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They come to her in the night; Underland's secrets, stinging the roof of her mouth like a bee's spiny, conditional kiss.
She eats mushrooms and chicken, imagines the rabbit nibbling delicately at the sprig of parsley laid precise atop for garnish. Depending on her mood and whim, he declines or accepts it - either sniffing haughtily or asking, if you please, for more and may he have a napkin to tuck into his waistcoat.
She'll ask him, when she gets back, if he does like parsley, and then she'll have an answer and no need for imagining.
Alice has a lot of things to keep her from being homesick. But she still feels it, no matter how many glasses of wine she sips and bites of chicken she washes down. There, pressing against the arch of her tongue; the place where Underland whispered to her, as she fell away home, and gave her a small piece of its heart - to carry burning within her until her wayward feet found their way home.
My Alice, Underland promises without words. She tastes the blue smoke of a pipe, the flat hot heaviness of blood, the cool dew-laden grass and the sharp cry of the birds, arching far above, bisecting the clouds with the ruler-sharp angle of their wings. She tastes the Jabberwocky's breath and the Vorpal sword's steel, and sometimes in her dreams, waking with her mouth throbbing and her tongue cleaved dry to its roof, she thinks she hears Chessur's purring laugh, a wisp of sound at the very corner of her bedroom.
Mother, she writes, I am well...
Mirana, she does not write, Hatter, I have not forgotten you. I have crossed a sea and I have made my mark and I have learned new tongues and not lost the old, as one might with hats or heads. I still dream of a battleground and wake contented. I miss catching rabbits out of the corner of my eye.
When I come back again, you must teach me to dance.
Mother, she writes instead, and knows her mother will smile when she folds the paper open, sees Alice's fingerprints here and there, marring her neat script, her thoughtful words. Mother, I miss you. She is grown now, and the missing does not hurt so terribly much, but her mother has loved her well, and always done her best by Alice, and after having lost her father, with a child across the seas, she knows it will comfort her. I will see you again. She tells her technical things, contracts and partners and business, and she sends trinkets home; not the expensive things, fine fabrics and teas and spices that go in trunks and crates for the household, but small things that wouldn't fetch more than a coin but will mean all the world to their hearts. A small seashell, still with grains of grey sand clinging. A little bracelet, woven of string, bright chipped beads, and strands of Alice's hair. She sends her a packet of Alice's favorite tea, and promises, it will help you sleep.
Her mother writes faithfully, and ends each missive with, with all of my love.
Alice is full to bursting with her worlds, and she isn't sated yet. She's found a bold and hungry heart, and she has further to tread before it's done. She has laddered tights, plucked by thorns, tall grass, winter-barren twigs and the hands of small ghosts. She wears bells at her wrist, and a small cat yawns, indolent, in the hollow curve cuddled at the base of her throat.
She stands at the train station and watches the wind pull and wisp at long white smears of clouds in the sky, like kittens batting playfully destructive at amorphous yarn. She asks herself yet? And her heart advises wisely, not yet. She still has places to go and stories to tell.
She thinks she'd like to take her mother, when she goes. She could show her mother a place where one might wear a codfish on their head if they so pleased, and count it as fine fashion. She thinks her mother would smile if she showed her enough - if she could show her freedom.
Alice is writing her own story, and she doesn't expect it will have an ending. Should it - and there must, of course, be an epilogue - a sequel should naturally follow.
Stories don't end when you close the book and set it down, even if you go on believing it's all a dream, your heart hurting with the lost beauty of it, slipping from your grasp like clever minnows, your own beating heart lost to to checkerboard halls, foul drinks and high-handed caterpillars, mad rabbits and arch Hatters, fencing mice and mischievous topiary. This time she knows she hasn't lost it.
Alice is the sixth impossible thing. She's mad as a Hatter, and bold as a Queen.
Alice doesn't forget.