Part 1.
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Once again, Alice found herself in her bedroom, feeling rather mimsy indeed.
Every day now, at two o’clock, she would sit at her desk reading a book, for Alice was always reading a new book these days.
On Mondays, Alice would peer up from the page, and out through the windowsill, out into the rain—the constant rain—attempting to locate precisely where the gray buildings end, and where the gray sky begins. Tuesdays would find Alice dangling precariously from her nose as it folded itself deeper and deeper between the pages of a new theorem, a critique, a rebuttal, a retraction, or a stanza of Greek poetry. On Wednesdays, Alice would lean back in her chair staring blankly at the ceiling.
It had been like this, from the morning through the afternoon and into the evening, for some time now; in fact, it had been raining for almost two years.
At the start of the rain, Alice had played outside with her friends, re-creating those gallant adventures from Through the Looking-Glass. But now it had been raining for quite a while, and those adventures were many years ago. Alice was older now, and it was time she knew things—and so she read.
Her life, so interior these days, had assumed a pale green tone and rectangular shape: four walls of faintly peeling wallpaper and a dim, distant ceiling. The more Alice learned, the more everything developed a center to it… until late one night, unbeknownst to Alice, the center snuck out of everything, where it had been, and wandered across her bedroom, blanketing the entire place in order. From the wooden desk to the stack of books to the dusty looking glass in the corner, everything had made such sense lately: everything pulsed with inevitability. There’s been so much of it all, she thought. Of everything as of late.
Alice first noticed something was amiss last week, when she was surprised to learn that nothing surprised her anymore (well, nothing after that last one.) She’d come to know every inch of her desk, every square foot of her room, and every cubic yard of her house. Its contents were either modern or Romantic or linear or Eastern or this theory in that style, and the very air felt both crystal clear yet neatly organized, tucked away in a bed of chemicals and formula.
Yet now that Alice knew everything, she started to have this nightmare, every night the same. In her dream, the everything came out of the everywhere where it had been, and assembled itself into a terrible, monstrous green beast which chased her from deep within the dark woods. Each night, Alice fell to its biting jaws and its catching claws, never once able to escape.
Today, being awake has given Alice little respite. She sits in a green velvet chair at her old wooden desk. To her right, stands the looking glass, and beyond it the rain
