!!
Monsters, monsters everywhere and two of them are in sight.
brilliant blending of the simplistic, childlike quality of so many of her observations and the occasional glimpses of her sanity still lurking, tucked away inside!
OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!! I had forgotten about the partial memory recounted earlier where she told herself not to think about them cutting off-----
I look down at my feet. I like my feet. . . . The scientists took my feet away the last time I went outside without permission. I remember. The scalpel was silver, sharp and cold at first. It didn't stay cold for very long. Look, such bright red blood splattering down on the pale metal floor. Silver knife turned crimson. When they switched toys, bones cracked and snapped. I struggled against the chains and screamed until no sounds came out of my mouth. But the saw kept buzzing and they kept talking. I bled and I remember.
How horrific. How perfectly representatives of
<Monsters> created by other monsters . . .
::still shuddering::
Oh, I love the exchange and the “reasoning” if you can call Alice’s thought processes that:
"Hurry it up." He rumble-grumbles at me again and I force myself to look away from the water. I bare my teeth and growl low in my throat. Just because he's stealing me away doesn't mean I can't see if the wall's real, right? Right! He arches his brow but doesn't rumble-grumble again.
The oddest catch in my throat upon reading
"Stain stay, am going now."
It’s as if in lieu of her own marks, that stain (and wall) being an actuality rather than an illusion are part of her Identity and so before she departs she must pay it some gratitude for Being There. Crafty ‘Bie.
I am utterly fascinated with Ratatosk’s comments:
You do a great job of using the rhythm of the words to back the message; getting your denotations and the sounds of your words to serve the same purpose. Reminds me a little of old English or Icelandic poetry. Ever read the Poetic Edda? (“Ax-time, sword-time, shields are sundered/Wind-time, wolf-time, ere the world falls/Nmor ever shall men each other spare.”)
Wow. Old English or Icelandic poetry?? Sounds like I need to be doing some digging and expanding my own horizons!!
As to Jamelith’s comment:
This is really a great portrayal of how people bend to survive.
Precisely!!
Laughing vociferously over Jypzi Knight’s
Holy smokes! I'm going to run out of descriptives for this!
because I feel rather like I was in the same boat before I finished chapter one! And I also liked the observation:
She rambles, nonsensical, but for some reason she makes sense!
Regarding the wondering that Jypzi did about why would she think the dripping water was unreal . . . that struck me at first, too, and then I remember “way back” in the beginning when she was musing over how they took away her old cell
quote from back in chapter 1
Even my cage isn't the same as it was before. . . . I want my old room with the crack in the upper right hand corner of the ceiling and my old cage, too!
and then once Riddick showed up she wondered if everything was new test and all the rules had been changed . . . Alice with her new mentality may not have been able to verbalize it, but I thought maybe she wanted to know: had the new cell setting, right down to the rock walls (did I read that or just imagine it?) and the dripping water leaving a stain, really been a façade, the equivalent of a holographic projection, a part of some new test, a part of the new rules that no one explained to her? She was questioning the validity of her own perceptions and needed to test the reality of that wall and the water in order to sort out what she should accept and not accept now that she was---gasp!---out of her cell and about to take off with the lightning-eyed thunder-voiced caramel-colored man---and I could even see it if Ayabie had left the “Before I walk over to my new keeper,” because he had become her ipso facto new keeper because he stole her from the others!
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