The Continuing Adventures of a Girl Named Alice
Category Archives: A new Alice in Wonderland story
Alice in Tartaria
Alice in the Magical Square of Tartaria
Ballykillduff is a village that thinks quietly.
Lanes hesitate. Grass leans when it should not. Things happen just slightly to the side of where they are supposed to be. Alice has lived there long enough to know this, and just long enough not to question it.
So when a crease appears in the air behind the Old Creamery, and a place called Tartaria slips sideways into existence, Alice is the only one who notices — and the only one who understands that some places survive by being remembered badly.
Tartaria is a civilisation that vanished by behaving too well. Now it endures in a state of almost compound memory: misremembered, misfiled, and dangerously unfinished. Maps argue. Councils disagree. Scholars from Outside begin asking sensible questions — the most dangerous kind of all.
As Alice moves between Ballykillduff and Tartaria, she discovers that memory is not passive, certainty is a trap, and being understood may be far worse than being forgotten. Worse still, Tartaria begins to misremember her.
To save both worlds, Alice must learn how to remember wrongly on purpose — without doing it too well.
Alice in Ballykillduff and the Almost-Remembered Tartaria is a whimsical, quietly unsettling fantasy in the tradition of Lewis Carroll: a story about places that think, truths that refuse to settle, and the peculiar courage it takes to remain unfinished.
To read this new story click on the link below.
The tea is poured from empty air,
With whiskers twitching in despair!
The clock has struck a purple grin,
Let the nonsense now begin!
A rabbit in a ruff of lace,
With panic written on his face,
Drinks from a cup of floral bone,
While sitting on a velvet throne.
The Hatter grins a jagged tooth,
He’s quite forgotten every truth!
He offers cakes of dust and light,
To keep the morning out of sight.
Poor Alice sits in quiet dread,
While floating teapots soar o’erhead.
The sky is full of spinning gears,
And echoes of a thousand years!
The Cat is but a giant smile,
That stretches for a country mile.
He’s here and there and gone again,
The king of every madman’s pen!
So gulp the steam and eat the spoon,
Beneath the grinning, cosmic moon!
For once you’ve joined this tea-time host,
You’re nothing but a buttered ghost!
The White Rabbit in Wonderland
A tick, a tock, a pocket watch,
A sky of ink and butterscotch!
The rabbit runs on legs of light,
To catch the tail of noon-at-night!
The petals scream a silent tune,
Beneath a pink and pulsing moon.
Don’t drink the tea, it’s full of stars,
And tiny, golden handle-bars!
My shadow’s gone to fetch the mail,
In a thimble-boat with a paper sail.
The mushrooms groan and start to sneeze,
While logic buckles at the knees!
So tip your cap to the empty chair,
And weave some chaos through your hair!
For when the rabbit rings the bell,
There’s simply nothing left to tell!
The March Hare in Wonderland
A swirl of logic, backwards-bound,
Where feet are lost and skies are found!
The tea is cold, the clock is dead,
With buttered toast inside my head!
The blossoms roar a petal-song,
Where right is right and wrong is long.
I’ve painted all the lilies green,
And danced with ghosts I’ve never seen!
The stars are buttons on a vest,
The moon is put to final rest.
A sneeze of glitter, a cough of gold,
A story that can’t quite be told!
So pour the wine that isn’t there,
And comb the static from your hair!
For in this wild and dizzy place,
There’s not a lick of time or space!
The Mad Hatter in Wonderland
Oh, bother and bluster, and cogs in the head!
My teacup is empty, my sanity fled!
A tick-tock of madness, a dizzying spin,
Where is the joy, where does chaos begin?
My eyes are like saucers, my smile’s quite askew,
A day without logic, eternally new!
The steam from my brew whispers secrets untold,
Of moments quite frantic, of stories too bold!
My hat, it’s a shambles, much like my own mind,
With patches of nonsense, for all humankind!
The gears in the ether, they clatter and chime,
Is it teatime forever, or just for a time?
A jumble of trinkets, and teabags that fly,
A world in a muddle, beneath a mad sky!
Though tired and tattered, my spirit still gleams,
For the maddest of thoughts fuel the wildest of dreams!
Alice in Wonderland
In realms of whimsy, softly spun,
A maiden drifts beneath a sun
Of petals grand, a blush-pink bloom,
Dispelling shadows, chasing gloom.
Her gown of blue, a gentle wave,
As golden tresses brightly rave
With blooms and beads, a floral crown,
She floats where dreams are upside-down.
Around her dance, in vibrant hue,
White-capped toadstools, fresh with dew.
Bright butterflies with wings so grand,
Flit through this most enchanted land.
And tiny birds, with wings so clear,
Whisper secrets to her ear.
A cosmic swirl, a starry night,
Embraces her in wondrous light.
A world of magic, soft and deep,
Where every fancy she can keep.
With serene gaze, she looks above,
Lost in a dream of endless love.
Seven for a Secret, Never to Be Told
Seven for a Secret, Never to Be Told
Everyone in Ballykillduff knew the rhyme. They learned it young, usually from someone older who lowered their voice for the last line.
One for sorrow.
Two for joy.
Three for a girl.
Four for a boy.
Five for silver.
Six for gold.
Seven for a secret, never to be told.
Most people laughed at it. Some people touched wood. Nobody ever talked about seven.
Alice saw them on a Tuesday morning, standing along the hedge at Curran’s Lane.
Seven magpies. Neat as fence posts. Silent as if silence were a rule they were following carefully.
Alice stopped walking.
The hedge itself felt wrong. Not dangerous. Just… held together too tightly, like someone smiling for longer than was comfortable.
She counted them twice. She always did when things felt important.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.
All seven turned their heads together and looked at her.
“Right,” Alice said quietly. “It’s that sort of day.”
People passed along the lane without noticing anything at all. Mr Keane walked by whistling. Mrs Donnelly hurried past with her shopping. No one looked at the hedge. No one slowed down.
Only Alice stood there.
The magpies did not speak. They had never needed to.
Long ago, Ballykillduff had made a decision.
It was not a cruel decision. It was a tired one.
Something sad had happened. Something that could not be fixed. A thing with a name, and a place, and a day that people still remembered too clearly. After a while, the village agreed to stop saying it out loud. Not because it wasn’t real, but because remembering it every day was making it impossible to live the next ones.
So the remembering was set aside.
And the magpies stayed.
They stayed because someone had to remember, and magpies are very good at keeping what others lay down. Not just shiny things, but moments, and names, and truths that no longer fit anywhere else.
The rhyme was never meant to predict luck.
It was a warning.
Seven magpies meant a place was carrying a memory it no longer wanted to hold.
One of the magpies hopped down from the hedge and pecked at the ground. Not at soil, but at a flat stone half-buried near the roots. A stone no one stepped on, though no one could have said why.
Alice knew what was being asked of her.
She did not need to know the whole story. She did not need names or details. She only needed to do one thing the village had not done in a very long time.
She knelt and placed her hand on the stone.
“I know,” she said, softly.
That was all.
Not what she knew. Just that she knew something had been there. Something had mattered.
The hedge loosened. Just a little. The air moved again.
When Alice stood up, there were only six magpies left.
They were already arguing with one another, hopping and chattering, busy once more with ordinary magpie business. Shiny things. Important nonsense. The everyday work of being alive.
The seventh magpie rose into the air and flew away, light now, its work finished at last.
Alice walked on down the lane.
Behind her, Ballykillduff continued exactly as it always had. But somewhere deep in its bones, a small, quiet weight had finally been set down properly instead of being hidden away.
And the rhyme, for once, was at rest.
The Eighth Magpie
Everyone in Ballykillduff knew the rhyme. They said it quickly, like a spell that worked better if you didn’t linger on it.
One for sorrow.
Two for joy.
Three for a girl.
Four for a boy.
Five for silver.
Six for gold.
Seven for a secret, never to be told.
Alice had already seen seven magpies once before, and she knew what that meant.
So when she walked along Curran’s Lane and saw eight, she stopped dead.
Seven stood along the hedge, silent and still.
The eighth stood on the path itself, blocking the way.
“Well,” Alice said, “that’s new.”
The eighth magpie was smaller than the others and less patient. It tapped one foot, then the other, as if waiting for a late train.
Seven magpies meant the village had forgotten something important. A sad thing. A thing everyone had agreed not to talk about.
That part had already been done.
Ballykillduff had remembered.
But the eighth magpie had arrived because remembering had changed nothing yet.
The bird pecked sharply at the ground.
Alice followed its beak and saw the problem at once.
The old path had collapsed further down the lane. A fence lay broken. The shortcut people once used had never been repaired. Long ago, someone had been hurt there. That was the secret. That was why people stopped using it.
They had remembered the accident.
They had never fixed the path.
“Oh,” said Alice. “You mean that.”
The eighth magpie nodded briskly.
It wasn’t here for memory.
It was here for mending.
Alice went back to the village and told people what she’d seen. Not the whole story. Just enough.
By evening, someone had brought tools. Someone else brought boards. Someone else brought tea.
By the next morning, the path was safe again.
When Alice returned to Curran’s Lane, there were only seven magpies on the hedge.
Then six.
Then none at all.
The eighth magpie was gone first.
It always is.
Because once something is put right, there is no need for it to stay.
And the rhyme, at last, had room for one more line, though nobody ever said it aloud:
Eight for the thing you do about it.
The Crazymad Writer Writes Again 