The Mirror by Jude Cowan Montague

The Mirror

How had she come here? That answer was easy. She had looked in the mirror. Then she had walked into the mirror at which moment she walked into herself. Or not herself, but herself in mirror world. Where she was still herself.

She was still Alice. Alice was a fixed point in time. She was safe only in who she thought she was while everything around her was changing so fast, faster than breakfast down to dinner and sleep and the next day on its crazy round of meals and conversations.

Time was backwards but she was still going forwards when the White Queen tried to grab her escaping shawl, flinched at her own blood and finally pricked her skin as Alice helped her fasten the cloth around her shoulders. Alice tried her best to help the Queen. but Alice hadn’t understood that it was Alice who was wrong. ‘I’m talking to myself again,’ she noticed. She was still a child,

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and her confusion was that of a child’ s. These adults, even if they were chess pieces ran past her complaining and crying until the knight caught her in his arms and lifted her high in the air. She didn’t want to be a prisoner. She needed to cross the brook and become Queen Alice but the White Knight was too strong, holding her upside down, trapped inside her own logic.

Jude Cowan Montague

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