She stood outside the hospital without a clear understanding of what to do.
She knew one thing for sure, she didn’t want to go back to the needle ever again. While in the coma she realised that life is not worth living with the stone under her neck.
“ I am done with this. It never brought any lasting joy to me anyway” — she said it to herself.
“But what shall I do, where do I start?”
“Oh look who is back,” he said with a smile on his face.
“I need to stay somewhere and you are the only one I know who is clean” — Alice explained.
“Are you clean? I don’t believe it! Once junkie, always a junkie!” — he said it laughing.
“ I will have to find a new addiction, smack doesn’t excite me anymore.”
“Will see. Ok, come in. You can stay here but you will have to work.”
“ Work? what kind of work do you have in mind?”
“ Don’t worry, you are my family, I am not going to sell you or make you sell the gear. You look after the house, make some phone calls and that’s it, deal?”
Alice understood that Doug is pulling her into his dirty business but she didn’t have a choice.
“Yeah, whatever,” — she said while stepping into the house.
“ Take the room upstairs, that way you won’t be seen by visitors. You can go and settle down and rest, the work starts tomorrow. I will order some food but from tomorrow you are cooking. Hopefully, we won’t die from food poisoning” — he laughed.
Alice hated to be here, she hated to be bossed around but she had no other options. She knew that for now, she had to stick around and do everything that Doug wants her to do.
Doug is her cousin. Not a real one, he was her brother’s best friend. Alice’s brother is dead, shot in the head from behind. Cowards couldn’t face him, jumped on him from the back and let three bullets open the back of his skull.
In the evening Doug ordered some Chinese food. They ate then smoked a few joints and watched some crap on Netflix.
“ You will have to take my car to the garage tomorrow, do you still remember how to drive”?
“ Yeah, I do,” — she replied half asleep. “Where is the garage?”
“I will tell you tomorrow, go to sleep”.
Alice’s dream was vivid and restless, she saw the same girl in a doctors coat smiling at her, kissing her cheek. Alice woke up in a cold sweat with the same sadness in her heart.
“ How the hell I can be sad for a girl I never met?”
A short prequel to this short story down here:
Alice lives on the digital pages of my short stories. Due to the world’s journey south she waited patiently until I remembered about her, once again.
