I dragged my knees across the dirt, the hard ground pulling at my stockings. This narrow hole in the hill I had crawled into in pursuit of the little white rabbit proved to be a worthy opponent as I squeezed my way along the rugged path. A pale light glowing in the distance the only thing visible in the darkness. As I approached the light, the dirt walls began to widen to where I could sit up right with the top of the tunnel brushing the top of my head. I soon realized that the light I saw did not come from the outside, but from a large hole in middle of the tunnel. I sat at the edge of the hole, gripped what little roots I could grab hold of and peered down. The once dull light now shone brightly, blinding everything to white. I tried to pull away but the dazzling light had me captivated. I leaned in towards the hole and the ground beneath me began to crumble. The brilliant light seemed to call out to me, inviting me into its warmth. I leaned in closer. The dirt beneath my hands gave way and I had to throw myself backwards to keep from falling in. I stared at the spot that was now consumed by the hole and let out a sigh of relief. "I don't know what I'd have done if I had fall--,"
Just then the ground beneath me fell through and I soon found myself falling down into the rabbit hole. I fell further and further into the light, where time seemed to stop and the edges of reality began to blur into imagination. I was leaving the world I once knew, a world of reason and order, to plummet into this place of chaos and insanity. I was in Wonderland now, and there was no going back.
As I fell, the past days events flashed through my head. I started the day as I always do with my thick-framed glasses hanging at the tip of my nose, a cup of coffee--black--and the daily newspaper. My mother always told me that it was unusual for a sixteen year old high school girl to start her mornings off like a middle aged man, but I didn't pay much attention to it. To my mother, I was always unusual. My hobbies, my taste in music, my friends, everything about me was unusual. That is, according to my mother. But my mother was one to talk for she liked to dress in hideously eye-popping colors adorned with every accessory you could possibly think of. And I mean every accessory. My mother says that her fashion sense is an acquired taste but in all of my sixteen years I have never once not been ashamed of my mother dressed as a bright purple and gold peacock at a parent-teacher conference. Her only friends consisted of those rude old hags from her sewing circle, and yes, that means my mother made all of the clothes she so gallantly sported every where we went, and my aunt Alice.
My aunt Alice was quite the odd ball herself, but with a more fun and adventurous approach to her. She liked to do odd things such as wandering around with an amused expression, crawling into holes in the wall, painting white rose bushes red, and drinking tea with everything. Out of all of these habits, the one I found most odd was the latter. When asked why she carried a box of tea with her wherever she went she replied in a rather whimsical voice, "Why, because a friend of mine would say ʻItʻs always tea time,ʻ and I believed him." Why she would take something like that so literal is beyond me. But the one thing that I was sure of was that I loved my aunt. When I was younger, I would spend every summer with her immersed in flowers of every kind. We called this special place The Singing Garden. Itʻs not called the singing garden because every time we walked through it we would instantaneously burst into song. No. We called it the singing garden because if you closed your eyes amidst the flowers and listened carefully, really carefully to the point where the sounds of the outside world echoed that of a soothing rhythm, you could hear it. You could hear the flowers whisper their songs of spring and enchantment as it slowly rose and spread throughout the garden. This is the reason for its name, and itʻs quite a magical one.
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