Oh, I hate Christmas parties. It’s just an excuse to celebrate. Back in Wonderland, we didn’t need excuses.
We had just finished the meal and are now moving on to dessert. The other teachers and their families are drinking coffee, but not tea. Only strange earth people would drink dreadful beverage. People should drink tea.
“Holly, we’re so glad you came!” My colleague, Linda, said in a sugarcoated tone. All the other teachers hate me, but they feel bad because I don’t have any other family. That’s why they invited here for Christmas. I’m like the unwanted realize that someone has to invite. They pass me around.
“Well on Easter, I do hope to invite you to my place. I feel like I’m always intruding on your lives,” I cackled.
“Oh no,” Linda insisted. “You’re fine. I do love having you.”
“We can have tea and everything,” I continued. “Speaking of tea, do you have any?”
Linda went to bring me a cup of tea, but it was only boring, regular tea. So I pulled a cup of tea out of my hat and starting drinking.
________________________________________________________________
The next day in class, the children were annoying me by being very loud.
“Would you like to take a visit to the closet?” I hinted as sweetly as possible to a student shouting “21”.
“No ma'am,” the boy responded rather frightened. I certainly know how to quiet a child. My first few years of teaching, I was the perfect teacher. I didn’t yell or burn children ever. But then, I broke down. I opened the closet, where the magic happens. I decided that the bad children simply deserve to live. And so I started burning them. I always keep the first child I burned in a nice, neat jar on my desk.
“Um, Ms. Bublitz, the rulers are starting to move, on their own,” a student in my class sputtered.
“Well maybe the Wonderland magic has finally started to seep through the portal,” I suggested.
“Ms. Bublitz, that’s a storybook,” corrected a policy debater in the class
“Oh, but you see, the whole book is all true. Alice In Wonderland is actually narrative nonfiction book. You can use it for our next unit. Okay back to the point. A long, long, long time ago, it must have been twenty, no, twenty-five years by now, I lived in Wonderland. Everything was amazing and crazy and Wonderlandiful, but then gruesome things started to happen. The world became less crazy and I went to earth to find the cause for this mayhem. I think one time, the White Rabbit was early to the tea party and another time, the Mad Hatter didn’t bring any tea to a party. Now, here I am, twenty-five years later, having done nothing to help,” I sighed.
“What can we do to help?” persisted one of my more helpful students.
“Well the portal needs to be closed up, but first, it’s more important that we find the cause for the disease that is currently killing my beautiful Wonderland,” I instructed.
So we set off. I had seven, very willing students to help me (in my class there were actually 30, but the rest were just being teenagers who may look like they care, but deep, deep, deep, deep, deep down really don’t care).
“We should start with a trip to Wonderland,” offered Cynthia, a girl with wavy, black hair that perfectly framed her flawless skin.
“That would certainly be a start, if we knew where the portal was. You see the portal changes places every week, and so it’s slightly difficult to find,” I remarked.
The portals kinda hard to miss. It’s rainbow and covered in glitter, but it is found in the most inconvenient places.
Several days of searching for the portal went on. But we have one slight interruption. One of the student’s, Hattie’s, mother had decided that what we were doing was very destructive and should not be taught in our good American schools. She even brought in the state. The government told me to forget about this nonsense and just teach. So we had to be secretive. Now I only had two children to help me, Cynthia and the boy.
We planned for weeks and then finally we were ready to go on our search. We left New York in the dead of the night, except the fact that there really is no dead of the night in New York. We set off for the portal, which had decided to place itself in the middle of a seemingly unreachable African Savannah.
We took a plane and then drove to the closest city. The rest of the expedition would have to be on foot.
Words cannot describe the agony we felt as we made the arduous, fifty-mile journey across the rugged terrain. We didn’t bring enough water and there wasn’t any along the way. We were almost dead from dehydration when we reached the portal.
The portal was much smaller than I expected. You see, every month, only one jump can be made. The portal this month wouldn’t allow more than two to pass through its opening. Either me and one of the children or just the children will go into Wonderland.
“Only two of us can go,” I stammered. I wanted to see my Wonderland, but then one of the children would die and I knew I could bear that. The way Cynthia looked into Matthew's eyes is why I made my decision. It’s their turn. Mine is over.
“Go,” I sobbed.
“No, Ms. Bublitz, you go. We went on this expedition for you,” Cynthia insisted.
“It’s your turn to live. Your life is laying right out in front of you,” I persisted. “Jump...now.”
As Cynthia jumped, she clasped Matthew's hand so tightly that it left marks. The two seemed to fall forever. It was easier for Cynthia to just close her eyes than to look at the sides of the portal. It was giving her a headache. After what seemed like hours, they finally reached the bottom. Instead of the “eat me” and “drink me” chiche bottles you think of with Wonderland, it was completely dark. Thankfully Matthew remembered to bring his iPhone to light up the entrance. After looking around for a while, the children found that Wonderland was the same as always, just dark.
The two experienced Wonderland over the next few months, even though it was difficult to see. No one in Wonderland seemed to notice the lack of light though. They went about life as if it was normal, as if they could see in the dark.
After a few months had passed, Cynthia noticed that a resident of Wonderland, one she had always read about, was missing--the Cheshire Cat. Matthew then suggested that they search for the cat. In those days, not all of Wonderland was a happy and Wonderlandiful place. There was one dark and boring place, the House of Rules. Found in the very center of Wonderland, it was by far the most ordinary and wretched places of Wonderland. Old myths stated that once you enter, there was no going back.
“Where might we find the Cheshire Cat,” asked Matthew, who was very curious to the Queen of Hearts.
“Well, the Cheshire Cat left six--off with his head--years go in pursuit of the destruction of the House of Rules, and hasn’t been seen from since,” answered the Queen.
“I guess we’ll just have to search it,” Cynthia assured.
So they left and found that atrocious place. It looked like an abandoned orphanage, with peeling gray paint and stiff rose bushes out front.
“Time for destruction,” declared Matthew. “I brought the matches.
“Do you just want to burn it,” questioned Cynthia.
“Hell yes!” shouted Matthew.
The inside of the house looked no more inviting than the outside. On strictly embroidered cloths, thousands upon thousands of rules hung on the wall. They searched the downstairs, and found nothing. Upstairs though, they found the closet. Matthew carefully opened the door to find an elderly lady sitting inside.
“Follow the rules,” she barked. “Or else...death.”
The two were horrified, vivid memories of Ms. Bublitz’s closet flooding into their minds.
"Matthew, drop the match,” Cynthia screamed. He hurriedly pulled a match out of his pouch and lit as quickly as he could.
“Run,” commanded Matthew.
As the house burned, Wonderland became filled with burning light, but Wonderland was very heat resistant. The light continued to spread until the whole land of Wonderland was full of light. This filled every creature of Wonderland with joy. But in their haste, the children had forgotten something--to put the fire out. The light spread to the portal and through the hole that seemed to go forever. Earth couldn’t the heat of both the light and the sun, so it burst into flames. The people of Wonderland were overjoyed because they would not have to deal with the strange earth folk who found the portal and jumped.
“We did it,” Cynthia remarked.
Because time goes so much faster in Wonderland, for it goes so much faster in Wonderland, it is another dimension, Matthew dropped to one knee.
“Cynthia, will you marry me?” Matthew asked very sincerely.
“Ye--,” Cynthia started to vow, but before she could finish, the Queen of Hearts strolled by. The Queen of Hearts commands beheading quite a bit, but most of the time, they are directed at no one in particular. She just wants to say that phrase. This was one of those times.
“Off with your head,” she ordered. The minions unfortunately took this order to mean Matthew, so the chopped off his head.
“No,” wailed Cynthia. “Kill me too.”
So Cynthia was beheaded also and that was the end of both Cynthia and Matthew, as well as all the other humans that lived on the earth. Ms. Bublitz would have been so proud.
