The thing about Alice was that she was singularly talented in hindsight. Life, for Alice, was a trial. She would wax poetic about that thing that happened last year, and how much better things had been that one time that wasn’t now, despite the fact that she had been miserable about them then too. It seemed that for Alice the absolute zenith of her life had occurred at birth, and everything that followed had been a bitter disappointment. I don’t mean to imply that Alice hadn’t been dealt a fairly rough hand, she had, the woman looked like an angry bassett hound and had limbs so doughy, paper white, and deeply lined with varicose veins that they likened a road map. In short, she wasn’t attractive, far from it, and she deeply resented the universe and the powers that be for it. They had done this to her, and she would exact retribution by being powerfully unpleasant.