Writing Prompt: A young girl gets bored and follows a pale rodent underground. Odd things happen.
How this story plays out is up to you. Perhaps well, perhaps not.
Here’s our second prompt for May, where our theme is Free for All:
This week you've got only one story to reimagine
The problem with choices is that the lead to forks in the road.
You could go left or your could go right. But which one is the most fun?
Which route is the most arduous, the most torturous, the one that puts you most in Harm's Way.*
So this week it's simpler
The story to reimagine this week is the psychedelic mind-bending children's tale of Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland.
Choose a single chapter. I for one am going to create my own version of Neo following the white rabbit down into a land of wonders.
Where everyone dies.
Chapter One — Down the Rabbit Hole
Chapter summaries from Wikipedia
Alice, a seven-year-old girl, is feeling bored and tired while sitting on the riverbank with her elder sister. She notices a talking, clothed white rabbit with a pocket watch run past. She follows it down a rabbit hole where she suddenly falls a long way to a curious hall with many locked doors of all sizes. She finds a little key to a door too small for her to fit through, but through it, she sees an attractive garden. She then discovers a bottle on a table labelled “DRINK ME,” the contents of which cause her to shrink too small to reach the key which she had left on the table. She subsequently eats a cake labelled “EAT ME” in currants as the chapter closes.
Chapter Five — Advice from a Caterpillar:
Chapter summaries from Wikipedia
Alice comes upon a mushroom and sitting on it is a blue caterpillar smoking a hookah. Caterpillar questions Alice, who begins to admit to her current identity crisis, compounded by her inability to remember a poem. Before crawling away, the caterpillar tells Alice that one side of the mushroom will make her taller and the other side will make her shorter. She breaks off two pieces from the mushroom. One side makes her shrink smaller than ever, while another causes her neck to grow high into the trees, where a pigeon mistakes her for a serpent. With some effort, Alice brings herself back to her normal height. She stumbles upon a small estate and uses the mushroom to reach a more appropriate height.
Chapter Seven — A Mad Tea-Party
Chapter summaries from Wikipedia
Alice becomes a guest at a “mad” tea party along with the March Hare, the Hatter, and a very tired Dormouse, who falls asleep frequently only to be violently awakened moments later by the March Hare and the Hatter. The characters give Alice many riddles and stories, including the famous “why is a raven like a writing desk?.” The Hatter reveals that they have tea all day because Time has punished him by eternally standing still at 6 pm (tea time). Alice becomes insulted and tired of being bombarded with riddles and she leaves, saying it is the stupidest tea party that she has ever been to.
Challenge Requirements
Your story must:
- Be min 100 and max 1000 words long, excluding the title, subtitle, and any post-story bio/links. (We use Medium’s own word count feature.)
- Use “Alice” as one of your five tags.
- We recommend Fiction, Flash Fiction and maybe your genre too. But it’s your choice.
- Please link back to the prompt so others can find it easily.
New here? Here’s how to write with us. We’d love to see your stories.
*Doesn't Harm's Way sound like a great name for a town? Somewhere gritty and rough, full of the woebegone forgotten and fugitive dregs of a wild west period or a quiet sullen and vengeful last hope in a post-apocalyptic era.
Perhaps it could be an Empty World? I may come back to this one. 🤔
**Wikipedia is Creative Commons with attribution so AFAIK that is fair use with attribution. Anyone disagree please let me know if the comment.