Alice in Blunderland
Alice in Blunderland
Chapter One: The Marmalade Meteor and the Cheese Moon
The Blunderland Waltz (A Song for Alice)
Alice was dozing in a dictionary when it happened.
Not on one, in one.
It was the latest invention from the Ministry of Improbable Sleep—page-fluff bedding, bookmark pillows, and ink-scented dreams. She had just reached the word “zimbledonk” (meaning: a sneeze performed while tap dancing) when the dictionary began to tremble.
“Oh dear,” said Alice, rubbing her eyebrows which had curled into question marks. “Not again.”
With a WHUMP, the sky exploded.
A marmalade meteor plummeted through the air and landed with a sticky squelch in the middle of her garden, splattering her tulips into top hats and her pet hedgehog into a musical note.
Out of the meteor climbed a teacup.
Yes, a teacup.
And inside the teacup was a spoon, and inside the spoon was a tiny, muttering moon. Not the Moon, but a cheese moonlet from the planet Lactosa Major.
“I’ve come to take you to Blunderland,” squeaked the moon, polishing itself with a lettuce leaf.
“Blunderland?” said Alice. “Is it terribly reasonable?”
“Good heavens, no. It’s catastrophically daft.”
Which is exactly why Alice climbed in.
Chapter Two: The Queen of Upside-Downside-Anything-Goes
Alice arrived upside-down.
That is to say, she was right-side-up, but everyone else was wrong-way-right, which made her feel upside-downer than she was.
She was greeted by a galloping teapot wearing roller skates and reciting legal advice in Old Icelandic.
“Watch your elbows,” it warned. “They’re considered weapons here.”
“Why?” asked Alice, cautiously examining her elbows.
“Because elbows once overthrew the Parliament of Sponges. History is very sensitive about it.”
As they rolled into Blunderland Proper, Alice beheld the grandest nonsense she’d ever seen. Clouds shaped like spoons rained alphabet soup. Trees played violins. The rivers flowed backwards, and the fish sang protest songs about fishing.
She was soon ushered to court—to stand trial for thinking too hard.
“Off with her logic!” screeched the Queen of Upside-Downside-Anything-Goes, a monarch with an egg whisk for a sceptre and a flamingo perched on her head like a hat.
“But I haven’t even thought anything odd yet,” protested Alice.
“Exactly!” said the Queen. “That’s your problem!”
Chapter Three:TheHour That Went Missing
Suddenly, time stopped.
Literally.
A large pocket watch trundled in, sobbing.
“I’ve lost my 3:17!” it wailed. “Without it, the whole afternoon is dribbling sideways into Thursday!”
Alice tried to help. She opened a drawer labeled SPARE MINUTES but only found a dusty tick and a soggy tock.
The watch rolled away, muttering something about horological injustice and soup.
To make matters worse, the Caterpillar arrived—but he’d become a Calculator instead.
“Who… are… you?” he beeped.
“I’m Alice,” said Alice. “Or at least I was before the asparagus revolution.”
The Calculator blinked. “ERROR 412. Too much nonsense detected. Rebooting Wonderland…”
Chapter Four: The Unbirthday That Ate Itself
There was a party.
It was unplanned, unwelcome, and utterly unforgettable. Balloons danced. Jelly wobbled with purpose. The Mad Hatter had turned into the Slightly Confused Haberdasher, and the Dormouse had a podcast about spoons.
“I’m interviewing forks next week,” it said. “Very controversial.”
Alice was offered a slice of unbirthday cake, which immediately apologized and walked away.
“I’m on a diet,” it sniffed. “Low in icing, high in existential regret.”
The party grew louder, madder, and wobblier—until the whole thing looped back to the beginning and started again backwards.
Chapter Five: The End That Forgot to Finish
Just when Alice thought she couldn’t possibly experience any more lunacy, she fell upward into a sideways rainstorm, landed on a trampoline made of forgotten socks, and bounced into a jar of marmalade dreams.
She awoke—back in the dictionary.
The page now read:
Blunderland (n.)
A place of supreme silliness, where reason goes on holiday, clocks weep into teacups, and girls named Alice discover that being mad isn’t a curse—it’s an adventure.
Alice yawned, stretched, and checked the time.
It was precisely 3:17.
But only just.
The end?!?
Chapter Six: The Whispering Walrus of Wednesday
Alice woke up on a Tuesday that claimed to be Wednesday and insisted she dress accordingly. So she wore a tuxedo made of alarm clocks and a hat filled with squeaky rubber ducks.
She strolled into a forest made entirely of ideas—trees whispered riddles, and the leaves rustled with opinions. There, sitting on a velvet toadstool and wearing a monocle carved from an old ham, was the Whispering Walrus.
He leaned in close and whispered, “Don’t trust the number seven. It’s a cannibal.”
“Pardon?” said Alice.
He nodded gravely. “Seven ate nine. The evidence is compelling.”
Before she could argue, he handed her a spoon.
“This is no ordinary spoon,” he said. “It’s a sporacle. Use it wisely. Or foolishly. Both are encouraged.”
Chapter Seven: Alice Gets Caught in a Sentence and Can’t Get Out
Blunderland was experiencing a severe punctuation storm.
Exclamation marks were pelting rooftops, colons were being rationed, and rogue apostrophes were attaching themselves to unsuspecting plurals.
Alice took shelter under a grammar tree, but it was too late.
She tripped over a dangling clause and fell straight into a sentence.
“Help!” she cried. But no one could hear her. The sentence was run-on, tangled, and absolutely nonsensical:
“The hedgehog who danced on Tuesday while the jam sandwiches were plotting revenge against spoons although the moon had already filed a complaint but only if the porridge was cold and didn’t involve stamp collections—”
“I’ll never escape!” wailed Alice. “This sentence has no full stop!”
But just then, the sporacle (remember that spoon?) twitched in her pocket and tapped the paragraph. A full stop appeared out of nowhere, and the sentence finally ended.
Alice stumbled out, dizzy and dotted with commas.
“Phew,” she said. “That was a grammatical nightmare.”
Chapter Eight: The Final Crumpet Catastrophe
As Alice wandered toward the Valley of Vague Things, a loud crumbling echoed through the land. The ground was made of stale crumpets—and they were beginning to collapse.
“It’s the Great Crumpet Catastrophe of Crumbly-Crumpton!” shouted a nearby weasel dressed as a weather forecaster. “This happens every eleven dreams!”
The sky turned butter-yellow. Rivers of raspberry jam burst through the cracks, and buildings made of sponge cake leaned dangerously to the side.
“Quick,” yelled a passing biscuit, “get to the Sausage Roll Embassy!”
Alice leapt from biscuit to biscuit, narrowly avoiding a falling eclair. Just as she reached the embassy, the crumpet ground gave way entirely, and she tumbled into—
Chapter Nine: The Department of Unfinished Thoughts
Down, down, down she went—until she landed in an enormous office with typewriters for desks and filing cabinets that hummed nursery rhymes.
A bored-looking pencil with a clipboard approached her.
“Welcome to the Department of Unfinished Th—” it said, then wandered off mid-sentence.
Everyone in the department had started something and never quite completed it. A man was painting a giraffe that stopped at the knees. A cat was writing a novel about sandwiches but kept getting distracted by the smell of tuna.
Alice tried to ask questions, but all the answers stopped halfway:
“Because the weasel—”
“Well, if the moon had only—”
“It’s all about quantum…”
She sighed.
Fortunately, a confused librarian in a hot-air filing cabinet offered to fly her out.
Chapter Ten: The Return of the Dictionary
Alice landed with a bump, smack in the middle of her old dictionary—this time, on the page for “Spoonality” (n. the personality traits of spoons).
Everything was quiet.
Too quiet.
No backwards rivers, no political fish, no whispering walruses. Just words. Hundreds of them. Lining up neatly in alphabetical order, like good little soldiers.
It was horrible.
But then, from between the words “zebra” and “zigzag,” she heard a familiar giggle.
The dictionary grinned.
And from somewhere distant, the Queen of Upside-Downside-Anything-Goes shouted:
“We’re not done with you yet, Alice!”
Final Chapter: The Reasonably Unreasonable Goodbye
Alice stood in her garden, blinking at the very spot where the loophole had vanished.
“Did that really happen?” she asked the air.
“Define ‘really,’” said a passing daffodil.
She looked down. A spoon with a monocle was napping in her lap. The air buzzed faintly with leftover possibility. Everything around her looked normal—but smelled faintly of sock dreams and existential porridge.
“I suppose it’s over,” she said aloud.
“Supposition noted,” said the grass, which promptly rolled itself up like a rug and shuffled away.
Just then, the clouds overhead parted—revealing a final glimpse of the Blip: upside-down islands, floating tea shops, and a walrus in judicial robes waving goodbye with a rubber stamp.
“You’ll always have nonsense in your pocket now,” said the Walrus, his voice echoing across the sky like thunder wearing slippers. “Use it wisely. Or not.”
Alice turned to see the Prime Minister of Maybe emerging from a biscuit tin. He handed her a parting gift: a certificate that read:
Official Blunderlander
In recognition of heroic illogic and brave bafflement.
Lifetime membership. No expiry date. Especially not on Tuesdays.
“You’ve earned it,” he said, tipping his pigeon-hatted head. “You chose to choose, even when nothing made sense.”
Alice felt a little sad, a little wiser, and also a bit like marmalade.
Epilogue: The Slight Ripple in Reality
Back at home, Alice returned to her usual hobbies—reading dictionaries, chasing clouds, and talking to hedgehogs about philosophy.
But sometimes, on especially peculiar afternoons, she’d spot something curious:
A door in a tree.
A marmalade meteor.
A very suspicious spoon grinning at her from the cutlery drawer.
And every now and then, just as she was about to drift off to sleep, she’d hear it:
A whisper from beyond reason—
“We’ll blunder again, Alice. We always do.”
She smiled.
And fell, quite contentedly, into a dream made entirely of upside-down umbrellas and jam.
THE END.
(Unless, of course, it isn’t.)
The Crazymad Writer Writes Again 