For my English GCSE coursework, I have recently been asked to write a short story. so I have. This being the 'writing process' thread n all, I thought I would post it up for your feed back, as this is only my first draft. Enjoy:
The original Alice; My Alice; was not really an Alice at all.
I called her Amy, although Amaris was her full name. I don't think it was quite English enough for him and his writings. Alice means 'noble'. I'm not sure that Amaris was noble. Amaris means 'child of the moon'. I'm not sure she was that either. She was what she was. My sister. Not that you are even vaguely interested in that, I suppose.
You can understand why I was apprehensive about seeing you today. When I last saw a psychiatrist, it was for Amy, and you can tell how that worked out. Dr L. Carroll, Psychiatric whiz - I think not. All he did was pretend and then steal the heart from Amy and the Amy from me. I'm not sure if Amy even really understood what happened, or what he took from us. But I know it got much worse after him.
She was always the little one with the big imagination. The things she would dream up. She could call anything by a name - anything… and it would fit just right. She could have been an author… for children, perhaps, but it’s all messed up now.
She looked not unlike the 'Alice' the world has come to know and love. A little small for her age, she had dark auburn hair that was dead straight. Red lips and perfect little white teeth. And her eyes… they were the most startling green - like bottles or emeralds or fresh grass.
You want to know about the headband, I expect. Amy only wore it twice. Well - she had to look smart for the interview and the trial. 'Alice bands' I think they call them now.
She used to sit in her room all-day, playing with dolls or other toys or just sitting in a sort of innocent contemplation. Amy could set up an entire kingdom in her room before tea. I guess I thought it was normal. And you know what? For a child that age I still do. It wasn't her fault things turned out this way.
The teacher at her school didn't agree: "That child spends a too much time with her head in the clouds" she would say. I knew she was right. Amy did not have a very long attention span for things outside her own little world. Though she did like to read- he lied about that. What was it he said? "…What is the use of a book, without pictures or conversation?" Another one of his merry little fairy tales.
I read those tales many, many times, just to see what he had stolen from my Amy.
It all could have been fine. I am Amy's senior by twelve years, so when our parents died, I was seventeen and old enough to be her legal guardian. We lived in a reasonably sized house all by ourselves, and continued much like we had been doing.
The dreaming got worse. Not by lots, but it did. She didn't daydream a little and often, but rather for long periods with little provocation. Sometimes I had to shake her just to bring her back to the land of the living. She was hard to wake in the mornings too. It was as if sleep held on too hard for her to escape, and sleep again, was only to pleased to clasp her in its arms once more at night, where she would fall into slumber before her head hit the pillow.
This extra time for imagination sparked games and quests that I could not describe to you. New people: characters of races and of worlds never heard of before. The individuals she would tell me of - their traditions, their mannerisms, their gains and losses. She had a 'curiosity', that much is true, but more for her own mind and what it created than this world or anything in it.
Amy liked cats at this point in time. She tried to catch them grinning, but never managed it. I bought her one, and she named it 'Missy', short for 'Mischief'. It was a good fit, as that was all that cat ever caused. Better than 'Dinah' at any rate.
I took Amy to the doctor's about her sleeping habits. Her flicking in and out of consciousness was getting worse. She was diagnosed with chronic fatigue. It wasn't something hard to deal with. The school didn't like it though. They said some rubbish about "needing pupils to be awake and concentrating all the time", and Amy left school. At home, she became quite talkative. I think she missed the company of children her age and in the lack of response from Missy, she turned to me.
In the times between her sleeps and daydreams, Amy would describe the landscapes her mind provided. The blues, the purples, the reds, the golds that came together in that head of hers and formed the land her mind spend two thirds of the day in. It seemed a marvellous place, and I felt not in the least bit sorry for her sleeping disorder, as I would have done anything to spend even half that time in the wonderland she described. She had started writing too. Putting her visions onto paper in rhyme. These compositions were intriguing as anything else she constructed.
Then there came the time of that famous afternoon under a tree near a rabbit hole, and with this, the time when I left her at home with the cats, the mirrors and the chess board. I was starting to worry about how well Amy understood her dreams. The mental borders between sleep and waking were beginning to merge for her, often leading her to believe that her dreams were just as real as Missy or I. Our doctor suggested we might see a psychiatrist about Amy's condition. Just to "check things over" he said.
So we did. This was our first encounter with Dr L. Carroll. Amy told him just snippets of what she had told me. Fascinated, he asked if we would come again. And If Amy might be willing to share with him all she had witnessed.
Amy, eager for a new listener, complied and we attended a meeting with him the next week. Dr Carroll sat down with his notebook and pen and took the most detailed notes of Amy's chronicles. She focused most of her narrative attention on her trip down the rabbit hole and through the mirror. It took us three days, allowing for refreshments, Dr Carroll's finger cramps and Amy's random loss of consciousness.
When we finally finished, Dr Carroll pulled me aside. He told me he was worried like me. He told me there was a line where imagination and reality should separate. And then, of all his cheek, he told me not to tell people about Amy. He said she might get taken away. And then he packed up and left. We went home as well, to our little house, to try and continue things as they had been. This time it didn't work.
That night Amy had a nightmare. Never before in her long history of sleep had her subconscious conjured something dreadful. She screamed and cried and I came running. The fear that reflected so raw in those green mirror eyes was scary in itself. When the sniffles had cleared I asked her what had happened. Amy frightened me with her response: in her dream, some one had stolen her heart, so the Queen of Hearts had ordered Amy's execution. She was going to have her head chopped off, and was petrified of what she would become with no head and no heart.
It took hours to get her to sleep that night, a problem I had never before encountered. When she finally dropped into a tear-damp and troubled sleep, I went to bed myself. All that I could pray for was that it would clear up by the morning. It didn't.
From that night on, Amy feared the slumber that she would unwillingly slip into. She stopped playing with her toys in waking hours; telling me that they were bad and hindered her search for her heart.
Amy developed a fear of many things. She didn't like mirrors. They told things differently to her, apparently, and she said she could see the hole in her chest when viewing her reflection. Heeding the psychiatrist's advice, I stupidly kept Amy's change in aura quiet. Maybe if I had done something earlier, I could have saved us both. Instead I had all the mirrors in the house removed. This tamed Amy for a while, but it was not long before other threats had caught her attention.
She no longer enjoyed the company of cats. "Their smiles are more than I can bear" she would inform me with tired and tearful eyes. Missy was given up for adoption and numerous anti-cat measures were taken. Caterpillars and butterflies were no longer kept in jars to watch with wonder, but shunned from the house and garden, as they were apparently "rude and unhelpful and gave confusing advice". Card games were not to occur in her presence, a, if a card was to notify the Queen of her location, the results could be to Amy, devastating. As for mushrooms, they were scorned upon in any cuisine.
Things were beginning to get complex. I could barely keep up with Amy's new fears and dislikes. Can you imagine what it is like having the world turn against you? I can only try to imagine how it must have felt to Amy. Soon I was hearing of many frights and terrors - most ghastly of all, the terrifying 'Jabberwocky' that haunted both mirrors and dreams. It was about then that Amy caught a glimpse of her 'heart'.
She was leafing through a paper. I had already scribbled over an article about a cat stuck in a tree, and a recipe revolving around mushrooms in thick pencil. I was clearing up in the kitchen, or some such triviality, when she came running. I had not seen her run for long, her small limbs becoming the agile things they had been before drowsiness made them slow and clumsy. On the page in front of me was a book review telling of Lewis Carroll's Children's Tale "Alice and her Adventures in Wonderland".
There was then an in-depth description of the book's contents and how 'imaginative' and 'inspiring' the entire read was. I went out as soon as possible, regretting having to leave Amy at home by herself. I bought a copy immediately and took it home to scour the pages, absorbing every word he had stolen from my fragile sister. I had to stop him or do something to bring back my Amy.
Of course, the court case didn't hold up. Where was our evidence? All we had was an ill child who could recite practically the entire book by heart (although when she was told this, she asked from what heart was she supposed to recite it). We might have had a further chance as well - if a jury member hadn't had the stupidity to get out a compact mirror.
Amy screamed about some obscure monster, ran over to the mirror holder, snatched it and smashed it on the floor, crushing the shards into the ground with her little Mary-Janes. She was restrained, naturally, and that’s when I saw the smirk in our 'psychiatrist's' face - he had been right. He said I should keep quiet, or Amy might get taken away. And she was.
In the middle of attempting to wrestle herself from her captors and back to my arms, she passed out, and didn't come to until they had her secured in a little room. A doctor and mental specialist came and took a look at her. I was there all the time, to hold her hand even as she slept. Amy was declared legally unstable, due to her frequent hallucinations and the fact that she persisted that her scary fantasies were real.
They moved her away. I moved too, out of our home and nearer to the special hospital they kept her in. She was getting more and more distant from me… and this world in general I think, and her horror would turn quickly into anger. I could cope much better with losing her through natural sleep, and I think it even hurt the nurses a little to see such a child pumped full of opiates to stop her painful rages.
By then, Amy's dead straight hair was matted with sweat and tears and saliva, her green, green eyes sunken and rimmed with red. Her once full and rosy lips were pale and drawn, and would quiver on the brink of tears habitually - even her little teeth would appear almost feral at times. She would still talk to me about twice a week in my daily visits to the hospital.
Some times she would talk about her dreams, and I would try to soothe her and to still the fright that shone in her eyes. Other times we would speak of the old days, the days in the sun when we laughed and played and read books under trees. We would cry together, occasionally, just the two of us, about everything, all that we had lost, and all that had been taken. I'd rock her back and forth until the shudders of sobbing melted into the sighs of sleep.
The sleep she had once sought after as an escape had become as much a cell to her as the constrictive hospital room, and even in that state usually so associated with peace, she would weep and wail and twitch fitfully. I remember the last thing she asked me, and I know she asked of me, not some character in her mind, was if I would like some tea. She had no tea, but poured some from an invisible pot into an invisible cup. That was a good day. Things could have been looking up.
I was at home and lying in bed awake, as sleep had started to evade me, when the telephone rang… it was the hospital. I was told that in the early hours of the morning, Amy had started into a rage, screaming and running about in her room, tearing at the walls and beating her fists on the floor. Hospital staff had gone in to restrain her, but before they could sedate her, she fell into a coma.
I got to the hospital as soon as possible, but my presence made no difference. I held Amy's hand, tiny and ice-cold, and watched as they checked her responses. Her pupil dilations were changing but not in relation to the torches they shone in her eyes. Her lips moved silently. I suppose I felt… I don't know how I felt. I can't really remember.
Then I remember she sat up. Amy looked right through me and that made me feel scared. She licked the blood that had dried on her lips and whispered something about the taste of chocolate. Then she lay down again. She hadn't really woken up. She hadn't acknowledged anyone in the room and it was clear her mind was still in catatonia. She still does it. Occasionally, she will open her eyes from the eternal slumber, and blurt out something, a scream, a moment of coughing up blood or a comment irrelevant to anyone but herself. Amy is ten years old now. I still visit everyday, just in case she wakes up.
She won’t though. I know she won't. I've lost her from this world forever. She's stuck in the world that she built and he knocked down. Seeing her stuck somewhere like that… it hurts me more than you can imagine. More than I can imagine. Amy was always the one with the big imagination, maybe she could understand. But she's gone.
I can't sleep anymore. The doctor gave me some pills for the insomnia, but they're not working. The amount of time I've sat with Amy's hand in mine, and thought of taking her off the drip, or something- anything to let her out of the nightmare in which she remains. To end her suffering, as I don't think I can end mine until she's free. I thought about that too - ending my sleepless days and nights and weeks and months.
When I can't sleep, which is essentially all the time now, I try and think. I try and work out what happened. What exactly that wicked man Carroll took from my sister that destroyed us both. Whether any of it makes any sense. If I could somehow have done something to stop any of it. How it might have been different. Sometimes when I'm so tired I would cut out my eyes just to close them, and the sleeping pills are making me retch, I can almost picture us both back under that tree. Amy and I- me with the book and her making daisy-chains with Missy on her lap.... It's all messed up now.
And now I'm wondering if you understand me at all. You, in your fancy little room with a desk and a couch and a pencil and pad, I'm wondering if you think I'm just the next crazy with a story to sell. Or if you even believe me at all. Whether after I've left this place, you'll look at that note pad with excitement in your eyes and send it to the nearest publisher, just like he did.
Amy was what she was: the original Alice: my sister. And now I am what I am: sleepless, nameless: Amy's sister. All we had was each other…. When I go - tell me, will you sell my 'heart'? Please? Maybe then I can join her at last. I'm begging, please- it's just… I feel so very... very... tired...
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The Original Alice - a short story by Hannah Sauer (hehehe)
Gotta hand it to your imagination Booji, that was fantastic. Well done, i am sure that homeworks getting an A* :D
Cool!
That was simply fabulous, Hannah. Good job. Thanks for sharing it with all of us.
The Original Alice - a short story by Hannah Sauer (hehehe)
Thank you. I am really prayng for an A minimum for this homework, after all the time I have spent obsessing about it.