prompt: bottle, title: three plus one in misc. flash fiction

Dorothy, Wendy and Alice, so different on the surface but so very much the same at the end of the day. Each of these lost girls three thrust into worlds beyond their young reckoning, beyond imagination as they understood the concept. Each of technicolored wondrous forcibly-adopted land a wee bit of daydream and a whole lotta waking nightmare, seventeen-percent impossible fantasy and eighty-three-percent everything trying to murder them in the most ridiculous ways.

Alice, Wendy and Dorothy, led down a rabbit hole, taken to the sky by a petulant godling up up and away, sucked into a tornado and spit out into a crime-scene of her own accidental doing. By birds or by planes, even Supermen, left off to forefend with only the help of a couple of friends, horrors you or I could scarcely conceive, let alone actually believe. Drink from one bottle to get into one kind of trouble, drink from the other to escape into another even weirder form of threat.

Wendy, Dorothy and Alice, put on those shoes, gulp down that chalice, soar through the air with that child of half-joy and half-malice. You’ll see beauty and glory rarely glimpsed by the human eye, you have to try like hell not to blink and try twice as hard yet to not just simply quickly die.

Dorothy, Alice and Wendy, do the axes not swing just for you, does their shine not offend thee? Grab at an apple, get attacked by the tree. Look for the cat but see only his teeth. Dodge a slash from the Captain, get cold-cocked by Smee. All that absurd resplendence but no way to be free.

Wendy, Alice and Dorothy, you’re baffled by bullshit and you’re dazzled by glory. You might be the star but will you out-live the stories? And if you do manage to crawl back out of that rabbit’s hole, will you come back unchanged, will you still have all of your soul, let alone your memory?

Alice, Dorothy and Wendy, though we are all quite different, you are all almost exactly like me. My time spent in Los Angeles, where those colours shone fully-unfettered but nothing was free. We all got sucked in, one way or the other, to places where uproarious or glorious quickly flake into threats most notorious. And even when we all returned home mostly-safe to our houses and cows, one question lingered: though unscathed, after all such insanity, who the hell are we now?

Survivors of getting just what they wished for, in their childish boredom, all three. Survivors of getting just what they wished for, in their childish boredoms, also me. What you get will mutate into what that new you just doesn’t need. Back to the home, to the farm, to the cave by the tree, armed with stories even we cannot quite believe, left to drink normal liquid from a normal cup.

You’ll have dreams and you’ll have nightmares but if you are lucky, you at some point grow up.