Present: Mad Hatter School, Mushroomland, Colombia
T he teacher was breathless.
Even though she had been suppressing a smile at the children’s accents a while ago, she came to realize the gravity of the situation.
At first, the children laughed at the book. Alice in Wonderland had been a laughed-upon book back at their parent’s home. White girl, white author, animals that talk. Come on! This wasn’t a fairy tale or a kid’s book. It was a joke that bordered on insult.
Prior to the teacher’s call to read the book, extremist troops had kidnapped some children and probably killed some folks. Hell, attending school hadn’t been one of their priorities. They had only come for the free lunch, courtesy of a mysterious man who called himself — drum and eye roll please — the Mad Hatter.
Mad or not. Read or not. The children of Colombia knew Shakespeare had always been wrong. To be or not to be was never the question. To starve or not to starve was the ultimate question. Sorry Shakes .
“Looouiee Carooole,” the brown kid wiggles his eyebrows and laughed.
The kids laughed as well.
The teacher had to threaten to deprive them of their free lunch if they didn’t behave, so they obeyed and started reading
That was two hours ago.
Now they’ve been reading for so long and never even asked about the meal. The book had been like a magic spell that consumed them and possessed them. The children read aloud, each pair from a book, and did their best to stay in unison.
The teacher herself, a woman in her late thirties, gave into the magic and began sweating.
She had nothing against the end of the world needing a little magic, a little hope by reading a children’s book to supposedly keep the good guys alive. At times she wished it was real. She wished the world wasn’t a dark spot in the middle of the sun. She wished the mushrooms weren’t a sign from God that they went too far. She wished millions of kids weren’t kidnapped and thrown into the drug industry of Mushroomland owned by this dark man,
Not the Pillar. The Pillar was the dark man’s assistant. They usually made the world think they weren’t allies, that they loathed each other, but the truth was they were rocking the same boat of evil.
Mushroomland was owned by none other than this Mr. Jay, who some called the Jabberwock or Jabberwocky.
She really wished magic existed. She felt for the children reading the book and after their initial skepticism believing in a little girl who went down the rabbit hole.
In the teacher’s mind, Alice went down the rabbit hole, not to discover magic, but to escape the tragedy of real life.
She so wished magic was real, but being old enough not to believe in unicorns, she knew it was a lie. A beautiful lie the elders like to tell children to put them to sleep.
With all her denial and pessimism, something happened that made her reconsider.
She watched, as the children read the book, that their bodies started to elevate above the floor. Floating they started to gather in a circle.
With tears falling from her tired eyes, she couldn’t breathe. Not only because of the elevation, but because of the shape of the circle the kids created with their bodies.
She had to stand up on the desk to watch from a higher angle.
Not quite a circle.
Close enough.
The semi-circle the elevated bodies of the reading children created was the shape of a heart.