• The setting is cold and dark, but from afar in a nearby parlor is a very dogged and petrified Alice, along with Mr. Franks, a very self-pitying man who takes comfort in helping others fix their problems as he grows feebler by the day.

    The audio is drowned by only breathing and the sounds of trains from a distance, though it could possibly be the sound of a carriage riding quite hastily out from the center town; but Alice, though fixed with a trance, is quite sure it is simply a train, for no one would come to visit these dead places—not with such haste as that of the sound Alice and Mr. Franks hear.

    The smell is a variation of stench, but it is drowned by the cleaning supply in the closet, and the wooden floors gleam with newly applied paint, though it slowly begins to wear off as people step in and out of the shop. There aren't many customers, and soon the doors disgorge until Alice and Mr. Franks are the only ones in the shadows of the small shop.

    Right about now, the five senses could be elaborated throughout this chapter, but the most tasteful of fruit comes from within the labyrinth of Alice's mind, and we have yet to explore it.

    Mr. Franks is at rest on his chair, allowing his hunched back to relax itself. A cracking is heard from joints and Alice breathes in a gasp, making him look up.

    His voice drones and it bores her; it makes her loathsome of human contact, and she wishes to be so very much far away from this place of lost hope and wishes, that she closes her eyes and fondles her hair with her hands.

    "Alice, is there something on your mind?" His grin is from ear to ear, and it reminds her of a place she wishes she could not see when she closes her eyes, but usually does nonetheless.

    "You remind me of him," she says after a few moments of thinking.

    "Of who, Alice?"

    "Everything. This place…the clothes, the paint, the sky, the gloom—it reminds me of my Wonderland."

    The Shrink is somewhat halted back from what Alice states. He interjects his notion aloud after some time thinking. "Alice, what is your Wonderland?"

    But Alice is filled with such frailty that his words seem to force her off of the resting chair. She folds her feet beneath her thighs and sits up. "My Wonderland is beautiful. It's filled with meadows, birds, fish, cats—all of a diversity that cannot match the reality I am forced to live with."

    Mr. Franks eyes her suspiciously, his grin never fading away, only growing wider and wider, his eyes turning a dark green—a very ominous look. Light shimmers from behind a curtain, blinding Alice; and in a moment's haste, Mr. Franks is up—a gangly man—dragging his body about the small shop, picking up items and shaking the dust off them as he goes. "Tell me, Alice, what makes your Wonderland so horrid?"

    "Not horrid, not horrid," she mocks in his voice. She begins to show signs of humanity, as her eyes begin to fill with a liquid so very foreign to Alice's mind, and her body quivers in the silence of the shop. She would rather be anywhere else than in darkness; for in silence, the world feels like a very dark place.

    She wonders on whether or not some Alice in another part of the world is enjoying herself in a vast field of chrysanthemums and poppy flowers, eating with her family at a picnic near a grand house where she lives and enjoys life with her brothers and sisters; where she has more than enough money to feed several families for years; and where she could study abroad when she grows older and becomes known for her wonderful writing and musical talents, if she so wished to learn music.

    Her mind of mixed wonders slowly fades away to red and white, however. How the colors contort her face into something grim and humorless! She begins to tap at the banister of the wooden stairs near her, leading up to a small attic at the top of the shop that Mr. Franks shares with his business neighbors.

    Mr. Franks coughs lightly, a small foreshadowing to some serious conversation. "Then tell me, Alice, what would you describe your Wonderland as being?"

    "Beautiful, but all an illusion. You see, the beauty distracts you from what really is happening. But now that I see the truth and lies in this land, I can't go back to my childish ways."

    Mr. Franks thinks pensively of Alice's complaints, and then thinks of a certain resolve for it. "Perhaps you have grown too old, Alice. Perhaps it is adolescence that takes you away from this Dream World." Mr. Franks flimsily places his coat collar against his neck, hiding his face as he looks out the window at the women in brilliant gowns and men in nice suits.

    "It cannot be that. I go there countless of times. In my sleep, mostly; but sometimes reality and the monstrosity and also the good of my fake world tend to mix together."

    He bitterly laughs, rubbing the back of his head with his scarred fingers. "How strange it is that you understand these stupid notions."

    "Stupid!" shouted Alice, flinging herself from her lounge chair and making way to Mr. Franks until she is about five meters away from him. "I'm the stupid one?"

    "It is not you who is stupid, only your ideas. Alice, you remember too little. I want you to remember your wonderland. I want to see what you see, or hear what you hear, Alice. All I want to do is help you, and to do so, I must know what this Wonderland is."

    "'Too little?'" Alice ponders. "But it feels—it feels as if…as if only yesterday I was prowling through the lair of my mind, going into this Wonderland that is no longer my Wonderland. I cannot call it a Dystopia, for it isn't. It's a mix of my utopia with the sin of growing up. I can't explain it much better than that." Alice could not control her stuttering, so she casts her eyes downwards as she awaits Mr. Franks' lecture on what girl's should think and not think, and that silly worlds like these are only made for children to think of, and Alice is far older than that of a child.

    Alice begins to ponder notions with a pensive facial expression, preening her dark brown hair with her fingertips, blinking occasionally, but not for too long. Bags wrinkle her eyes with such tiresome appeal that she stares about with a deathly glow. She is distracted by keeping her eyes open and not allowing any light to escape her view, that she doesn't have time to construe that Mr. Franks came from behind, much larger than before (about twenty-four feet tall, and the whole room has become so very big that the lounge chair looks like a massive mansion than a sitting place), and scooped her up in his palm.

    Too little? Alice still ponders, unaware that she is being moved quite swiftly. Why my thinking is not little. I'm quite grown up. I guess I'm quite tough, I suppose.

    "Alice, dear, you think too little," reiterates Mr. Franks in a voice that sounds like a distant echo. Mr. Franks' mutton chops appear as devilish spikes on his cheeks, and he briskly folds Alice into his coat pocket and heads up the stairs, now an amorphous and darkly colored tunnel leading to a great door filled with every shade of black ever thought of.

    The paintings on the walls speak, screaming insults and shouts. There are portraits and environments that speak in a whisper, and those of which speak in the loudest of tones.

    "That girl! that queer in the attic is going about it again. Pig!"

    "That dog! That idiot! Come here, Alice, come here and show us how weak you are. Let us see what is left of you that we haven't already taken away!"

    "Alice, come back!" screams a large woman in a portrait on the right side of the tunnel. It is a strange picture, for the woman is in livery, and holds herself proud, but at a second glance, she has a knife in her hand and is blood-frenzied.

    "No!" shouts Alice, though her voice is muffled by the coat. She feels her head going light, and her eyes roll back as she takes in the smell of the cloth she is being suffocated in. It gives her a migraine that makes her dizzy. "No! Not again!"

    But the dream is already occurring, and Alice's mind is no more the stable conscience that sleeps lazily in the small parlor of Mr. Franks' therapy room. The room she is in, or thinks she is in, is extremely dark. It would take a lantern and several hours of searching to find her own two feet. Alice has learned not to speak at these moments, for who can hear her?

    Her thoughts are futile, and the very notion of the saying: If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? makes Alice feel uneasy about what is to take her further into the depths of her Wonderland.

    There is no help here.

    She has fallen down a traumatizing version of her beloved rabbit hole.

    It's oblivion after all.

    *Rate, or comment for any critiques to help me better my writing!* ;D