My Hatter, my ghost, had given me a purpose and I would not let him down.
~ ~ ~
He had let me into his world. I was a part of it, and I knew, deep down, that there weren’t many people out there who he allowed to be a part of something so…sacred.
Truly sacred.
It awakened something in me. Something I didn’t have a name for. Whatever it was, it felt dark and out of control, but electric at the same time, and I never wanted to let that feeling go. I wanted to cling to it like Pastor Masters clung to his preciousGood Book.
One of the Pillars from the church drove me back to the house. I had no idea where Thomas was, and I didn’t care. What I did care about was getting out the ideas I had in my head.
I loved to draw. It was one of my most favorite things to do, but Thomas desperately hated it, despite the fact that the church provided me with supplies. He hated it so much that sometimes, he had punished me if he saw me painting on the cameras or if he showed up and I was painting, so several months ago, I had stopped.
Tonight, however, I felt my fingers itch for a paintbrush for the first time in a long time.
I pulled out my paints and brushes from underneath the sink, set them all up on the floor and started painting exactly what I had seen in my head today. I wanted to get it all out on paper before I forgot even a single detail.
The thing was, I couldn’t really remember what my lovely characters looked like from the story, but I suppose that was fine because they wouldn’t have looked the same anyway.“This is not the Wonderland you remember.”
The exhaustion today felt like a distant memory as I put brush to paper. Everything twisted and turned, looking distorted and not quite right. There were trees that curved with strange leaves, plants that were far too big and looked more scary than they did pretty. Mermaids who had claws for hands and whose tails were losing their scales, the Cheshire Cat with red eyes and fur made of living shadows.
Everything was so beautiful but I could see why Azrael wanted to rid the world of it. Nothing looked quite right. Everything looked…wellmad. Even the ocean seemed to be filled with a glowing green, the crocodile had clocks for eyes, and everything looked as if it were melting.
When I was done, I studied the work of art, chewing on my lip gently. I had even painted us. Azrael in a tattered and torntop hat, shielding the top half of his face in shadows, his eyes glowing a solid blue, his smile sharp and wide. I put him in a red and black suit covered in a few patches of the opposite color. Black on red. Red on black. He had his cane too, long, thin, and black, with those metal branches growing from it like thorns threatening to swallow the world.
And me.
I was wearing a white and red dress, longer in some places and shorter in others, it was tattered and torn along the edges, marred in black and gray, with a big black bow around my waist. I was wearing the typical Mad Hatter hat too, only the ribbon that wrapped around the hat was laced in playing cards. I had on that heart necklace, but my face?
I frowned.
It was blank. I couldn’t think of a good face to draw. It had been so long since I had seen my own.
I touched my lips gently, the paint on my fingers smearing across them. What did I look like?
I suppose it didn’t really matter. I had looked good enough to capture Azrael’s attention so fully that he rarely looked at anyone else in that church when he attended. That was enough for me.
I lowered my fingers and continued to study the painted versions of us as Azrael’s sing song voice drifted through my mind bringing with it new words from my own mind.“Fly away to Wonderland, and off to the ship we’ll see, something ticking across the water, a clockodile with sharp teeth.”
I liked the way it had sounded, the crocodile and the Jolly Roger. I wondered if that was another fairytale. I knew there were a lot of them, my mother had once mentioned it in an off-handed kind of way, and the way he spoke about it? It must have been another story. I wanted to add it into my own story now, molding it around just like he had.
I bit my lip again and leaned over the large picture, almost the size of my coffee table, and I painted five words around the edges of the paper in black.
“Tick tock goes the clock.”
“Tick tock goes the clock.”
Over and over again, until the muscles around my lips started to hurt from being stretched so wide.
26
Azrael
February 13th, 2023
“If she is truly delusional, you can’t encourage her hysteria.”
My grip on my cane tightened at the pure…goodnessin the cub’s eyes, the pure resentment. I could see his assumptions; see the future he had laid out for me. I’m sure he would have preferred that I stayed in that asylum. That I had died there.
