Dead Alice

Joshua’s dead girlfriend has been sending him postcards. He puts them up on the wall above his bed, even though his mother asked him not to tape up posters because they would strip paint off the wall.

Boyfriend, she wrote on the first one, I wish you were here. All my love, Alice. It was stamped from somewhere in Purgatory, which confused him, because the front of the card was a photograph of Cleveland, Ohio. It was probably a dead person joke, he thought. He’d never been to Ohio.

The second postcard was of Death Valley National park, and that was a joke he did get. He tried to remember what her laugh had sounded like. She had only been dead two weeks then, but some good things were already starting to fade.

Joshua thought the strangest part about the whole postcard thing was that Alice never wrote him anything when she was alive. Once she and her family went to Daytona Beach for a whole two weeks, and she didn’t send a postcard, even though Joshua sent her three from his family ski vacation.

The next postcard was a Georgia O’Keefe print, a painting of a deer’s skull against a brilliant blue desert sky. Josh, she wrote, even though she knew he preferred to be called Joshua. Are you still failing Chemistry? Please don’t let Tiffany Delaney sit in my old desk. xo, Alice. 

He had let Tiffany sit in her old desk, the desk that Alice had carved their names into with her pocketknife. What was he going to say about it? Everyone knew Alice wasn’t coming back, and Tiffany’s blond curls smelled like honeysuckle. He asked her about it once before class, and she said it was organic shampoo, the kind her mother used.

Tiffany’s mother was the guidance counselor, a woman who wore pantsuits, but the smell of the shampoo made him think of Mrs. Delaney in a whole different way, so he made an appointment to see her. The visit had nothing to do with Alice, but of course that’s what they ended up talking about anyway.

“Joshua,” Mrs. Delaney said, in her honeysuckle voice. “I’ve been hoping to see you.”

When he told her about the postcards, she reached across the desk to grab his hand.

Alice’s next postcard, Greetings from the Memphis Zoo, told Joshua to Say hello to your mother, asking sweetly: How is she? He was surprised at this; Alice was rarely polite. Besides, Alice and his mother had only met twice, once at the house and once at Alice’s funeral. His mom said she’d looked pretty both times. Alice did look pretty in the casket, looked like she was only sleeping in the crushed purple velvet. Joshua was amazed at what a good job they did reattaching her head, but no one else at the service mentioned it.

Alice had died on a school trip to the amusement park, on their third time around on the Texas Tornado rollercoaster. She stood up during the ride, even though the roller coaster operator had specifically asked her not to. Joshua noticed she hadn’t properly secured her safety bar, he even asked her about it, but she said it was fine, it wasn’t an upside-down coaster, she’d done it before with her Dad.  So Alice was hooping and hollering like the ride was the best thing she’d ever done and Joshua was just about to stand up too, when the coaster went around a corner, and next thing Joshua knew Alice was sitting back down in her seat, without her head.

Joshua told the wall of taped-up postcards that my mother says hello back, and that she’s doing okay. She doesn’t make me eat broccoli anymore, he continued. She wants to get us a dog. She never asks me about you.

That last bit wasn’t entirely true, because whenever Mom asked Joshua anything, she was asking about Alice. When she asked him if he wanted a German shepherd or a Pomeranian, she was really asking how much Joshua missed Alice. Joshua said maybe we could get a white poodle, because he liked the way their slobber stained their dog-beards. Joshua’s mom didn’t seem to know what he meant by that. A teacup Chihuahua, she asked, or a Bernese Mountain dog?

Other people asked about Alice without asking about Alice too. The track coach said Joshua didn’t have to come to practice every day and he’d still give him a varsity letter. His Chemistry teacher said he wasn’t failing anymore, even though the only thing that had changed in the class was that Tiffany now sat in front of him, where Alice used to be. Joshua still liked the way Tiffany’s hair smelled, and it reminded him to make more appointments at the guidance office. Joshua thanked Alice in his head for these things, and she sent him a blank postcard of two prairie dogs grooming one another.

Alice’s still-alive boyfriend has been sending her postcards. She doesn’t know where he gets her addresses; she’s not even sure where she is most days. Joshua always liked postcards. When he went on a ski vacation, he sent Alice one card for every night he was gone. She recycled them, but she regrets it now. She has softened up a bit since death.

Dear Alice, the first one said, in Joshua’s careful penmanship. I bicycled past your house. Your tulips are out, and your dad threw a beer bottle at me. -J.

They were daffodils, she growled, angry that he got to see their orange and white heads. When she died they were only sprouts, little fingers of green poking out of the ground. It is not surprising to Alice that her father is drinking again, or that he thinks her boyfriend is some sort of feral cat that he can throw bottles at.

Thank you for the postcard, she wanted to write to Joshua, if she only had a pen. The Afterlife is fine. My grandmother is here, the one with the glass eye, you remember, she died a few years ago? The eye falls out all the time, because her eye sockets have drooped even more since she’s started decomposing. She whines like a Basset Hound when I put it back in.

Joshua has only been to Alice’s grave once, walked all over her fresh dirt plot with his ratty Vans sneakers. You are standing on my face, she wanted to tell him. You are stepping on my hair, she tried to shout, as she watched him from somewhere above. That’s the funny thing about being dead, she thought, you’re both everywhere and nowhere. That visit, Joshua left yellow carnations on the top of her headstone. Alice thought about how she would have been absolutely livid, beyond pissed, if he had give her yellow carnations for her prom corsage, but now she thinks they’re sort of nice.

Alice wishes Joshua would come back to the cemetery, is sorry she got so mad about his sneakers. She’s glad that he at least remembers to write, even if all of Joshua’s postcards are very short and a little impersonal, which Alice chalks up to the fact that he’s afraid of spelling something wrong. She wants to remind him of the time he bit her nipple so hard it bled. It was only the third or fourth time she’d taken her bra off in front of him, and he just didn’t know what he was doing, he didn’t mean to hurt her. Still, those sorts of things bring people closer, and at some stage you don’t have to worry about spelling anymore.

But as the postcards keep coming, Alice grows more annoyed with Joshua. He didn’t say he loved me, she whines, and he wrote it in pencil. She hates that none of the postcards are from interesting places; he’s just going through the rotation of the cards available at the gas station next to his house. That was another thing she never liked about Joshua, he had no desire to travel, no sense of adventure. She did get jealous when Joshua wrote to her after the first time he smoked marijuana, behind the bleachers with a bunch of his friends. But she had already smoked Clouds twice at that point, which her glass-eyed grandma assured her was much better. You can’t trust anything that comes out of the dirt, Nana said, pulling a fat white grub out of her ear.

When there’s no postcard from Alice for a week, Joshua thinks it’s a good sign, and so does Mrs. Delaney. Mrs. Delaney says we never forget our first love, but we have to keep our hearts open. Mrs. Delaney has been married three times.

Joshua asks Tiffany Delaney to prom, because he can’t very well ask her mother, since husband #3 is still in the picture. Joshua gives Tiffany a corsage of pink carnations, and Tiffany says she loves them, that they are her absolute-most-favorite flower.

At the dance, there is a video tribute to Alice. Everyone looks at Joshua during it, and he nervously runs his fingers along the edges of the Georgia O’Keefe postcard in his pocket. The gym teacher walks up to Joshua after the five-minute memorial, and hands him a plastic cup of bright red punch. Joshua takes a sip; it is half full of vodka.

Later in the night, Joshua and Tiffany grope each other in the back of her mother’s station wagon. The whole car smells like honeysuckle.

“Was that okay?” Tiffany asks after, nervously pulling her taffeta dress back on.

“Heaven,” Joshua says, pulling her close so he could sniff her curls.

“Better than Alice?” Tiffany asks, and Joshua thinks about showing her the postcard of the deer skull painting, but decides against it, and pushes the folded up card further down into the pants pocket of his rented tuxedo.
The next morning, there is a postcard in Joshua’s mailbox, a photograph of a naked baby in a flowerpot. It’s not stamped or signed, and Joshua thinks it might be the last one he’ll get.

Nice night for prom, Alice writes, in barely readable scrawl. I’d still stand up on the Texas Tornado. Sorry about the handwriting. Fingers decayed. I’ve only got my teeth to hold a pen, and those are going too.