Urban Fairytales: Alice Triumphant

Urban Fairytales

Alice Triumphant

"Portrait of an old bag," Alice thought, as she caught her reflection in a shop window. "A wrinkled old bag in goddamn wheelchair." The chair hit a pothole in the sidewalk and jolted to a stop. Alice pressed the accelerator key, but the wheels only spun in place. She sighed and looked around her. A woman in what seemed to be a gypsy costume was sitting behind a table outside the nearest store and smiling at her. She was old, but not as old as Alice, at least by the looks of her. The table was covered with fancy boxes of tea. "What are you grinning at?" Alice said. "Would you like to try some tea?" the "gypsy" asked. "Tea? That's the last thing I need!" said Alice. The woman rose from behind the table, still smiling, and pushed Alice's wheelchair out of the pothole. "Well, thanks," Alice murmured. "Here, try this," the woman said, dropping a tea bag into Alice's lap. "It's muscolo tea. Good for the nerves and the limbs."

That night, Alice brewed the tea, and found it delicious. It made her arms and legs tingle, in a pleasant way, all the way to down to her fingertips and toes. The sensation wasn't enough to make her forget about her looming rent day, though. The rent was already two months overdue. Soon she'd have to move back in with her idiot son and his bitchy wife, she thought. It made her want to cry.

The next day, Alice rolled out of her building, only to meet her landlord, Derek, halfway down the block. "Today, Alice, today!" he said. "I don't have it, OK? I don't have it!" she said. His face began to turn red, and he began to shake his finger at her. She hated that. Almost before she knew what she was doing, she reached up and grabbed Derek by the scruff of his shirt and his belt buckle. She raised him, all 200 pounds of him, high over her head with hardly any effort at all. "A miracle," she thought. Derek squirmed and cursed at her, but she decided to leave him up there for a while. After a minute, he quieted down and began to whimper. His baseball cap fell off and onto the sidewalk. A crowd was gathering, and some of them began to drop money into the hat. Alice felt warm and powerful all over. She wasn't going to lose her apartment now, she thought--oh no. And that triumph would be only the beginning.
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