In Between Fairytales: Down the Rabbit Hole.

“Oof!” I didn’t land quite as gracefully as the girl seemed to. My backpack broke my fall. I reached into it for my cell phone. Unfortunately, my mother’s world doesn’t have any bars.

“Well, let’s go,” I said to myself.

I stood up and bent over to roll the hems of my pant legs up. It was about to get hot. I headed out.

Time didn’t move in my mother’s world, so I can’t say that I grew up there. But I spent a lot of my own childhood there. I knew all of the fairytales she used very well. I knew how to get from one of them to the other to the rest. I knew exactly how to get to the Queen of Heart’s rose garden.

The land between each of the fairytales was pretty barren. Lots of sand and lot of dunes. But if I looked carefully enough, I could see the shapes of certain fairytale worlds. I could see the shadows of Rapunzel’s tower and Maleficent’s castle in the distance. I could see the green of the Queen of Heart’s world coming up.

I traveled toward the green. Soon the sand became soft grass and the dunes became marshmallow shaped trees.

I reached the hedge maze that led to the rose garden. In my mother’s world, none of the heroines from the fairytales actually existed. So Alice herself never walked through those hedges. I knew from memory how to get through them and found the card guards still painting the white roses red. Off with their heads it would be for them.

I could hear the court going on in the courtyard, “Constance Innocence, you are hereby guilty for trespassing in the rose garden of the Queen of Hearts’! Queen of Hearts, what shall be her punishment?”

I pulled off my red ring and slipped it into the smallest zipper pocket of my backpack. I ran toward the courtyard.

The Queen of Hearts was standing plump and proud in the castle’s terrace. “Off with her head!” she yelled.

“No! Off with your head!”

I made it through the army of card guards. I let out a couple of huffs of air to knock over the two holding on to Constance. I grab her arm and run her off.