Page 12 of Madness

Two…

Three…

“She’s going to think you are nuts, nuts, nuts,”Queenie laughs.

“Shhh!”

“Excuse me?” Red exclaims.

“Not you.”

“Then who?”

I open my eyes. The holes in the cup are still there, and Red is staring at me, the teapot held in her hand - ready to pour.

I touch the cup, feeling the smooth ceramic beneath my fingertips, solid and real. Yet, my eyes tell me something else entirely.

“Nobody important,” I say, holding my cup out for her to fill. She obliges, and when none of the brown liquid falls from the holes in the bottom, I know it’s another delusion.

I mix in milk and try to ignore Red’s eyes burning into the side of my head.

How do I explain that I’m mad?

That my mind conjured things that simply do not exist in this world.

“Hare!” Red greets happily, pulling me from my mind.

A wide, amber-eyed Hare runs toward Red, his legs barely able to keep up with him, and he throws himself into her arms.

“Well, not Alice, this is Hare.”

“We’ve met,” I say, leaving out the minuscule detail that I nearly made him cry because I almost tore down his sign.

She came out of her room at the perfect time, giving me the ideal chance to escape before I made the situation so much worse.

I’ve never had a sign before, not one with my name on it.

The signs on the walls around here turn topsy-turvy, and the only way I can understand where I’m going is through the pictures Hare has drawn on the paper.

“I made him a sign!” Hare shouts, jumping up and down, “Sign! Look! Sign!” He points around the room to the multiple pieces of paper stuck to the walls.

“Yup, buddy, they are so cool. Do you want to sit down and have some tea?” Red asks him, already pulling a cup over to her and filling it with the hot liquid.

I wrap my hands around my cup, letting the warmth of the tea ground me.

Alice used to love making me tea. She said Wonderland had tea parties every day at precisely one minute to noon and that they were so fun that she just had to do it with me.

Her stories of Wonderland had turned whimsical, as if it was just a silly adventure she had been on.

The steam rising from my cup twists and curls in the air, and before I know it, I’m staring back at Alice’s face, her head thrown back in laughter and the familiar twinkle in her eyes as she tells me the stories of her escape from Wonderland and the characters that stayed there.

“Cake,” Hare says, pulling me from my thoughts; he reaches for a cake covered in pink icing with a weird lump in the middle and sits as close as possible to Red. She smiles down at him, heaping some strawberries and raspberries onto his plate.

“If I don’t put it on there, he won’t eat it. Then he’ll be on a sugar high all day,” she explains, adding a cube of sugar to his cup of tea, then her own.

“Aye, and then he’ll be bouncing off the walls like a wee mad ane. Just like a rabbit, ain't that right, Hare?” A rough Scottish accent comes from behind me just as a man appears at Red's other side and sits down.

“Cup!” Hare shouts, holding his cup above his head, then brings it to his lips, guzzling the liquid.

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