Alice in Wonderland
Rewritten by Leila Nabih
Alice was sitting by a river one warm afternoon, feeling bored and hot. A movement caught her eye and she saw a strangely dressed white rabbit run past. He was wearing a waistcoat and kept saying he was late. She had never seen a dressed rabbit before, even less one that she could understand, so she quickly got up and followed him.
He disappeared behind a large flowering bush. Alice followed quickly but in her haste, failed to see that he had jumped into a large hole in the ground, and she fell in.
She fell for what seemed like a long time. When she finally reached the bottom, she found herself in a room with many doors. But no rabbit. On a table sat a little key and a tiny bottle with a label that said “Drink Me.” She tried the key in every single door she could see and eventually figured out it was the key to open the smallest of these. She drank from the bottle, and found herself shrinking enough to fit through a door but she’d forgotten the key on the table. Under the table was a little box with a piece of cake inside that said “eat me”. She grew again after nibbling a piece of magic cake. Alice kept changing sizes until she finally managed to enter through the door and found herself in a lovely garden.
In this garden, she met unusual creatures. A smiling Cat appeared and disappeared whenever it liked. A Mad Hatter and a March Hare invited her to a tea party that never ended. Everyone spoke in riddles, and no one behaved in a normal way, but Alice tried her best to stay polite.
She met a blue Caterpillar sitting on a mushroom. He spoke in slow, dreamy sentences and asked her many puzzling questions. He told her that changing size was normal in this world and that she must learn to stay calm, no matter how strange things became. His words confused her, but they also made her feel a little braver.
When Alice saw the rabbit again, it was when she met the Queen of Hearts. The queen had a nasty temper and was always shouting for people to lose their heads. The Queen invited Alice to play croquet, but as with everything else in this world, the game was wild. The balls were live whimpering hedgehogs, the mallets were obnoxious flamingos, and everyone cheated.
Everything became even more confusing when the Queen realised someone had stolen her tarts. The queen ordered a trial, everybody gathered in the courtroom, and everything turned to chaos.
The Knave of Hearts was the one accused of stealing them. The courtroom was stuffed with noisy characters, all arguing at once. Witnesses gave silly answers, and nobody listened properly. In the end, the Queen didn’t care about evidence—she simply shouted for the Knave to be punished.
Alice finally stood up and said the whole trial was nonsense. She felt brave enough to stand up but as she was about to make her case, the world around her began to fade and she found herself back by the riverbank.
It had all been a dream, but a very strange and exciting one.
