Alice Returns (Short Story)

Part One: The Hidden Hole

It's been a long time since Wonderland, I often forget that it was real, it was all real...it had to be real, right? I sometimes think back to those days of when I was younger and remember how much of dream it all seemed; but if you were there and smelt the wild flowers, the musky air that could drift your further into a deep sleep, saw the immense array of colour that would put shame to any rainbow you saw there...you would know it wasn't a dream.

I found myself back by where the rabbit hole use to be, where it seemed like only yesterday when I was child my curiosity crept me closer to investigate... and I fell. It's all overgrown now with grass and ivy that you can hardly make out the outline of the abnormally large rabbit hole, one would think it were a mass grave for them. Time and nature had not been so kind to the entrance of another world, almost as if it were never there, blended in with the rest of the overgrown meadow around it. The vines so intertwined, leaves so elegantly perfected by nature it would seem like a shame rip it down.

I stared for what seemed like hours at the place where my life felt like it began, where my happiness truly started and my dreams became a reality that I had not noticed the sky had darkened and evening was falling upon the pine tree skyline.

I had a strange and yet familiar sensation come over me and the more and more I recognized it, the happier I felt from the gloominess of my surroundings had previous started to make me feel. I had some kind of an awareness that he had returned, I knew it and yet I didn't want to turn around to face the reality that he remembered me, still wanted me...loved me even, after all these years.

"Alice." He said with a hint of sadness in his voice.

I dared not turn to look at him, my expression changed from curiosity to fear, back to curiously again. 'How could I have just left him like that?' I thought solemnly. I was still in shock that he did remember me, even after I did what I did to save myself from becoming entranced by the magical world that I lived in for so long. Had I not left I may not have ever escaped, not that I had wanted to at first; but after a while Wonderland had a toll on my perception of reality and as much as I wanted it to be real, part of me was not so easily convinced.

I took a deep breath, repeated in my head 'this is only a dream, this is only a dream Alice' swung on the heel of my black polished shoes, tightened my matching black ribbon that was loosely holding my long wavy golden locks from my face back into a bow and slowly looked up from the ground...

"Alice." He said again, this time with a little more content in his voice, taking my left hand in his right, squeezing it gently. 'He is real?' I questioned myself, still not entirely convinced that this was possible.

I stopped my eyes at the nape of his neck, tracing his perfectly sculpted lines of his well-defined collarbone. Before I could shake the thought away from my mind my subconscious had already thought it, 'he has aged well, handsomely well and yet he still remains the exact way I remember him.'

Either he was somewhat immortal and it was my imagination that he still hadn't seemed to age one year in the ten years it has been away from Wonderland, or as I had grown up my mind is seeing and experiencing new sensations I had not previously felt before and he would be ten years older than he looks; if so he hides it well.

"It's okay, Alice. I'm real." He said encouragingly as if he had sensed my uneasiness about his sudden reappearance.

He held my hand a moment longer before letting it go and it fell back to my side. I didn't want to look up, so far from what I could see this indeed was an actual human male before me, of that I was very certain, however could it really be him... 'impossible.'

"Impossible." I whispered under my breath as I thought of the word, still looking at his neck.

"Only if you believe it is." He replied having heard me he said in a gentle voice, whilst lifting my chin with the back of his fingers so my gaze would look at his beautiful mix of hazel and green eyes...

He really was real, just as I had remembered...