White Rabbit (Redux) (528 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 0.77 on 16 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Ballare (View user info) at 2009-01-06 20:29:26 EST
She was sitting in a cloud of smoke, her dangling, skeletal hand wrapped around the hose of a hookah. Her eyes rolling back in her head, she stared sightlessly up at the ceiling and laughed that shrill high-pitched laugh of hers.
There was something in the way she laughed - that sharp, high squeal - that grated on his very soul, as though she were poking her thin little fingers into his ribcage and pinching at his innards. He hated her laugh; he hated her. But here he was, propped against the wall in a darkened room that smelled vaguely of piss and tobacco and sweat, listening to her.
It had been so long now that he'd been sitting there, with her, so long in that endless shuddering, flickering reality that he wished he could just make her vanish. Vanish, or at least shut up. Shake her until she stopped laughing. Snap her emaciated body into pieces; chuckling, squealing pieces that would never stop with the sharp coughing laugh. And then he would be the one to poke his fingers into her innards, would he? satisfied to do it. Happy to do it.
Of course, he couldn't. To him, she was all that was. She was all that ever could be. To break her would be to shatter his own existence into thousands of broken scattered pieces, a splintered looking glass which showed no reflection nor captured no image. Seven years of bad luck? An eternity of it, of this existence, only -- without. And that would be, he presumed, infinitely more bleak.
But he couldn't stand her fucking laugh.
"Shut up, Alice," he snapped, twisting his head around to fix his wide, yellowed stare on her, and his pupils first dilated and then constricted sharply when finally his focus came upon her lax shape.
When he spoke her head suddenly drooped, dangling on her neck as though she were some raggedy ann doll, lolling back and forth freely, sickeningly. For a moment, he thought she had fallen asleep, until she listlessly pushed her cheek into her shoulder and gazed at him out of the corner of crusted, half-opened eye.
She giggled again. Through the ripped cloth of her shirt, he saw her ribs hiccupping with every intake of breath, and when she spoke, her voice was unexpectedly girlish, too high and childlike; it was pitched for his ears only, pitched as her laugh was pitch, to rasp against him and wash over him. To curdle that hatred within him.
"Oh -- oh, Kitty, why are you so cruel to me?"
He watched as her thinned lips drew downwards into a facsimile of a pout, but instead wrought a foul grimace that bared too many stained, jagged teeth. A gaunt hand extended an offering to him; the pinched hose of the hookah, the coarse smoke curling from her nostrils when her upper body flopped towards him and that hand neared.
Turning his head away, he leaned his brow against the cool wall. Lightly, as though the gentle touch of a butterfly's brushing wing (what was a butterfly? a wing?) against his leg, her wrist bumped against him serenely, but he only pressed harder against the stone. "Fuck you."
"Oh, Kitty," he heard her inhale sharply, and for all that disgust searing within him he slanted a look over towards her, to see now one hand held clasps to her mouth, those sunken eyes widened in horror. "Oh, Kitty, that is a bad word, you mustn't say that! Bad, Kitty, bad!" Now the sensation of her hand against his thigh was sharper, as though she had struck him, though feebly, and no pain coiled its way to his brain so instead he stared dumbly down at the silver tray of the hookah, stared at the reddened coals and the twisted, blackened shisha tobacco within it that never seemed to be replaced.
How long had it been, now? He had been here forever, it seemed. As long as he could remember, he had been here, with her. There was once, perhaps, a lifetime ago, a world of light and colour, of shapes and motion and things. A world in which he could come and go as he pleased, which in fact he seemed to recall in those moments of clearer lucidity he took a great delight in doing. But freedom was a word, like butterfly, like wing, which seemed only a string of syllables, of noise that was empty and hollow and inconsequential to this solid and quite tangible world.
When he made a great effort, many of such meaningless words floated through his mind in an endless parade, words which used to have significance but were now simply words.
A flamingo, a carpenter. Colours, though he knows the word, knows not the shades themselves, such as: red. A looking gla--
"Kitty!"
Nobody, and Somebody, these too he knows, and he knows them more intimately than he may ever have foreseen when he was still that real and solid creature which so enjoyed his freedom.
Her voice was suddenly trembling, hushed, intense, snapping him from that thought and he snarled loudly for the interruption. "Kitty, I must know. What time is it? Where is the pocket watch? You must... you must tell me..." These last words quavered unhappily, and her thin shoulders lifted and fell with a faltering moan.
"Fuck you," he repeated, mumbling into the peeling plaster. As she began to whimper, a soft, anguished mewl, he sighed heavily and fumbled around blindly, searching about for the timepiece. It was here, too, a constant as bona fide as he or her or the hookah, but often they kicked it away with languid motions, banishing it to far corners of the oppressive room for that inexorable, inescapable noise it made. He hated it, that ticking, that marking of passing time -- time, a joke, another one of those unimportant words -- almost as much as he hated her laugh.
When finally he felt it, the cold curved and brassy contour of it, he pawed at it unsteadily, labouring to focus on the round glass face.
"What time is it!"
This question was a question she had never asked before, and his eyes widened for it, for the surprise it took him for.
"It's too late," he replied shakily as his head fell back, struck hard against the wall and bursts of colour sputtered before his eyes. "It's always too late. You know that."
The pocket watch clattered noisily to the floor, and Alice moaned again, softly.
User Reviews
Submitted by sketch9 (user info) at 2009-04-02 00:53:20 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
YALL NIGGAS BEEN TROLLED
Submitted by RoadSong (user info) at 2009-01-07 16:31:50 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by kaos-king (user info) at 2009-01-07 15:04:19 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Bubba2341 (user info) at 2009-01-07 14:59:27 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Cretin below.
Submitted by Wildman (user info) at 2009-01-07 14:31:11 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Idiot below
Submitted by Bubba2341 (user info) at 2009-01-07 13:42:45 EST (#)
Ranking: 1
Submitted by Wildman (user info) at 2009-01-07 00:01:04 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Comment(Redux)
Submitted by Wildman (user info) at 2007-06-30 20:06:10 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
Needs more splooge on Grace Slick's face.
-----------
Grace slick was/is an ignorant bitch.
Submitted by Bubba2341 (user info) at 2009-01-07 13:42:45 EST (#)
Ranking: 1
Submitted by Wildman (user info) at 2009-01-07 00:01:04 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Comment(Redux)
Submitted by Wildman (user info) at 2007-06-30 20:06:10 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
Needs more splooge on Grace Slick's face.
-----------
Grace slick was/is an ignorant bitch.
Submitted by Bubba2341 (user info) at 2009-01-07 13:42:32 EST (#)
Ranking: 1
Submitted by Wildman (user info) at 2009-01-07 00:01:04 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Comment(Redux)
Submitted by Wildman (user info) at 2007-06-30 20:06:10 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
Needs more splooge on Grace Slick's face.
-----------
Grace slick was/is an ignorant bitch.
Submitted by Bubba2341 (user info) at 2009-01-07 13:42:32 EST (#)
Ranking: 1
Submitted by Wildman (user info) at 2009-01-07 00:01:04 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Comment(Redux)
Submitted by Wildman (user info) at 2007-06-30 20:06:10 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
Needs more splooge on Grace Slick's face.
-----------
Grace slick was/is an ignorant bitch.
Submitted by Bubba2341 (user info) at 2009-01-07 13:42:25 EST (#)
Ranking: 1
Submitted by Wildman (user info) at 2009-01-07 00:01:04 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Comment(Redux)
Submitted by Wildman (user info) at 2007-06-30 20:06:10 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
Needs more splooge on Grace Slick's face.
-----------
Grace slick was/is an ignorant bitch.
Submitted by sage104 (user info) at 2009-01-07 13:16:58 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Vanishing like a sigh and slowly
Disappear
Disappear
Vanish...vanish...into the air
Slowly disappear
Never really here
Submitted by ICO (user info) at 2009-01-07 12:45:42 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Where was the part where the rabbit bites his own head off?
Submitted by skrapmetal (user info) at 2009-01-07 07:11:51 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
This is to the original as Marky Mark and the Monkey Bunch was to Planet of the Apes.
Submitted by Wildman (user info) at 2009-01-07 00:01:04 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Comment(Redux)
Submitted by Wildman (user info) at 2007-06-30 20:06:10 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
Needs more splooge on Grace Slick's face.
Submitted by Bubba2341 (user info) at 2009-01-06 20:55:56 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Your original was better.
Submitted by experima (user info) at 2009-01-06 20:47:24 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment