit being carried by a house cat, holding a giant cleaver in her left hand and a telephone in the other.
                “Mrs. Darling, I’m terribly sorry…I…” Alice couldn’t think of why she was here. What the hell was she doing here?

“Aren’t you supposed to be out in Massachusetts with your father?” the woman said, putting down the knife, with a regained sense of authority.

Alice talked her way out of it the best she could and ended up saying she had forgotten a lovely quilt that she desperately wanted back and decided to take a shower before she left.

“But dear, the paramedics were here months ago. Why didn’t you come sooner?” the woman questioned Alice intently.

“My dad is a…he’s a busy man I guess,” Alice was horrible at lying.

The woman accepted it though as she nodded and started to walk away. Then she turned around to face Alice again.
                “You need to learn to control this Alice, I’m one too…or I used to be anyway” the woman turned back around and walked down the stairs.

Alice’s heart was racing. She followed the woman downstairs. The woman entered the kitchen and began to fill up a glass of water from the sink. Before walking out the door, Alice turned around to ask,

“Control what…I am not…” the woman was gone.

Alice’s head was spinning, even more so than it would when she was just about to puke off of Jack Daniel's and too many hookah hits. What the hell had just happened? Alice stepped out into the frosty, Manhattan air and threw up nothing but water and bile onto the hard, frozen sidewalk.

Alice had known her mother did coke since she found evidence of it in her top dresser drawer when she was only fifteen: a little razor, a straw, and even a small bag of the white powder itself. Hell, it wasn’t even that long ago that she had admitted to Alice that she was on ecstasy. She had just come home from some club, where she hooked up with way too many guys in a large van somewhere outside in the parking lot. Alice had been rereading the fourth Harry Potter book, when her mother burst through the kitchen door and fell to her knees.

“I need you to keep a ss-ecret Alice” her mother stuttered as she got up from her knees.

“Mom, what happened…are you okay?” Alice slowly approached her mother, but started to back up as soon as she realized she was fucked up.

“I…took the magic pill Lissy” her mother would only call her “Lissy” when she was really little but Alice still remembered it because of how much she hated to be called that.

“What! Mom! No…please don’t tell me you are fucked up right now” Alice was only fifteen but she scolded her mother like a dog that just s**t on her bed.

“I’m sorry Lissy, I’m really sorry I did...X…Oh.. I’m so sorry baby…my little girl…Alice” her mother cried to her.

Alice started crying, she couldn’t stop herself.

“I hooked up with… guys too…too many guys…Oh Alice I’m sorry” her mother looked like a nine year old girl admitting she had sex to her parents, as she stared at Alice from across the kitchen with bloodshot eyes.

Alice knew her mother wasn’t that high anymore but she was coming down and that was even worse. She was in the regret-stage of her big drug, sex, and alcohol charade. Alice feared that she may end up like this as she cried in harmony with her mother in an otherwise dead silence.

“I thought…Mom…I thought” Alice struggled to form words as a new kind of mutated sadness swallowed her sentences.

“I thought you...I thought you went through…through rehab” Alice just barely managed to say through her jags of whimpering.

“I did Alice…I’m…” she slipped on the kitchen floor, wet with milk, hit her head on the countertop and collapsed on the floor, knocked clean out.

Alice screamed. Her throat was producing noises she didn’t know could come from a human being. Alice fell to the floor in front of her mother. She started hugging her mother sobbing and begging her mother not to die. The idea hadn’t popped into her head to call 9-1-1 until she saw thick, sticky blood pooling around her mother’s head. She jumped up from the ground and fished and fumbled her phone out of her pocket with a seriously disabling tremor and mistakenly dialed 9-1-End Key. She brought up the dial pad again and dialed 9-1-1. Her words were almost inaudible to the dispatcher but she managed to make out, “91 Linwood Avenue”.

Alice knew nothing about first aid or whatever the hell she was supposed to do now. She snatched a kitchen towel, hanging from a hook near the sink. She reached up and opened a cabinet and took out some 100 proof, triple distilled Rubinoff. She poured some on the towel and kneeled down next to her mother. She tried to lift her mother’s head up but she didn’t want to hurt her. She pushed her head over to one side and placed the towel carefully under it and turned it back over. It was the best she could do without risking furthering her mother’s imjuries, if she wasn’t already dead.

It was enough. The police and paramedics showed up within ten minutes. The paramedics put her on oxygen right away and checked her vitals. She was breathing, very choppily, but still breathing.

“She’s a lucky one” one guy said who had just turned Lucinda’s head and located the wound that was causing the dark, viscous pool of blood he was now kneeling in.

“There is a big bruise on her head and she might have a concussion but the wound is in her neck.”

“I think your mother is going to be just fine” the other paramedic said that was holding her oxygen mask.

Alice was relieved that her mother was alright but she was still terrified. She looked at her phone; her hands were covered in her mother’s blood. Text from “Daddy”; she didn’t even read it she just clicked the callback button and listened for the ringing. It went straight to voicemail. His phone was probably off.

“Alice Barcella, can we have a word with you” two police officers walked toward her.

“Umm...yeah of course” Alice talked in her small, girlish voice.

Her father had told her that her mother was not all right. He said that she takes drugs that the doctor didn’t prescribe to make herself feel better. Alice knew what he was talking about not only because she had found a small bag of coke in her top dresser drawer but also she had been fourteen years old now and was well updated on drugs, alcohol, sex, and everything in between. She even smoked marijuana with her friend a couple of times when she would sleep over her house. Alice never really liked it and by the time she was 16 she stopped completely. Her father treated her like a child though and warned Alice of her wretched mother. He even said he was trying to gain sole custody by extorting her mother’s drug habits. The only reason her mother had even partial custody of Alice was because the court gave her a second chance: a six month rehabilitation period and a heavy fine. Alice was scared by these warnings although she had never gotten the feeling that she wasn’t sober, but than again there was that bag in her dresser.

 Alice and her mother had a beautiful, inseparable relationship in her younger years. Her mother would come home with all the foods that Alice loved and made sure she was always comfortable, happy, and entertained. They would play Barbie games when she was in elementary school, talk about boys when she was going into high school, and paint each other’s nails and eat ice cream late at night towards the end of their close relationship. Her mother even knew Alice was high one night when she came home from hanging out with “Jess” and “Lindsay”. Her mother shrieked at her and made her promise that she would never do it again. Alice promised her she wouldn’t. Still Alice’s father warned her of her mother and claimed that she took all sorts of drugs. And Lucinda did do all sorts of drugs. Although it was when she was high off coke or weed, that she played the best Barbie games and told the greatest stories. But Alice was young; she was young and she was clueless. So only when her mother was going clubbing every single night and leaving Alice cold, hungry, and lonely every single night, only then did Alice and her mother’s relationship come to a brittle end.

The night Lucinda knocked herself unconscious would be the last time Alice saw her for a long, long time. Her father refused to take her to the hospital because he didn’t want Alice anywhere close to her after what happened earlier that night. They drove all the way to her dad’s house in utter silence. The moon was nearly full and hung in the skyline the entire drive home spilling over with white, iridescent light. As Alice stared up at the moon in admiration she wondered if she would ever see her mother again. At this point she told herself that is the last thing she would ever want to do but deep down she knew it wasn’t true. She loved her mother and was upset with herself that she couldn’t stop. As her dad hung a left onto Purchase Street, Alice risked a glance over at him. How was he so stone cold and Alice was so goddamn emotional? He glanced over at her and she pretended to look out his window.

“You know honey, I think life is going to get a lot better from here”

“What will happen to Mom now?” Alice shuddered out her words trying to stay composed. She scolded herself mentally for not being able to hold back a single, salty tear that started carving its river down her pale, smooth face.

“If she makes a full recovery, which I’m sure she will, than she will be tried at court again for child neglect and hopefully they do more than put her through rehab again.

“But she didn’t do anything to me…I” Alice wasn’t sure why she was defending her mother. It wasn’t like she was even telling the truth; her mother did neglect her and was in no condition to care for a child.

“Alice, the police told me what happened, just because she knocked herself out doesn’t mean she’s not a danger to you too” her dad didn’t dare risk a glance at her, he knew how easily a compassionate look could set her off on a crying spell.

Alice couldn’t think of a good response. In fact, she didn’t even want to respond. She just unbuckled her seat belt and waited for the car to stop. When it did, her father glanced over at her and said, “Now Alice, you know that it wasn’t safe there for you, right?” Alice mumbled something that sounded like a yes and walked into her dad’s enormous, Victorian estate with her head hung low.

She time traveled. That was almost certain. It was a couple of months after her mother’s accident, her mother was now in rehab, and she had just painted her nails and was waiting for them to dry so she could hop in the shower. She was sitting in the kitchen waving her hands through the air and then…poof! She was in her mother’s tiny Manhattan apartment. It was freezing. Her nails were now almost dry.

“What the f**k just…huh?” Alice exclaimed to herself.

She had appeared right in the middle of her bedroom. She fell over onto the bed intentionally. It was dusty and the nosy sunlight peered its way through the curtains to illuminate all the dust particles in their swirly descent. Alice sneezed and then sneezed again. And right as she was about to sneeze for a third time, she time traveled. She was lying on her back on a pile of wooden planks; she tried to sneeze all need to was gone. She heard what sounded like a big tractor trailer. It was an excavator and it was coming towards her, or coming towards the pile of wooden planks. She scrambled out of the way only to trip and fall over another pile of wood. She gathered herself back up and kept running until she hit a solid, tile covered wall and fell backwards and landed on her butt. She was soaking wet and naked. Hot water was streaming down onto her, scalding her head and shoulders.

She was in her mother’s apartment again, she knew by the looks of the bathroom. Crappy tile covered the floor and a broken light bulb hung out of a ceiling lamp only attached by a wire. How did she end up in the shower? She was just in a construction zone and before that she had…she had wanted to take a shower yes, but she had never actually went and got in, or she hadn’t yet. But apparently she had, she must have somewhere between the split second that she was at her dad’s house, then in her mother’s apartment, then in a construction zone, and then in her mother’s apartment again. She must have because here she sat, being burned by the hot water. Alice turned the shower off and stepped out of the shower. Her phone was on the counter next to the sink. She dried one hand off, while the rest of her was dripping wet and slide her finger across the bar to unlock it. It was September 22^nd a whole week after she had last been at her father’s house. Alice wrapped a bright orange towel around her torso and slowly tried to digest the fact that she had just time traveled. 

Author's Note

Ignore grammer, themes, and spelling errors. please just comment and explain what i could do to make it better what i am doing wrong, what you think of the dialogue and the overall command of the english language. Also comment and say if you would read the rest of this book or not. please dont comment negative things about the marijuana themes in this book it is in there for a reason don't you worry. Thank you in advance!