Après Moi, La Rouge!

                              head canted to the side, arms folded & resting on his                               chest.  there’s  a hesitation,  before  he sighs,  and a                                smirk  is let loose. amusement in  your actions. now                                why  is  a  guy  like  tyler  watching  you?  gotta  ask,                                are you doing anything that’s worth it?

Her eyes flick up from her book as she detects a movement out of the corner of her eyes; it was the queerest thing, because she had thought herself truly alone when the sound of something running through the grass disturbs her. 

Now don’t be silly, Alice, it’s probably just some rabbit, or another small animal. Nothing out of the ordinary in the garden.

However, when the animal appears in plain view, she lets out a gasp, starting, and having to pinch herself to ascertain that she’s not dreaming. 

A White Rabbit wearing a waist-coat and a watch… Just like my dream that I had when I was a little girl! 

The Rabbit looks straight at her, making brief eye contact before it scampers away again, leaving Alice to just stare after it in bewilderment. After a moment, it comes back, almost seeming to give her an impatient glare before it sits and stares at her again. 

Perhaps it wants me to follow it? I don’t think this is really a good idea, but I have to know. I have to know if this is some strange dream, if I’ve fallen asleep on the bench in the garden, or if I wasn’t dreaming all of those years ago. 

After a moment, she stands, her book falling out of her lap, before she takes this as her cue, and follows the rabbit into the forest, and after a few hours of what felt like chasing this rabbit around, she finds the Rabbit hole, feeling her heart skip a beat. 

Can it be? 

She unfortunately leans too close over the edge and falls into the hole, head over heels, letting out a small yelp as she tries to grab roots, rocks, or anything really to stop her fall but to no avail. 

Down and down she falls, the sunlight above fading as she falls further into the earth, and after a while she stops looking up and starts waiting for the inevitable impact with the earth below. After a few moments, she decides she’s in no immediate danger of crashing to the ground and breaking her legs, she starts talking to herself to pass the time. 

"Oh goodness. How will I ever get out of this hole? It seems to go on forever. They’ll have to use ropes to come down and get me… if they even find me. At least this way, I might not have to marry Reginald. Dying in a hole wasn’t exactly my plan on how to escape an engagement, however."

She looks down and frowns, seeing herself pass cabinets and bookshelves, a title catching her eyes, and she furrows her eyebrows, picking it off of the shelf, and leafs through a pages. This is certainly the strangest turn of events to happen to her lately. So it seems that her trip to this strange land wasn’t just some childish fantasy but was real. Perhaps, or just her way of coping with some horrible childhood memory of falling down a hole. 

"They’re going to need awfully long rope to get me out of here. I suppose I could try climbing up, though in this dress that might prove difficult indeed!"

She gives another frown as she looks down the hole again. 

"How far down does this go? At this rate I’m going to end up in a Jules Verne novel… I’m going to fall right down to the Center of the Earth, and find myself among dinosaurs and lands untouched by man."

 She lets out a deep sigh, closing the book. The bit about dinosaurs was nonsense, and she knew it, but she had to find some way to entertain herself.  Would this fall never end? 

Carefully, she holds onto the book, for fear of dropping it on anyone below. Wouldn’t that be dreadful, being stuck in a hole with a dead person. If there was anyone down here. Highly doubtful. 

Eventually the floor rushes up to meet her, and she flinches, bracing herself for impact. However, her fall is broken by a pile of leaves, and she sits up, blinking at the sight before her.

There was a long hallway filled with doorways, that the Rabbit was quickly making a hasty retreat through one of the doors. Shaking herself off, she starts after the rabbit through the halls. In her astonishment, she forgets to speak proper English for a moment, musing out loud again, and looking at her surroundings in wonder. 

And then, as if by some miracle, the blade of the guillotine which was poised to come upon that rabbit's neck came to a halt, for he had delivered me news of She-- older, perhaps, yet unmistakably The Alice who had once shown me such spirit and utter disregard that I was scarcely sure that she had not been more than a phantom figure I might have conjured in the name of need, a hunger that reached within my very core, to find a soul who might be bold as to defy me. To challenge, sans the fear of death, but rather, the assuredness of victory.

Of course, she would not succeed in any attempt to beseech my good will, nor to stake a claim upon this throne; simply the existence of her belief that such things were possible was enough to bring a small smile unto heart-shaped lips.

Such a naïve little wonder she was, this Alice from beyond the Rabbit Hole.

For his part, the rabbit had just been ushered in by the Spade Guard, insisting animately that the girl would be here at any moment. At this, I demanded a mirror to be fetched, that I might gaze upon myself, find no red tress left out of place.

❤ Je suis très jolie! ❤

And so it was that from years, to mere minutes, the separation between us grew less and less until, finally, it ceased to exist any longer. I saw her, a vision of beauty and curiosity-- and all of this time seemed worth it in that instant, to see her as she was just now, so utterly lovely.

"Is it often that you would allow yourself into one's home-- uninvited, no less."

‘For me, this scene is not a piano performance, it’s a metaphor for sexual intercourse, and because it’s between a teenager and her uncle, it’s incestuous. Phillip told me he has a four-hand piano piece he had written as a husband and wife duet, and where the husband has to put his arm around his wife in order to play the correct notes. So if you look at the postures from Mia and Matthew, the way they move, you can see these moments of ecstasy, the roused emotion of a sexual act. At that moment, the audience can imagine that India’s uncle might be the fantasy of a young girl, or some kind of phantom…’ —Chan-wook Park