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H. Victory has a degree in Creative Writing and English and works as a school librarian. She divides her time between her ever growing collection of books, her dog, and her much abused PS4. Occasionally she writes.
She is best described as strange.
Tied around the bottle is a note. Drink me, it says. It is just like Alice except the pale orange liquid will not shrink her. It will not make her bigger. It will not kill her. It will not make her sleep. It will not make her hallucinate.
She can get potions and poisons that will do just that. All she would need to do is call Pole and ask him to put his sticky fingers to good use down at the lab.
She pulls the stopper from the bottle. It is intricate for something produced by a pharmaceutical company. It is only made from aluminum but they have paid somebody to engrave it, by hand if Pole is to be believed, with swirls. She highly doubts that, believing it to be the handiwork of a bot, and if you were to ask her, she would argue that bots aren't people. Were she to undertake a closer examination she will have realized that the curves and spirals are made up of tiny letters. An endless loop which reads forget me not.
As she raises the bottle to her mouth she wonders if she will be able to remember the story of Alice, the girl who vanished into Wonderland down the rabbit hole but she supposes she will not. She has new identification sitting next to her on the hard motel bed and a letter telling her who she will be. She will not remember herself. She will not remember Pole. She will not remember the face of the woman who raised her, her opinion on bots, or the name of her first girlfriend. She will not remember this moment or any of the moments leading up to it once she drinks the pale orange liquid.
As she sips her last thought is that her new beginning tastes like squid. It seems an odd flavor for orange. She was expecting something fruity.
The End
This story was first published on Tuesday, July 12th, 2016
Author Comments
This story was born out of two conversations, one about not believing in the whole New Year's thing because it's simply a false start and nothing changes, and one about robots taking over human jobs. The result? A girl who finds a way of rebooting her life who doesn't think robots can replace people. I'm not one hundred percent sure I agree with her on that score.
Oh, and it references Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; It's a book I can't seem to escape from these days.
- H. Victory
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