This Story is completely fictional, interlaced with a very sad truth.
Lauren is a young woman, filled with ambition and resolve. Wearing a blue dress, her blonde hair glows with the light of the sun. She isn’t unsophisticated, inexperienced , or callow but rather hushed and conscientious.
Standing in a lush green garden with a cocktail in hand and pitbull at her side, she catches a glimpse of a White Rabbit wearing a waist coat made entirely of one hundred dollar bills. Enticed by her curiosity, she follows the strange White Rabbit into the far reaches of her garden, discovering a hole into a deep dark abyss below.
Clumsily tumbling inward, Lauren vanishes into the darkness below the surface, following the brake lights and road construction of Interstate 15 before crashing into an odd, unusual, and peculiar room.
Here, she finds that she is too tall to pass through the only exit, a small odd-shaped door leading into more of the unknown. Perfectly placed upon a center table is a glass vile with a tag that reads: Conform.
She drinks. She shrinks. Now the right size to venture forward, she embarks for the door and enters the upside down world of Wonderland, where she discovers that she isn’t alone. The world is inhabited by the peculiar, the bizarre, the unordinary. Among them is an out-dated Dodo, a squeaky mouse, two idiots, and the White Rabbit.
The Rabbit, carrying a stack of spreadsheets and operation manuals leads the young and ambitious Lauren to meet the blue Caterpillar, the obvious leader of many, though not all of the squatters in Wonderland. The Caterpillar offers advice and guidance, casual mentorship, carrying with him a melancholy dread that he warns, “will soon be felt by all.”
“Slay the Jabberwocky,” one of them says.
“That is your purpose here in Wonderland,” says another. All of which Lauren hears, listens, and understands.
“Okay,” Lauren replies, “the Jabberwocky can’t be that hard.”
The group snickers and loudly applauds, cheering for Lauren and her abilities to slay the beast.
“In all of the years it’s never been done!” declares the squeaky mouse.
“So….. Lauren can do it, right? Slay the Jabberwocky and such?”asks one of the two idiots.
Rolling out the scrolls of spreadsheets and operational instructions, the White Rabbit is oblivious to Lauren’s impatience. She doesn’t have time to wait- the Jabberwocky won’t come to her, she feels, but she needs to go to it.
“Has anyone come close?” she asks. The group nods quietly, pointing off into the distance to a dark lit room, closed off by thick wooden doors.
“So….the one in there has come close,” replies an idiot, “but at a price.”
Lauren steps forward, approaching the closed door. The others stand by and watch. Her hand reaches out, pale white skin touches softly on the cold steel door knob before she grips it tightly, pulling the door open. A cold wind of desolation escapes the room, blowing her sun colored hair back.
She takes a breath. Gathers strength. Enters.
The dark room is decorated in no such manner of odd shaped picnic tables placed oddly and randomly about with a small handful of soulless lifers. Their eyes glossed over in dull ignorance, seeping out from their sockets, penetrated only by the hazy-blue flicker of computer monitors in front of them all.
Lauren is drawn to one in the room; a top hat wearing, crazy-as-shit snob calling himself the Mad Hatter. Maybe he is the one the others are referring to, she thinks to herself. Removing the frog from her throat, she calmly addresses him, “Are you the one whose come close to slaying the Jabberwocky?”
The eyes behind the thick black rimmed glasses pierces her as he laughs maniacally before standing up from his table and lights up a cigarette. “Indeed.”
He offers her a smoke. She accepts and draws the unlit fag to her mouth as he lights it for her.
“But you’ll attempt.” he says.
“Of course I’ll attempt. But will I succeed?” she asks proudly. The Mad Hatter just gives her a stare. No smile. No frown. A look of being quietly judged emits from deep within his soul.
“Hello?” she asks in hopes of snapping him out of the bottomless gaze.
“If anyone can do it, it would be you.” the Mad Hatter states pleasantly.
Over the next several months, Lauren and the Mad Hatter would become inseparable. He shares stories with her over close victories. They exchange cigarettes and plot their next adventures to lure out the Jabberwocky. The Hatter even describes those in months past who arrived to “change” the system, only to be squashed which turned grown men into temper-tantrum throwing babies.
Soon, even the blue Caterpillar was of no help. His voice becomes as quiet as remaining hope. The White Rabbit’s spreadsheets and operation manuals grow in size in his own desperate effort to numb the intense and acute pain Wonderland emits; an obvious sign of the avoidance of confrontation.
It is Lauren who soon realizes what everyone was missing. The Jabberwocky is not the beast to slay. The Jabberwocky is not what is sucking the life from Wonderland. The Jabberwocky is not what everyone in Wonderland is afraid of. No, it is Wonderland’s ruler and leader; the self proclaimed Monarch and the big-headed Queen of Hearts herself.
Upon the Red Queen’s arrival in Wonderland (which thankfully to the residents, her arrival is few and far between), she makes ridiculous requests.
“Piggy!!” she yells. The pig rushes in without a moments hesitation and throws itself at her feet. “I love a warm pig belly for my aching feet.”
Lauren notices over the months that upon a ridiculous request the cards run around aimlessly, while chanting, “We’re painting the Roses red. We’re painting the Roses red.”
“Stop!” The Red Queen yells. The cards and everyone stop in their tracks. She stands from her throne and storms around the castle. “Who’s been painting my roses red?” she increases her volume as her face takes on the crimson red itself, “WHO’S BEEN PAINTING MY ROSES RED?!”
The cards tremble. The idiot pees. The Hatter laughs.
“Who dares to taint, with vulgar paint, the royal flower bed? For painting my roses red, someone will lose his head.”
The cards, the mouse, the idiot point at one another without a single feeling of remorse.
“Oh please, your majesty, please! It’s all his fault!” one card yells.
“Not me, your Grace! The ace, the ace!” another cries.
The Red Queen glares upon the Ace. “You?”
The card trembles, “No, Two!”
Her eyes dart to the Two. “The Two, you say?”
“Not me!” Two cries, “The Three!!”
The Red Queen stomps her foot, “That’s enough! Off with their heads!”
Lauren’s own discovery is that the Red Queen herself is the one to stop. The Jabberwocky is a biproduct of the Queen’s creation; the beast of hard work. She understands now, that everyone tries to slay the Jabberwocky. The Hatter and the Caterpillar have attempted to save Wonderland from the Red Queen before, a feat they understood way too late was impossible.
The Caterpillar bids farewell, encasing himself into a cocoon to emerge as something else. Who knows what will come of the Hatter, but Lauren knows that he is able to take care of himself and despite his lunacy, he may very well be the most sane of them all in Wonderland. Like the Caterpillar before her, it is time for Lauren to say her good-byes and leave Wonderland behind.
We all chase the White Rabbit wearing the waist coat made of money, tumble down the rabbit hole and find ourselves being forced to Conform to enter Wonderland. The Jabberwocky is the beast we all must face, and very rarely does anyone truly slay it. The Red Queen, however, is the obstacle to overcome. The pain-in-the-ass whose own big head gets in the way of everything and makes the day linger.
Venturing through the door she came, Lauren finds a piece of stale cake and takes several bites, growing uncontrollably and leaving the world behind.
Climbing out from the hole in her garden, Lauren is reunited with her pitbull and cocktail. She lays down on the soft grass under the blanket of the warm sun, staring up into the sky above. Thrilled to be away from such a nightmare, she smiles and thinks about her own future, knowing that one day she will face the Jabberwocky- but on her own terms and it will be one she’ll actually want to battle. The thoughts of a happy future is enough to put her into a short blissful slumber, drifting off as a blue butterfly flies overhead, resting upon a fresh green apple.
