Rose bushes that once argued about paint jobs are just thorn now, acres of it, climbing over toppled queens and rusted flamingo mallets. Somewhere past the hedge, the tea table lies on its side like something that bled out.
Alice is on her back on one of the white squares, and she cannot move.
The plastic is clear and it is tight, sealed from her shoulders down to her toes, and under it she wears nothing at all. Her tits are pressed flat against the wrap, mashed by the tension each time she arches, and every buck of her hips smears the plastic against her ass until it squeaks faintly against the rotted square beneath her. Her pussy is on display through the film, framed by the crease of her thighs, and there is not one thing she can do about it. Wonderland got a good long look at everything it took from her. Wonderland is not shy about staring back.
She fights anyway. That is the whole of her situation right now, fighting.
She twists at the shoulders and the wrap creaks and holds. She kicks from the ankle, both legs strapped together, and gets maybe an inch of give before the plastic takes it back. She rolls, gets halfway to her side, teeters there with her tits dragging against the film, breath punching out of her in ragged gusts, and then gravity and the wrap conspire and slam her flat again. Each attempt costs her air. Each attempt fogs the plastic from the inside, a humid gray bloom that comes and goes with her lungs. Sweat has no exit either. It beads under the wrap and slides down the channel of her sternum, down the slope of her stomach, and pools in the small warm places that the film presses against her skin like a second, crueler modesty.
“Hello,” she says to the gray above her, and her voice cracks on it. “Hello. I don’t actually know why I keep saying that. Habit. The door had a talking knob, once. Everything here used to talk. Now it’s just me and the, the thorns, and the thorns don’t count, they never had manners, they were always the worst guests.”
No answer. A wind moves through the bramble and the thorns click against each other like polite little teeth.
She bucks again, harder this time, alligator-style, slamming her ass against the board and whipping her head from side to side. Her hair has come loose from whatever it was doing before this happened and it fans out across the white square, damp at the temples. The plastic takes her thrashing and distributes it, tightening somewhere every time she gains slack somewhere else. There is no seam she can find with her fingers, no edge, no knot, no latch. Her fingers are mittened in the wrap, pressed together in their own little pocket, and the most she can manage is a flutter that looks, she knows, exactly like a small wave. Hello. Goodbye. Both, maybe.
“I had a dress,” she tells the dark, breathless from the last round. “The blue one. It had pockets. You don’t appreciate pockets until they take your dress and your pockets and wrap you up like leftovers.” She laughs, and it turns into something else halfway out, and she stares at the dishwater sky until it passes. “The Hatter would say something now. Something about time. Time’s dead here, though. I checked. The clock is a briar patch with a face in it, or maybe it’s a face with a briar patch in it. I’ve been looking at it too long.”
She twists again, writhing, the plastic shrieking softly against the square, her tits sliding under the film with the motion, nipples dragging against it, and she screams a little, not from pain, just from the need to spend the scream somewhere. The sound goes out over the board and does not come back. Wonderland has stopped echoing. Even the echo got up and left, and she cannot blame it, but she wishes it had stayed, because the alternative is this quiet, this gray, and her own voice worn down to thread.
Her thighs strain against each other inside the wrap, pussy squeezed between them, and she flexes her whole lower body at once in one last huge effort, back bowing, ass clenching, heels digging, and the plastic groans and does not break, has never broken, was never going to break. She crashes back down. Her chest heaves. The fog inside the wrap blooms thick now and thins, blooms and thins, her breath sawing in and out while she stares upward.
“Somebody,” she murmurs, and it is not a word so much as a shape. “Somebody, anybody. You. If you’re the kind of thing that’s a you. I know you’re not the wind, the wind doesn’t watch. You watch. I can feel it on me like a thumb on the back of my neck. So look, since you’re looking. Look at what he did, what she did, what it did, I’ve stopped keeping track. Look at what’s left of the girl who fell down a hole after a rabbit.” Her eyes are wet and she does not blink it back or in. “But if you’re going to look, then see me. See that I’m still moving. That’s the whole trick here, whoever you are. You’re only caught when you stop.”
And she is still moving. That is true and it stays true. Her fingers flutter. Her shoulders roll a few degrees left, a few degrees right. Her tits shift under the clear film with each slow breath and her hips work in small stubborn circles, ass grinding against the square, going nowhere with tremendous commitment. The wrap creaks like a ship. She breathes like a runner.
At the edge of the board, the thorn has begun to move.
It comes on slow, the way patient things do, one black runner uncoiling across a dead white square, then another, and another, a whole slow tide of bramble peeling itself off the hedge. It takes a pawn square first, swallowing the rot, and keeps coming. Alice sees it and her breath goes shallow and quick, fogging the plastic in shallow quick clouds.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh, hello.”
The thorn does not answer. It has never had manners. It just keeps coming for her, one square at a time, and she pulls against the wrap with everything her tired body has left, wild again, all the way wild, while Wonderland watches and clicks its little teeth.
