xalicethewonderx

[xalicethewonderx]

Alice hadn't expected their day to turn into such a philosophical one, pondering accidents and apples like this. In fact, this had taken them so off guard that they had forgotten where they were going and what they were doing in the first place. Clearly there was no need for urgency… they hoped.

"Are we really good people if we have to reassure ourselves that we are?" Alice asked quietly. It was rhetorical. Mostly. "What should we buy?"

Edmund stood near the display, his eyes scanning the modest assortment of goods with a thoughtful frown. As Alice spoke, he realized she had voiced the exact sentiment already turning over in his mind. He’d been thinking of buying something—not because he needed it, but because the idea of the shop owner losing money over something so minor gnawed at him. It wasn’t their fault, technically, but that didn’t stop the weight of second-hand guilt from settling in his chest. There was a quiet decency in trying to soften the blow, even if it meant spending a little more than intended.

"I was thinking about purchasing something else as well," Edmund admitted, his tone low but sincere. "I know it wasn't our fault, but I'd feel guilty seeing the owner going without now that he's lost some cash on other sales." He gave a faint smile, a touch sheepish but proud in his own way. "Shows we're good people, huh?" he added, the comment more of a reassurance than a boast.

[xalicethewonderx]

"In that case, thank goodness." Alice sighed a breath of relief, the weight of worry guilt thankfully lifting from their shoulders. "I think I would have a hard time explaining myself," they continued. "Especially if I wasn't paying attention."

Alice thought on Edmund's question for a moment (perhaps a little too hard for something that should have been a simple yes or no answer). "I wasn't, but perhaps I should now. I know this wasn't my fault but now they might have even less sales if all their apples are bruised. Wouldn't it be right of us to buy something?"

Edmund raised a single brow at Alice’s comment, the motion subtle but sharp, carved from a mix of disbelief and concern. She had spoken the words like they were truth—like guilt was an old companion she had grown far too comfortable with. His gaze lingered on her a moment longer, searching her expression as though trying to understand what life had taught her to carry blame so quickly and so easily. “This wasn’t your fault,” he said finally, his voice softer than his posture implied. “I think it was an accident.” He didn’t look away as he spoke, the confession spilling out in a measured tone that left no room for doubt or protest. “It’s easily fixable,” he added with a shrug.

Without waiting for her to respond, Edmund bent down and began gathering the fruit strewn across the ground, hands moving with quiet efficiency. A few were bruised beyond saving, and he sorted them out with a resigned flick of his wrist, dropping them into a nearby bin. Straightening up again, he brushed his hands together and gave Alice a side glance, not unkind but edged with dry curiosity. “Was you planning to buy anything?” he asked, the question simple, but the tone suggesting he was nudging her away from self-blame and back into the present.

[xalicethewonderx]

Alice's shoulders relaxed, glad that their scatterbrained-ness hadn't caused yet more trouble. It was difficult to focus, you see, but quite easy to take the blame for things.

"Those poor strawberries," Alice lamented. An apple could survive with a bruise or two, but a strawberry wasn't any good if it was squashed.

Alice blinked at the stranger, grimacing slightly. "Well, often things are my fault, even if I don't mean them to be," they said. "Sometimes I think that my brain is elsewhere, and it's very easy for things to go wrong when you haven't been paying the slightest bit of attention."

Edmund shook his head with a soft laugh, his expression a mix of amusement and mild disbelief. "It wasn't you who did it," he said with a touch of clarity, as though the thought had only just clicked in his mind. "I don’t actually know who did it, but food has gone absolutely everywhere," he chuckled again, unable to suppress the slight grin that tugged at his lips. It wasn’t funny, not really, to see food strewn across the floor in such chaos, but there was something about the absurdity of the situation that tickled him. It was a rare kind of mess, the kind that didn’t happen every day. "Why would you think it’s your fault?" he asked, genuinely curious, his eyes meeting theirs with a look that seemed to say he couldn't quite understand how the blame had landed on them.

[xalicethewonderx]

Alice looked between the apple, and Edmund, and the vendor's display multiple times before finally putting the pieces together. (Well, some of them at least.) "It must be a very smooth apple," they mused.

Alice's brow knit further together. Truthfully, that answer was no. They hadn't heard it, nor seen it. They turned back to look at the vendor's station. The mess slowly came into perfect clarity.

"I-- No, I-- I didn't..." they admitted rather sheepishly. Then they gasped. "It wasn't me, was it?"

Edmund crouched down, reaching for the apple that had rolled further than he had expected, its path taking it well beyond the other fallen fruits. With a small chuckle, he rubbed it against his chest, hoping to clean off the dirt that had settled on its skin. His sense of responsibility kicked in, knowing he’d be buying the apple no matter what. He couldn’t stomach the idea of letting someone else pay for it after it had been rolling around on the ground. "This. The apple," he said with a grin, still holding it in his hand as he stood up. "It rolled all the way to you from that vendor up there." His voice was light, the playful tone matching the situation perfectly as he made the best of a minor mishap.

Rubbing at his eye as if to clear a bit of sleepiness or lingering confusion, Edmund turned his gaze to the person standing in front of him. His expression shifted slightly, a hint of curiosity flashing across his face. "Did you not see all the commotion?" he asked, still chuckling softly. He was clearly bemused by the little scene that had unfolded.

[xalicethewonderx]

Alice knew that thinking such thoughts often lead to trouble and an unshakeable longing. The majority of the time, Alice was daydreaming about being elsewhere, and was scarcely present in their own life when it mattered. They looked at Pearl, recognising that same longing in her face. It did not help that the 'Other Alice' could remember being in a place so fantastical that Redwood Hollow seemed like the most boring place on earth.

"I can't tell you where it is, because I don't remember," Alice said cryptically. "Or, I remember that it exists but I don't know how to get there."

Pearl’s staring out the window, watching the world go by, lost in thought. The sky shifts with soft hues, and the distant hum of life continues, but her mind drifts elsewhere—to places she’s been, places she dreams of. Some far and unfamiliar, others comforting and known. "If you could escape for a moment and be anywhere in the world right now—where would you go, and why?"

@happieststarters

[xalicethewonderx]

Alice wasn't paying attention. Alice seldom paid attention these days (save for to the things that they really aught not to be paying attention to, like clouds or mysterious incidents in town). In fact, Alice had been paying so little attention that the vendors wears spilling all across the floor wasn't even a blip on their radar. That apple rolled in front of Alice's feet, saved from being kicked only by a stranger paying more attention than Alice was.

Alice paused just before they could trip over the stranger on the floor.

"What did?"

Edmund was on his mission of the day, briskly walking through the bustling streets to the local market, determined to fill his fridge and stock his shelves. As he turned a corner, he heard a commotion nearby and noticed a vendor's cart tipping over, sending produce sprawling across the pavement. Without a second thought, Edmund knelt down to help, his hands swiftly gathering the scattered items. "Hey. I can help you with that," he said warmly, offering a reassuring smile to the grateful vendor. His grocery run could wait—lending a helping hand was the true priority of the moment. He watched as a piece of fruit rolled towards someone else. "Sorry, that one got out of my hands," he apologised looking up at the person where the fruit had rolled near. || @happieststarters ||

[xalicethewonderx]

Alice wasn't paying all that much attention to anything or anyone in particular, overstimulated by the din of the Enchanted Rose and its many, many patrons that day. Alice had come along in an attempt to write but it had turned out to be a terrible idea.

Eilonwy spoke nearby, trying to get their attention but all Alice could manage to make out was a jumble of words and a pointed finger.

"I'm sorry... who made a pass at the Chaplin?"

it was a rare occasion that eilonwy had a day off, and she was spending it doing as little as humanly possible. this morning, she’d had a lazy morning consisting of a long lie in bed and then a leisurely breakfast. continuing on with her day, eilonwy found herself sitting at enchanted rose café enjoying a coffee and pastry. she’d popped by to say hello to babette and victor but given the fact that the café was so busy she didn’t want to interrupt them.

“excuse me, could you please pass me one of those napkins?”

@happieststarters

[xalicethewonderx]

Alice was zoned out to the max, listening in to a nearby conversation without realising they were even doing it. When Anna spoke right next to them, they almost jumped. Blinking, Alice looked at Anna and said "Do you think time is weird too?"

Anna was at the coffee shop, getting some hot chocolate and chocolate chips because why not. "I can't believe is January already. Time is going by so fast." She spoke with the person next to her.

@happieststarters

[xalicethewonderx]

[xalicethewonderx]

"An awful lot of things they had us do in school didn't make an awful lot of sense to me," Alice admitted. "And when you questioned it because you wanted to know the why, they just saw it as a challenge of authority when it really wasn't the case at all." Sometimes Alice lamented struggling so much with school. There were so many rules and norms that had to be followed, when barely half of those made any sense. To make it all worse, most of them were unspoken things that everyone else around just seemed to understand, like an inside joke Alice had missed the memo on. "I dare say, I hope that our teachers didn't actually think the books they were making us read were interesting or fun! How terribly boring their tastes must be."

Alice shrugged, not blaming Olivia in the slightest. "How many cows are we expecting to arrive home?" they asked. "That could be a lot of Poirot."

The pair continued to walk, Alice now thoroughly distracted from what had been troubling them earlier. "Yes, that is a very good point," they said. "Perhaps that's what happened in the case of our teachers making us read boring books." A small laugh escaped their lips. A smile was easing back onto their face, and their shoulders had dropped somewhat. "I do think they should put disclaimers somewhere in the book to avoid that happening!"

.

Olivia huffed. "Yes, I wonder why they give us the most boring stuff in high school? We are supposed to hone our interest in books, not be turned off completely by them." There had been a couple fun choices back in elementary, or at least Olivia remembered it so. High school, not so much. She would have much preferred to prepare essays on her own favorite books.

"Huh. You know I'm not a big TikTok person," she said, a bit bashful. She had creative friends who made truly fun stuff with it, but she really only used it for book recommendations (not that she trusted them too much) and to watch cake-decorating videos. "But maybe I can dress up thirties-style and just, like, talk about Poirot until the cows come home." Olivia wasn't sure many people would care about that. There might be a whole fan community on the app she hadn't found yet, though.

"Hmm... I think the grandpa narration was pretty important, at least in the movie. Like, what he said, and how he said it, kind of colored the boy's interpretation of it, right? Hm, then again, it is true that every reader makes up their own version of a book in their own minds." Their next comment made Olivia gasp. "Oh! That used to happen to me a lot. I read a book and I assume it's real, especially if it's written like someone's testimony. That's what happens when you read too much non-fiction I guess, everything feels like a testimony."

[xalicethewonderx]

Alice's brow furrowed. They looked at Chelsea curiously. For a moment, the thought occurred that no one had ever asked Alice that question before. So often Alice was told they were speaking nothing but nonsense, or asked to be quiet, that questions from other people rarely came about. Since they had disappeared and returned with another Alice in their head, Alice dared say that even less questions about their nonsense were asked than before. It was better to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary was going on.

"No one has ever asked me that before," Alice muttered. How were they to articulate in words what had never been questioned before? Chelsea seemed capable, but Alice's seemed… well, complicated. Too complicated, or strange, or real and not real at the same time.

"To begin," they began. "There's a garden… and it's the most beautiful garden I've ever seen…" It was then that Alice's eyes glossed over. They could see the garden through a keyhole, hear the wind brushing the petals, taste the aroma of violets and rose. It was not a daydream like everyone insisted. "Except I can't get there. I'm the wrong size."

Images lived behind Alice's eyes of the other place. Of the Other Alice's place. Alice liked to turn them over in their head, despite their better judgement telling them it was a bad idea. It wouldn't do well to live in someone else's reality, would it?

Alice struggled to come back from it.

But a thought shattered the vision of the rabbit.

Alice looked Chelsea dead in the eye for the first time.

"Did it happen to you?"

.

"Huh. What's the somewhere in your head like?" she asked gently, genuinely curious. "Mine is a huge hotel, nice but not, like, super posh and fancy-pants. And there's a few cats lying around for when you're in dire need of a purring machine, and it has a fully stocked piano bar at the lobby, filled with interesting people to have dialectics with over a glass or two." Sometimes the arguments became a tad aggressive, but that was the good thing about imagination: nobody had to get physically hurt.

Their last answer did wipe Chelsea's smile off her face. "I... I get that, kid. I mean it. Sometimes, it's like... Like I can't trust anyone, nor anything, not even my own perception. It feels like everyone is lying to me, or hiding things, and that this whole reality is just... Somehow a screen, a play put on by a director hiding behind a curtain. I suppose it's the traces of anxiety cutting through the haze of medication, but still... Knowing something doesn't change the way you feel." Chelsea liked to believe she had a good intuition, a good eye for telling lies from truth, but who knew for certain? Who knew anything for certain, really?

There she was. Flirting with spirals again, one foot steady, one foot on the tightrope.

"Sorry. Didn't mean to scare you there... But I do believe I can trust you, Little. Besides... You don't strike me as the lying type." And she was, almost, completely sure about that.

[xalicethewonderx]

AMANDLA STENBERG "The Acolyte" interviews (2024)

[xalicethewonderx]

Alice had been in two minds about attending the gran opening of Evangeline's, given the trouble they had with Halloween previously. Their sister did a fair bit of convincing them that this would be different, given they were in a restaurant, the event was small and if they stayed indoors they would be absolutely fine. The tickets were expensive and hard to get, don't you know?

They hummed and hawed over a costume for weeks, finally setting on a green ribbon around their neck and an unsettling use of eye makeup. Alice had been keeping mostly to themselves at the event, until Abby approached with a compliment. "You do?" Alice asked. "I, uh… I like yours too, but I'm afraid I don't understand it."

Abby was known for taking obscure things and normalizing them, and so anyone with an odd costume was automatically intriguing to her. When she noticed someone wearing such, Abby’s interest was piqued, and she made her way over to them. She herself had dressed as a rather famous horror movie character, though even then she chose an obscure outfit for the character. “I like your costume,” she complimented, taking a sip of her drink.

@xalicethewonderx

[xalicethewonderx]

"I read A Christmas Carol against my will in High School," Alice lamented. "I can't say I remember a single word of it. I felt it was terribly boring, and the moral was lost on me because I didn't have very much money in High School… Can't say I've read anything by Cummings though." Alice liked to read, but they were incredibly so at it and therefore didn't engage in the hobby as much as they would have liked. The trouble was that Alice's imagination ran wild, and they pictured too much of the book in their head before their mind wandered to a better story. It was always a disappointment when the story in your head did not match what the book had in print.

"They may take you more seriously if you craft a social media take over that they simply cannot ignore. If you go viral on TIKTOK you're basically set for the foreseeable future if the marketing company catch wind and bring you on as a guest." If only it was so simple, but Alice thought it could be.

Alice allowed muscle memory to take over as they walked, turning a left and then an immediate sharp right to take a shortcut round the back of the houses. "I can't decide if it was better or on par with the movie, though I did read it twice. There are some choices between the two that I found very strange. The grandpa isn't telling the story for one, and the first time I read it I really did think that the author had uncovered a real historical artifact."

.

"No problem," she smiled back. "Anytime."

Olivia took a moment to remember. "Dickinson and E. E. Cummings. Have you ever read anything by them?" she asked. Alice was much more well-read than she was, and she trusted them and their taste to recommend stuff to put at the top of her to-read list.

And then, to their question, Olivia just huffed. "You know, I've been sending letters to the company that holds the rights to the books, but still no answer."

Olivia let out a small gasp. "Oh, right! I haven't seen that movie in ages," she chuckled. "Was the book good? More importantly, was it somehow better than the movie? I remember really liking the movie, back in the day." She didn't remember much besides there being a funny old couple, a funny man with a riddle about poison, and some... Rats?

[xalicethewonderx]

"Well, one never knows these days," Alice remarked, continuing to poke at the macaron until it split in half, revealing the inner layer of delicate pink cream. They thought about it for a moment, realised they were being stubborn for no reason, and then hastily stuck the fork into the macaroon to stuff the whole thing in their mouth in one swoop.

"I've tasted worse," Alice admitted mid-chew. "I'd say it's like eating a macaroon while someone walks by wearing particularly potent perfume."

" i mean . . yeah, maybe a little. " rose mused as she watched them poke at the treat with a fork. she raised an eyebrow. " it won't bite you, alice. go on, try it! i find rose to be a sweet flavor, but subtle. " it was certainty an odd flavor though, and nowhere near on the same level as your classic strawberry or chocolate. " maybe you'll like it! "

[xalicethewonderx]

Mary Blair concept art for Alice in Wonderland - 1951.

[xalicethewonderx]

Alice was as spaced out as ever, but was making an active effort now to appear like everything was absolutely, one-hundred percent, completely and utterly normal. They took a moment, amidst the buzz of the Enchanted Rose Cafe, to realise that Rose was speaking to them, let alone offering one of the many macaroons sitting on the plate in front of them.

"Rose?" Alice repeated, picking up a nearby desert fork simply to poke at the little pink treat. "Surely that would taste like eating perfume."

" oh, you must simply try this! " rose said with a bright smile as she offered them one of the macarons that was on her plate. a few too many were there, truly — but she was a massive fan of sweets. every other day, she could be found at a table in the enchanted rose cafe. the beauty was partial to it's atmosphere, and even more so to it's drinks and baked goods. " it's rose flavored, and i know that sounds terrible, but trust me! "

@happieststarters