It began, as these things always do, with the quiet certainty that nothing was unusual.
A clearing. Grass. Stillness.
And then the mushroom blinked.
Not metaphorically—no, quite distinctly, with the slow, knowing eyelids of a creature that has been watching far longer than it ought. Its face—creased, amused, faintly disappointed—sat where no face should sit, rising from the earth like a thought that refused to be buried. I remember thinking, quite calmly, that mushrooms had always had faces, we’d simply agreed not to mention it.
Above it—naturally, impossibly—sat a rabbit.
Not just any rabbit, mind you, but one composed entirely of intention. Upright. Dressed. Balanced with the casual poise of someone who has never once doubted the logic of sitting cross-legged atop a sentient fungus. He drew slowly from a long, curling pipe, and the smoke did not rise—it decided to rise. It curled like handwriting, as though the air itself were taking notes.
I could hear it thinking.
To the left, Alice stood—not as a child exactly, but as an idea of childhood. Perfectly balanced, one foot pressed against the other leg, hands together in a gesture that was either prayer or concentration or surrender. She was utterly still, which is to say she was moving in a way that the rest of us couldn’t follow. She looked toward the mushroom, though I had the uncomfortable impression she was looking through it… or perhaps at me.
Behind the mushroom, something shifted.
A face emerged—not fully, never fully—but enough. Crown first, then eyes sharp with judgment, then the unmistakable tension of a woman who has already decided the outcome of your existence. The Queen did not step forward. She leaned into reality, peering around it like a curtain, as if the world itself were something she could part at will.
I tried not to breathe too loudly.
And then—down at the right, where the ground begins to forget its own boundaries—sat the Hatter.
Ah, the Hatter.
He had arranged himself upon a smaller mushroom as though it were a throne fashioned from absurdity. His limbs draped with the elegant carelessness of someone deeply, profoundly at ease. The cigarette—no, that was not a cigarette, not really, it was an exaggeration of one, a concept rolled too large—rested between his fingers as smoke drifted in lazy, contented spirals. His eyes were half closed, not in sleep, but in a kind of blissful agreement with everything that should not be happening.
He was, quite clearly, the only sane one there.
And above it all, in the upper left where the air begins to thin into imagination, something hovered.
Not a body. Not even a head.
Just a smile.
Wide. Patient. Knowing.
It did not belong to the scene—it owned it.
I remember trying to step back then, to regain some distance, but the grass held me, the lines of the world tightening like ink around a page. The longer I looked, the more certain I became that this was not an image at all, but a moment paused—held in suspension—waiting for me to understand my role within it.
The mushroom blinked again.
The rabbit exhaled.
The Queen leaned closer.
Alice did not move.
The Hatter smiled without opening his eyes.
And the Cheshire grin… widened, just slightly, as though it had been expecting me all along.
