Alice discovered quite by accident that the world has a top.

Most people, she had noticed, were too busy walking around it to check.

It wasn’t marked by a flag or a signpost—nothing as sensible as that. Instead, it felt like a place the world itself had agreed upon in a moment of quiet pride. When Alice stepped there, the ground did not wobble or roll away. It simply paused, as though holding its breath.

Below her, the Earth unfolded in bright, broken shapes: seas made of blue ideas, continents stitched together with yellows and greens, clouds cut into careful pieces like a puzzle no one had finished. The sun shone from one side and the moon from the other, neither arguing about whose turn it was.

Alice put her hands on her hips—not because she felt particularly brave, but because it seemed like the correct posture for standing somewhere important.

She waited for something dramatic to happen.

Nothing did.

“Well,” she said to the air, which was listening, “that’s rather the point, isn’t it?”

From up here, worries shrank into polite little shapes. Arguments lost their sharp edges. Even time—dangling somewhere nearby with its pocket watch—seemed unsure whether to tick forward or simply admire the view.

Alice realised then that being on top of the world did not mean ruling it, or shouting instructions down at it. It meant seeing how all the pieces fitted together, even the crooked ones. Especially the crooked ones.

After a while, she stepped down again, because no place likes to be stood upon forever.

But the world remembered.

And from that day on, whenever things felt impossibly large, Alice smiled—quietly—knowing exactly where the top was, and that she had already been there once.