Excerpt: Midori

Alice Pyre’s rooms had often been likened to a hospital ward. This had not so much to do with the copious quantity of prescription bottles that could be found on nearly every flat surface of her tiny bathroom (though this did add to the authenticity of said claim); nor did it have to do with any general appearance of her half of the flat. The walls were not white. There were no medical appliances of any sort. No one was allowed to use her bathroom, and as such no one had any idea how many prescriptions were under her name. In fact, save for the near-impossible orderliness of the rooms, there was no visual cue to cause this comparison. No, Alice had been told 3728 times since she had moved into the flat of her childhood friend Thaddeus that her home reminded people of a hospital ward because of one particular smell. It was one of the few smells that Alice liked. It was the ever-present cloud of bleach fumes and orange oil.
Thaddeus did not care for the smell of bleach. This was the main excuse; employed on a bi-monthly basis (Alice always asked on the first and the 15th of each month) to avoid spending time in Alice’s rooms. The real reason for his reluctance to enter the domain of his favorite friend was his love for his hair. Thaddeus Ackart had 57 waist long dreadlocks. Alice hated these ‘abominations to countless gods’ and had vowed with all seriousness to rid him of the beloved mop by the following January. Or at least reduce it to a less offensive number.
In truth, Alice’s current frustration with Thaddeus’s hair was not that it was a series of mated pieces of hair (though this did bother her greatly). It was that he had 57. At one time, before Alice had accepted to split the five year recurring rental lease on the place, Thaddeus had had 58 dreadlocks. Upon seeing her childhood friend for the first time since they had graduated high school, the third thing Alice did was to sneak up on him and remove one of the monstrosities. This left Thaddeus with a ridiculous, floppy, and unfathomably cute set of lopsided bangs and a perfectly reasonable fear of the kitchen, Alice’s bedroom, her bathroom, and the hallway connecting the three to the front door. Since Alice had declared 50 to be a ‘good’ number, he feared for having seven more uneven floppy bits, which would inevitably lead to Alive removing more of his hair. Hence, since Alice never went into any other room of the flat; the living room adjoining the kitchen was perfectly safe, despite the fact that she was often less than ten feet away from Thaddeus with only the protection of a counter between them.
This was the position the pair found themselves in when the doorbell rang at the 3rd of May, at precisely 3:51:27 pm, more commonly known in mystic circles as : the afternoon of the day ‘The End’ started. Or Tadpole. No one is quite certain how the two names are related.