I is for impossible.
Having blown out her one hundred candles, with a slight relieve that her dentures didn’t come flying out covering the butter icing, Alice was quite exhausted and glad to be back in the solitary of her room, where she lit up a stogie and sat back in her chair.
As much as everyone had made a great fuss over her centenary birthday, with just as many making ‘ohh’ and ‘ahhh’ noises over her best wishes from the queen, Alice was not so fussed. In all her years nothing had compared to the magic of that one summer when she was just a girl, sitting in the garden, listening to her sister reading.
After her great adventure, falling down the rabbit hole and all the people she had met, she had honestly thought, hand on heart that her adventures would have been greeted with the same passion as she had felt, but alas this was not the case.
When Alice tried to explain that what she was telling her peers was real, this only made everyone around her more concerned for the young girls mental health. When she refused to admit it was all part of her imagination, her peers got angry and said she needed to be shut away for her own good. And so for the next ninety-three years Alice lived her life behind the great wall of Jupiter Hills Institution for the Mentally Insane. Not that that was what the place is called these days; successive management teams had come and gone, each adding their own view on how the inpatients should be cared for but more importantly how the institution was viewed by the outside world. These days the place on top of the hill is simply called, “Jupiter: Where We Care to Care.”
Alice would have liked to protest over such sentiments, but she learnt a long time ago that such acts of defiance only led to electrodes, isolation and beatings.
When she first arrived she longed to find a cake to eat or a drink to drink, to transform and escape this madness.
Her obsession with food and drink led to a frightening disorder which led to being force fed, a particular horrible experience which went on for many years. Now of course everything is liquidised and fed directly in to Alice’s stomach and Alice no longer has the fight to fight back.
And so, back in her windowless room, where suppression of natural stimulants are all part of Alice’s “care to care” package which for decades had been, as far as the powers that be were concerned, a great success. Although it took a lot of punishment, otherwise know as conversion therapy, eventually Alice’s spirit of th imagination was broken and eventually they have cured Alice of talking about her delusional dreams.
Although Alice stopped speaking wonders from that summer day, she just had to close her eyes, as she did everyday at three and let her imagination bring everyone back into sharp focus.
And so Alice settled down in her chair, the only other furniture in the room was a bed, and waited for the ticking noise to fill her head, only this time the ticking sounded different, louder, outside of her head, filling her room.
Afraid to believe it was true, Alice kept her eyes firmly shut until the ticking became so loud that it was quite impossible for it to be just inside her head.
First Alice opened her left eye, then her right and then shut them tightly shut again as she processed the sight of the white rabbit standing in the middle of her gloomy room. Again Alice was too afraid to open her eyes as she realised the wish that for so long she had held tight had at last come true.
Alice jumped as a slight touch was felt on her knee. This time her eyes sprang open wide and their stood the rabbit, standing by the rabbit hole with his , pocket watch in hand. Although Alice had wizened beyond all recognition of her youth, the rabbit recognised he right away, held out his palm and said, ‘It’s Time. Let’s get out of here, let’s go on an adventure’.