One followed a rabbit down into the dark,
The other a cyclone that left its own mark.
On a road paved in gold, where the green towers rise,
They met for a moment and shared their surprise.
Both wearing ribbons and dresses of blue,
In worlds where the logic is never quite true.
One spoke of riddles and tea with a cat,
The other of wizards and where home was at.
“The cards are all shouting!” the blonde one declared,
While the girl with the braids found herself rather scared.
“There’s a lion who cries and a man made of tin,
And a city of emeralds we’re meant to go in.”
They paused by the signpost that points the same way,
In the soft, hazy light of a magical day.
With a sip of her tea and a click of red heels,
They pondered how living a fairy tale feels.
No logic or compass could show them the door,
Between Kansas, and London, and Never-Before.
But for one quiet second, the wanderers stood—
Two girls lost in dreams, as all wanderers should.
Alice Meets Dorothy
The sun, a pale, milky orb in the sky, cast long, shifting shadows along the path of gold bricks. Dorothy, her blue gingham dress a familiar comfort, stood with a curious expression. Before her, a girl with hair the color of sunlight and a similar blue dress held a steaming teacup, a delicate saucer resting precariously on the rough, uneven bricks.
“Emerald City?” the blonde girl mused, peering at the signpost that read the same words twice. “How perfectly uninteresting. All cities are rather green, if you ask me, with all the grass and trees.”
Dorothy blinked. “But it’s Emerald City! Everything is green inside. The people wear green spectacles, and the palace is green, and—”
“Oh, like a rather large, sparkly bottle then?” the other girl interrupted, taking a sip of her tea. “I once met a bottle that contained a rather rude pigeon. Do you have many rude pigeons here?”
“Pigeons?” Dorothy frowned, trying to recall. “Well, I haven’t really noticed. I’ve been so busy trying to get to the Wizard.”
“A wizard, you say?” The blonde girl’s eyes widened slightly. “How dreadfully dull. Are they anything like a Dodo? Or a March Hare, perhaps? They are quite good at making things disappear, though often they just hide them.” She gestured with her teacup towards the path. “Are you going to a tea party?”
Dorothy shook her head, a little bewildered. “No, I’m going to ask the Wizard to send me home to Kansas. And my dog, Toto, needs to go home too.” She looked around. “Where’s your dog?”
“A dog? Oh, I don’t have a dog,” the girl replied, looking down at her cup. “I have a rather persistent White Rabbit. He’s always late for something or other. And a Ches—” She stopped, a peculiar glint in her eye. “No, I mustn’t mention him. It makes his smile appear, and then he’s terribly difficult to remove from conversations.”
Dorothy tilted her head. “A rabbit that’s always late? And a disappearing smile?” This world felt even stranger than Oz. “Are you… lost too?”
The blonde girl finally looked directly at Dorothy, a flicker of something familiar in her gaze. “Lost? One is never truly lost when one has a destination, however illogical. Though I confess, ‘Emerald City’ wasn’t on my itinerary. I was rather hoping for a game of croquet.” She gestured to the fallen teacup beside her feet. “Though this tea has gone quite cold, I daresay. Would you care for a cup?”
Dorothy looked from the cold teacup on the ground to the girl’s outstretched hand, holding another. The Emerald City gleamed in the distance. “I suppose… a small cup couldn’t hurt.” She had, after all, met a talking lion and a scarecrow. What was one more peculiar encounter on the road?
The meeting of the girls was polite, but the meeting of their companions would be a much more baffling affair!
Toto was a dog of simple, sturdy principles. He liked bones, he liked chasing the occasional crow, and he liked things to stay where he could see them.
He was sniffing a patch of particularly bright poppies when a tail appeared. Just a tail. It was striped, purple, and twitching lazily in the air about four feet off the ground. Toto gave a sharp, inquisitive bark.
“Oh, do stop that,” a voice purred from the empty air. “It’s dreadfully loud, and I’m trying to contemplate the nature of a ‘Kansas’.”
A pair of wide, yellow eyes flickered into existence above the tail, followed by a grin so wide it seemed to be holding the rest of the face together. Toto’s ears flattened. He was used to monkeys with wings and lions who cried, but a cat that was only half-finished was an insult to his canine senses.
Toto growled, a low vibration in his chest.
“A growl?” the Cheshire Cat remarked, its ears finally materializing. “How singular. In my forest, we growl when we’re pleased and wag our tails when we’re angry. Or is it the other way around? It hardly matters, since I haven’t got a tail at the moment.”
The Cat vanished entirely, leaving only the floating grin. Toto lunged, snapping at the empty air where the nose should have been, but his teeth met only the scent of tea and ozone.
“You’re quite a determined little thing,” the grin said, reappearing behind Toto’s left ear. “But you’ll find that biting the air is a very hungry business. Tell me, does your girl always walk on such a yellow road? It’s a bit loud for the eyes, don’t you think?”
Toto turned in a circle, barking at the floating teeth. He didn’t care about the color of the road; he just wanted this cat to pick a shape and stick to it.
“He’s not a dog, Toto,” Dorothy called out from a distance, sensing the commotion.
“And he’s certainly not a rabbit,” Alice added, peering over.
The Cheshire Cat began to fade again, starting with the tip of its tail. “We’re all mad here, little dog. Some of us just have the decency to hide the evidence.”
With one final, mocking wink of a yellow eye, the cat was gone. Toto sniffed the spot, let out one final, huffy “woof,” and trotted back to Dorothy’s side. He decided then and there that he much preferred the Wicked Witch; at least she stayed solid when you bit her.
The Crazymad Writer Writes Again 