1Alice Takes a Pill
by Nikki Little
The cash was piling up from Wonderland's deal with the Korean grocery stores in Los Angeles to sell the various types of "Old Bill's" brandy, and I decided to spend a little of it with a nostalgic trip to Swilly's for their fish sandwich which I sort of liked. Mainly because I didn't get much fish of any type in Wonderland. Snark doesn't count. Yuk. Still haven't figured out how Cheshire lives off those things.
Anyway, Swilly's looked the same as ever inside. Silly clown statue in the front. Order at the front counter. It was new that you took a number and waited for your order to be prepared. No more prepared food waiting for you under infrared heat lights when you walked in. Swilly's now prepared everything fresh. Wonders never cease. Swilly's had learned a new trick.
I sat at a table with a window open behind me. It was evening, and an orange sunlight washed through the entire restaurant. The sunlight felt pleasant and made me drowsy. Classic rock from the 1960s and 70s played on the restaurant's sound system. Free's "All Right Now" from 1970 started up. I was eleven when I first heard it. The Vietnam War still raged on the television screens. Richard Nixon was President.
I finished my iced tea and went into the bathroom to take my blood pressure medicine. Everybody in my family lineage got high blood pressure eventually, and I was overdue. Hatter informed me that I finally had to start treating it.
I went into the bathroom to take my pill because I was just a bit paranoid that some busybody would call 911 on the cell phone and report me as taking drugs in the dining room of Swilly's. Just a few days ago, it was in the news that somebody had shot up heroin in a booth at a Swilly's. The TV news station then showed grainy black and white security video of the event. You'd think by now that people would know that security cameras in the U.S. record everything when you're out in public.
I was heading for the wash basin when a kitchen employee in a typical white restaurant cook uniform dashed by me without stopping at the wash basin. I couldn't help myself. My arm darted out and I caught the back of her uniform and swung her around in front of me.
"Forgetting something, Missy?" I snarled. I was pissed. Really pissed. The cook yanked away from me and tried to head for the door again. I opened a portal right in front of the door. No way out. She freaked.
"You're that crazy bitch from Wonderland!"
She cooks in a restaurant and doesn't wash her hands after doing her business. And she's calling me "crazy." I just had to know.
"You didn't make a fish sandwich for the dining room recently did you?" There were only a few people in the dining room and none of them appeared to have a fish sandwich.
"Yup."
"Did you make it with dirty hands?"
"Yup. Whatya gonna do about it, Miss Crazy?" She smirked at me. "My father is the owner and manager," she cackled. "He never washes his hands, either!" She was guffawing in my face. I don't know what overcame me. I just couldn't help it. Totally spontaneous. It just happened. My foot sprang out all on its own and the toe of my shoe planted itself squarely in her ass and knocked her through the portal. My turn to cackle.
"Welcome to Hell, Missy!" I stepped through the portal into an underworld below the City of Dis in Hell. Hadn't been there in awhile.
The cook was standing in the midst of a vast sea of shades who were strapped to beds and getting liquid and solid waste from all the flush toilets of Dis spewed through overhead pipes down onto their faces. The stream of shit and piss from the toilets was almost continuous. It reminded me of waterboarding. A favorite CIA method of torture. The constant mist in the air from all the splashing waste was suffocating. Malacoda had showed me this place a few visits ago when I asked him if there were any areas that I had missed while shepherding a bunch of kidnapped U.S. senators through Hell.
"This is what happens to restaurant cooks who willfully ignore proper sanitation procedures. You serve shit to your customers and you spend eternity getting shit in your face." The cook fainted. I grabbed her by the arm and took us both through a portal back into the kitchen of the restaurant and dumped her onto the floor. Kenny Rogers' "Just Dropped In" blared from the restaurant sound system. Everybody jerked around to stare at us. And grab their noses.
Ummm... Yeah. We reeked. Dead skunk reeked. Customers in the dining room abandoned their meals and sprinted out the doors. My victim and I were both soaked in pee mist from Hell. I decided it was time to leave and dropped myself through a portal leaving my stinky victim to the scorn of her fellow employees who probably all thought that she had eaten something weird and then just peed all over herself. Maybe she had. With that uniform dripping wet with pee mist from Hell, who would be able to tell?
I stepped out of my portal into a car wash. The employees all ran for cover as I stripped my clothes off, grabbed everything out of my pockets, and walked through. I knew better than to go straight back to Wonderland stinking to the high heavens. After my walkthrough, I waved at the car wash employees while jay-bird naked and stepped through a portal back to Wonderland. I left the nasty clothes behind. The car wash employees probably tossed them into a barrel and lit them. What else could they do? Besides upload the grainy, black and white, low-quality security video to YouTube.
I stepped out of the portal into my bedroom in Wonderland, grabbed a towel, and headed toward the outdoor shower stalls for a thorough scrubbing. I washed the stuff I rescued from my pockets, too. I don't think I'm ever going to go back to Swilly's to eat. I seem to have lost my appetite for up-top restaurant food, ya know?
It wasn't until three hours later that I remembered to take the damn blood pressure pill.
The End
This story is based on the characters created by American McGee. EA (Electronic Arts) owns the copyrights.
