Sara: How did you get here?
Boy: I followed you.
Sara: Impossible.
Boy: I only had to close my eyes the moment you vanished.

Silence for a moment. Sara in her private Wonderland was right to be astonished. "By Invitation Only" was the law of her fantasy realm, yet here was the boy, and somehow he had found a way in.

"Run that way," Sara pointed off in the direction of the pink sun. He was off immediately. "But he'll be back," she thought to herself, "when I turn the path the opposite way." Now she pondered the uses of a boy in her Wonderland. "He could put the leaves back on the trees." They were constantly falling to the ground whenever the trees snapped themselves to attention. "Or put me on the slide, in moments I am not." She slid the blue slide down to the gravelly ground. "Now come back," she spoke.

"Here I am!" the boy announced, "I found a tablecloth. We can have a picnic!"

"What will we eat?" she smiled coyly, "There's no food here." There really was nothing. If Sara became hungry, she merely forgot more of the real world, to notice, moments later, that her socks became striped or a wall sprouted dots in shades of primary colors. The boy went away, then returned a while later with a handful of jelly beans. Sara was trying to catch her breath after swinging a complete Ferris-wheel cycle on the swing. He let the jelly beans fall and helped her, heading off the long strip of breath that looked like a rosy red ribbon flapping in the chaotic wind. What a mad dance it was! Never more than two feet on the ground between the two of them, and sometimes none, and neither in reach of the other - nor the ribbon. But finally they cornered the renegade breath. Sara snatched one end, the boy the other, and they shared it between the two of them. Afterwards, contented and waiting for something to say, they noticed the spot where the jelly beans had fallen. A spiral of cotton candy had sprouted into the strawberry sky!

"You can't catch me" Sara teased, or maybe it was the boy. They chased each other first one way, then the other, all the way up the candy, pausing for little bites along the way, for the running was making them hungry. When they reached the top they were holding hands and stickily sweet all over.

There they sat, on top of the Wonderland world, breathing their breaths together. "I still would like to know how you slipped into my Wonderland," Sara persisted.

"It was easy," the boy answered while glancing down at rainbow meadows. "This whole fantasy is my imagination."

She smiled with primal joy, and joined his gaze into the fairy-tale lands below, "I knew there had to be a logical explanation."

Story #377

Thank you to Dark Firefly for sharing her photo with us!

And now, for your further reading enjoyment: Comatose...