would appear on his screen, she began her reply – To which horns do you – but as she did another part of her had already begun to answer the question. Alice typed her name into the search bar, she clicked the link, she watched the video.
Acquaintances who used the app had demonstrated it for her: it was always goofy, the mutual distortion of features a proof of bonding. Get close together! Add the nose of a pig! Swap your friend’s teeth and eyes for your own! Affix a clown’s bow tie, stamp the text of an exclusive joke, show the world your boundless, flexible, fun-loving self. Send it direct or make it public, make it evidence of your multi-coloured, multi-peopled, widely envied life. She had never considered it could be used this way, the mockery as vicious as the silliness was vital.
I AM ALICE NIEMAND!!!! says a pulsing banner of text, red then black then red. Over and over, her mouth unleashing the forked tongue of a snake. Her hand making a thwong every time she holds out the hat. The recursive sprouting of sallow horns from her head. The audio was incomplete but unaltered, I am Alice Niemand and I saved this fucking hat, I am Alice Niemand and I saved this fucking hat. 8,567,122 views. HIPSTER LOSES SHIT ON HASID.
Even she could see that the filters were so effective for how well they matched her as she truly was in that moment, the voice in a register that belonged to the deranged and schizophrenic, the glare unconcerned with the society on the periphery.
*
The email came a week later. She had not worked, and had no plans to work; she had not left, and had no desire to leave. Alice Niemand lay circumscribed by single socks, moisturisers, ossified tissues, spent jars of peanut butter, books begun and abandoned, blouses retrieved from the closet but never slipped on. When she tugged down the screen of her phone for the thousandth, passive time, as she lay in the foul, clotted smell of her bedsheets, the vibration of Ethan’s email made her sit up.
From: [email protected]
Hey Alice!
Hope it’s ok to write you over here on your personal email. I know that your queue has not been getting any tasks lately and I was wondering whether you had any interest in a special project! It’s for a friend of mine and I know he needs a really focused creative person who can write circles around the rest of us so I thought of you OF COURSE!
Basically the deal is he’s starting a new pharma-tech-pub company – there’s a lot of VC excitement over here in CA, and it seems like it’s really gonna take off. But he needs writers to really make it sing. The idea is you would write reports and reviews about new prescriptions, pulling from studies and testimonials the pharma company has provided you, to be positioned all over the place. Rate is def competitive. Let me know if this sounds good and I’ll put you in touch!
Thanks dude!
Ethan
Alice swung her legs over the edge of the bed and curled her toes in the imported rug that lay clean on the floor. She was composing a reply in her head, striking the right tone – confident, grateful, capable – when her phone hummed with a bright note. In a manic fit the night prior, she had told herself that enough was enough, that she would no longer allow herself to fester, and ordered the things that would make her life recognisable to her. Now they had arrived in her foyer, the fresh produce and the lauded memoir and the sulfate-free shampoo, and they would keep her fed and clean for days. In the elevator down, she admired the light as it moved to illuminate each button, the cheerful two-part sound that meant arrival on the lowest floor. She had heard a great deal about the evils of modern technology, how its solutions were too focused on the individual, but Alice, for one, felt thankful for a world that let her stay exactly where she needed to be.
About the author
Born in 1988 and raised by two journalists, the American writer Kathleen Alcott is the author of the novels The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets and Infinite Home, the first of which was published in the United States when she was 23. Infinite Home, released in 2015, was nominated for The Kirkus Prize and shortlisted for The Chautuaqua Prize. Her journalism has appeared in outlets including The Guardian, The New York Times and The New Yorker, and her short fiction has been listed as notable by The Best American Short Stories. A native of Northern California, she divides her time between there and New York City, where she serves as an adjunct professor at Columbia University.
Half of What Atlee Rouse Knows about Horses
His daughter’s first horse came from a travelling carnival where children rode him in miserable clockwise circles. He was swaybacked with a patchy coat and split hooves, but Tammy fell for him on the spot and Atlee made a cash deal with the carnie. A lifetime ago, just outside Robstown, Texas. Atlee managed the stables west of town; Laurel, his wife, taught lessons there. He hadn’t brought the trailer – buying a pony hadn’t been on his plate that day – so he drove home slowly, holding the reins through the window, the horse trotting beside the truck. Tammy sat on his back singing made up songs about cowgirls. She named him Buttons. No telling how long he’d been ridden in circles at the carnival. For the rest of his life, Buttons never once turned left.
A year later, days after Hurricane Celia hit and everyone was digging through soggy debris for ruined photo albums and missing jewellery, an old woman from Corpus called Atlee about a chestnut mare. It wasn’t hers. She’d found the horse standing in her fenced backyard, soaked to the bone and spooked. “I think the storm dropped her here,” she said. He drove out and threw a rope not around the mare’s neck but her hoof, then coaxed her into the trailer with quiet talk and sugar beet. He ran an ad in the paper, hung signs in the feed stores, called every rancher he knew. He named her Celia and she turned out to be as fine a horse as he’d ever seen, smart and sure-footed. No one ever claimed the old girl. Not something he’d been able to parse.
The most beautiful thing he’d ever seen were the wild horses in Arizona. He’d gone to deliver Celia to a couple in Phoenix; they needed a companion horse for an old blue roan that was cribbing and stall-walking. Atlee was going to miss her and that must have been evident because after supper, a ranch hand said he knew something that would cheer him up and they drove out to the Salt River. Nobody knew how long the herds would survive. The state considered them stray livestock and staged round-ups without notice or due process. But Atlee saw a hundred horses that first evening. He glassed the mesa with the ranch hand’s binoculars and found the animals in the orange dust. They pawed the ground and threw their heads. They clacked their teeth and nipped each other, bucked and gave playful chase. Wind lifted their manes and tails. They bit at each other’s knees and reared up and sniffed the air. When one of the stallions caught a scent, maybe of Atlee himself or the truck or the ranch hand’s cigar, they broke into a run like nothing he’d ever witnessed. The herd spread and gathered, spread and gathered, one tremulous and far-ranging body, until they came together in a gorgeous line, a meridian dividing before and after.
*
Atlee had read of US Cavalry riders being thrown when their horses saw herds of buffalo. Those horses had originally been used for hunting – they’d been taken from the plains Indians – and the whole of their lives had been spent bolting and surrounding animals so the hunters could spear them down. They couldn’t unlearn it, so when they saw buffalo, the horses exploded into runs that dumped uninitiated riders. Atlee liked the image of those men on their asses in the dirt, but he hated to think of the horses waiting in vain for the buffalo to fall.
“Or was it right that he wouldn’t turn?” Tammy said, fanning herself with an outdated magazine. They sat on a hot porch, rocking in chairs, hoping for a breeze. His daughter drove out to Seaside Acres every couple of weeks. Atlee was wearing his good denim shirt, a leather bolo tie, boots he’d shined this morning or last night