Alice struggled to keep herself awake. The sun was even warmer now than usual, but then what was usual for most was hardly so for Alice. Now almost twenty, Alice had spent the last few years in and out of "facilities," as her mother was given to calling them. Her fantasies, once the harmless imaginings of childhood, had grown steadily more fantastic, more dangerous.
Her mother supposed she should have seen it coming. Even in her youth, Alice's daydreams (delusions, as the doctors at the Facility now corrected her) could take dark turns, what with all the imaginary head-rolling and whatnot. Now, they all but consumed her. It reached a climax at last on Alice's 18th birthday, when she bolted the full width of the parlor, diving at a full-length mirror. The mirror shattered, cutting her forehead and arms to ribbons. Alice's mother discovered her sitting stunned, in a growing pool of blood. She was smiling broadly as drops fell from her matted hair onto her new dress. Dinah, her aging cat, watched the whole thing wild-eyed, fixated on Alice, who was now babbling. "See there, Dinah. They shan't forget your saucer of milk tonight. That wouldn't do at all. No, I don't imagine it was quite 4,000 miles, but here I am the same, fit and ready for tea." The incident left Alice miraculously free of scars, save for a nasty one running almost the length of her forearm, elbow to wrist on the underside.
The doctors had lately been investigating some new treatments with Alice. As she wasn’t dangerous to anyone but herself, they frequently allowed her to spend weekends home, in the hopes that exposure to family and familiar surroundings would spark her saner portions. New research from an American doctor known as Kellogg suggested that a healthy lifestyle, frequent colonics, and liberal constitutionals could work wonders on the afflicted, and so they undertook them all with Alice. Doctor Dodgson, the doctor in charge of her care, saw personally to administering the colonics, sometimes twice daily. And while nobody, not his assistants nor Alice nor her mother, could recognize any benefit whatsoever, he maintained them religiously, insisting they were part of the “entire regimen.”
Alice had already had one today, and was enjoying a relaxing morning in the sun before the doctor administered her afternoon one. When in the sun like this, Alice often slept and almost always dreamed. Naturally, it was difficult for her to shake any dream she had, they all seemed real, and only the most bland or nondescript ones could be dismissed as completely false. Nearly everything else she regarded at least with suspicion, and at most as yet another foreign incursion on her psyche, as she now knew it to be called.
Alice lay still in the grass, listening to the cicadas churning out their dull hum. The sun pierced her closed eyelids, projecting a yellowish-red blur and creating illusory patterns before her eyes. The morning’s breakfast had included a small dose of laudanum, but not so small that it wasn’t making itself known. Medication was more an exception than a rule in Alice’s care, but she’d had a particularly fitful night of sleep, and the doctor wanted her relaxed. So with her usual breakfast of toast, jam and eggs was a glass of orange juice instead of milk, with simple instructions from the doctor: “Drink me.”
Yes, Alice could feel it working now. She liked the laudanum when they gave it to her. Although it did not lead to anything approaching normal thoughts or dreams, it did have the desirable effect of making her not care so much, making the bizarre that much easier to take in stride.
Which is why the rumbling beneath her was particularly troublesome.
Not inasmuch as she found rumbling so strange, but that such palpable and somewhat violent sensations had not been, in her experience, in any way associated with a dose of laudanum. Alice opened an eye and looked around. It was a lovely day, devoid of clouds. The sun was brilliant. The trees and field were an almost unnatural green, they were so lush, and an array of wildflowers dotted the landscape. A flock of birds flew silently overhead, and the ground was shaking so hard she could barely see. An earthquake? In Warwickshire?
Alice got to her feet as best she could and tried to get her bearings. She was drugged, making balance difficult enough, but the jostling ground made it doubly difficult. Alice stumbled a few steps toward the hill that led back to the Facility, but could tell it would take some time to get there. Managing even such a moderate climb might be impossible, under the circumstances. So Alice sat on the ground, bracing herself on both hands, prepared to wait this out.
Which was when the rabbit ran past.
Adam Junkroski lives in South Florida, where he works in advertising and marketing, screams at people doing 20 in the left hand lane, and avoids the beach.
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