40 Alice
Thom doesn’t remember what happens for a certain amount of time after he hears that name again. It seems to c***k against his head and make him lose consciousness, although he somehow manages to still walk and breathe. He next finds himself back at the bedsit, standing in the doorway. The clock above the kitchen sink says 1:27pm.
He doesn’t remember how he’d slumped against the wall at the hospital, or how the receptionist shook him, or how he’d sworn and muttered incoherently about things even he couldn’t have made sense of, how he’d pushed the woman off him and sped out of the door into the street, into the city, into more unknown things and more unknown people. Even the people he thought he knew have become false.
Standing in the doorway of the bedsit, the room seems to pul
