| The March Hare |
05-07-2007 12:37 AM |
// 01 – “ At the time it all seemed quite natural. ” \\
- I woke up to the most horrid of rackets pounding through my poor head. Like most of my migraines, it caused a relentless and excruciating beating, as if obnoxious blind mice were holding a party, and their piñata happened to be my brain. It was worse than the incessant screaming of the Queen of Hearts during a temper tantrum (believe me when I say, those are plain appalling) and even worse than a thousand of those awful jabberwockies putting on a parade from one eardrum to the other.
Sinking down further into my bed, I whined and whimpered but it was to no success; my pathetic mewling (do hares even mewl?) of pain was only muffled by linen sheets and, overall, unheeded by the rest of the world.
I grumbled to myself, for there was no one else in the room to hear my complaints except my bed and dresser. Even though they are sturdy enough pieces of furniture, they do not make for good listeners. Twisting and turning in a chaotic tussle with sheets, I heaved myself up on an elbow. An eye peeked cautiously open before I shut it in dismay at the brightness and overwhelming white that was the world this disgustingly sunny morning.
Did I mention yet that I’m not a morning person?
I looked towards the western side of my room, though if it was actually the western side or not, I couldn’t be less sure. It simply did not feel of North, South just sounded strange, and East rhymes with yeast, which is not pleasant. Therefore, I decreed that it would be looking to the West. And this Western-ward sight, with billowing curtains that were sheets of white against a luminous backdrop, could have been considered majestic, if it wasn’t so annoying.
To a great deal of aggravation, I discovered the noise that was plaguing me was not due to whatever was happening in my head (but oh, how my head did ache because of it). Instead, it was actually coming from outside my open window with the irritatingly splendid drapes. There was a cause, a purpose, a culprit behind the most irritating commotion.
I had a fairly accurate prediction for who the perpetrator would be.
It was too early and too tiresome to deal with him. I sighed, a lofty breath of air, and stumbled out of my bed, almost tripping over the fringe of my rug. I’m quite a graceful creature, elegant as a swan that’s had its legs chopped right off. After hobbling over to the window (a task I surprisingly managed to do without falling), I closed it with a resounding pound. I didn’t bother to lock it; there are no thieves in my particular neighborhood, in fact, there are no neighbors at all.
Only a few seconds after I had shuffled back over to my comfy nest of a bed, I heard a strange sound. I froze and cautiously looked back over to the window, which was where the noise had come from. Rest assured, the tapping came again. After it came a muffled voice that said something, but I could not make the words out. There was a pause in everything, and a small, hopeful part in the back of my mind hoped that whatever it had been, was gone now.
But I did not have the best of luck today, it would seem. The owner of the voice pulled open the window from the outside and heaved a leg into my room. The head came afterwards, drawing out a depressed sigh from my mouth. In came some arms, one hand holding a fork-like utensil, the other holding a shovel. Now, a person was sitting on my windowsill, and it wasn’t just any person.
I asked the first thing that came into my mind before I could blow up and just scream.
“Hatter… Why did you just scale the entire wall of the house with gardening tools and a fork?”
He perked up and shook his head, ‘tsk’ing to himself. “Ah, dear March, this is not a fork.” He held up the obtrusive instrument, its metallic surface bouncing waves of sunlight right into my eye. “Oh no, it’s a spork, quite an ingenious invention if I do say so myself.”
“Answer the question.”
“Well, I was sitting at the table, just sipping my drink pleasantly. It was the middle of the night, since insomniacs don’t sleep, you know.” He chuckled. I wanted to pummel him. “When the idea struck me. We should invite the Queen for a spot of tea. She’d love it, what with her tarts being.” His expression almost turned alarmed and in a paranoid manner, he looked to his sides before whispering. “Stolen.”
Once that word was spoken, the carefree and dumb grin appeared back onto his face, and he continued his epic story, whilst still perched on the windowsill. “And yes, so I began to brew up ideas for such a wondrous party.” He paused to giggle manically to himself. “Get it? Brew and tea? I used brew in the context of planning ideas while talking about tea, which you can also brew, but it means a differ-“ He shut up at my blatant glare but went on with the story.
“But I did not know where the tea pot was. And one can not have a tea party, without the pot. It’s unheard of. Absolutely disastrous. It’d be off with our heads in a second if the queen did not have a proper tea pot serving her tea.” He had a simply heart retching expression in complete seriousness while saying that, and it could have made one’s heart burst into sorrow, if he hadn’t been talking about the ludicrous topic of tea pots.
I stared at him, wondering just how stupid a person can be. He stared at me, watching my irritation grow and making a stray comment about how my eye was twitching unhealthily.
Before he could fill up my bedroom with any more idiocy, I cut him off. “Let me guess. You came up here to ask me if I knew where the… tea pot was.”
He beamed happily, and the rim of his hat fell down over his eyes, but he hastily rearranged it. His attempt to fix it didn’t do much good; it now lay lopsidedly on top of his large skull, tufts of disruptive hair flying around like gnats trying to eat his head. “Yes, that’s exactly right.”
“And you couldn’t use the door because…?”
He had a thoughtful look to his eyes for such a long time after I asked the question that I had to wonder if he was comatose. As I crawled out of my bed and cautiously crept towards him to see if, in fact, my housemate was dead, he sprang up back to life, answering, “Well… It just never occurred to me.”
I kept my breathing normal, despite the fact that at this very moment, all I wanted to do was to strangle something, preferably a small, furry animal or, even better, the neck of my companion. The expression on my face was forced to be harmless though, but I think it looked more psychotic than harmless in the end. The Hatter, the “Mad” Hatter, seemed confused as I walked towards him with slow, drawn-out strides.
“The tea pot is where it always is. Right in the middle of the table, where I always leave it.”
He might have wanted to ask me a question, because he opened up his mouth like he was ready to speak. But I didn’t hear whatever would have come from his mouth. I pushed him off the windowsill (boy, did it feel good) and heard the satisfactory thud as his form hit the ground outside. With that, I closed my window, made sure it was locked, went back over to my bed, slid in under the covers and went back to sleep.
It’s a very good thing that Wonderland does not have psychologists. They might just decide to kill us and then themselves, after dealing with us. We’re just lost cases, too far out of sanity to be brought back and much too sane for Wonderland, so the place itself tries to poison us and leech from us whatever strands of coherent thought processes we might have left.
After all, we’re all mad here.
|