knees

4. the dream

Third day

For some reason, Danny felt like he was falling.

Falling.

Falling.

He was falling into the illustrious rabbit hole; his head aching and body heavy as the sky. It felt like he was falling for days now, unable to stop the gravity. Danny, as observant as can be, saw many earthly things falling with him, but on a slower speed. Cupboards, tables, chairs, clocks. Once, he saw a grand piano hurdling his way—Danny avoided it with much grace.

Eventually, he got to the bottom of the hole. He dropped with a loud thud that echoed across the room he was in. He got to his feet and looked up, trying to figure out where the tunnel led out to. From the very moment that he was shooting through the hole, he knew that it was Wonderland.

And he was right.

In the middle of the room that was surrounded with locked doors and one especially small one, was a glass table. “Is this some kind of a test?” Danny muttered. He walked towards it, still in his proper size and did the Alice drill without having to cry a sea or having to talk to a doorknob.

He got to the other side of the small door with a beaming grin and a high expectation of having to see Wonderland in the flesh. Danny didn’t have any suspicion with what was happening. It was quite gullible of him, actually.

When he turned the knob, a familiar space spread on his vision—but it wasn’t Wonderland. Though, it seemed that it’s close to it sometimes.

Danny blinked and rubbed his eyes for good measure. “The bookstore?” he asked, mainly to himself since no one could answer him. As he was casually strolling around, verifying if his eyes were merely just deceiving him, Danny came across something unknown yet vaguely known.

Just by the shelf where Classics were arranged neatly stood a girl with long blonde hair and striking blue eyes. She held a book in her hands tightly as she read it with ease. “If only my cat was this cooperative,” she said, closing the book. The transition was quick but it was enough for Danny to catch. The girl was reading Alice in Wonderland. (That wasn’t the only thing he noticed; he noticed that she spoke with a trace of an accent. English, maybe?)

“Well, what do you know,” Danny whispered. “Someone that looks almost like a teenage Alice, reading Alice in Wonderland, is in my own Wonderland. What are the odds,”

“The only odd thing here is you, sir.” The girl was staring at Danny with her eyebrows furrowed. She had the book under her arm and a venomous snare drawn across her face.

Danny raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“Stop questioning me like I’m a complete twat—idiot, I mean.” she said. Unlike the Alice, she didn’t have an apron slung over her but she wore a dress that was the same shade of blue. It was almost a replica but the skirt was less flouncy.

“Sorry, it was a question that people don’t usually answer offense-taken-ly but, yeah.” he retorted, holding his hands up in the air.

The girl squinted and carefully approached him, stopping at a 5-feet distance. “Have I seen you before?” she inquired with a straight face.

“Shouldn’t you be asking that to yourself?”

“You’ve got a point,” she deadpanned, holding her hand out in courtesy. “The name’s Alice.”

“Uh, Da—Dinah.” he told her, taking her hand respectfully.

Alice smiled. “That’s a very intrepid name you have,” she jested. “Perhaps, you’d like to meet my friend. He doesn’t have a very good name, though. It’s quite hard to spell it, actually.”