Week 11 Storytelling: The House

Crying Baby, Source: flickr

Out of the blue, there came a loud crying from across the room.

The mom turned around just in time to see her daughter Lilly flailing about and crying hysterically. She was helpless and alone. The mom needed to be by her side immediately in order to comfort her daughter. She flew to the other side of the room so swiftly it was as if she floated. It was all a blur; she did not even know how she got from one side of the room to another. She was only concerned with comforting her crying daughter. Apparently, she had managed to knock down her husband in the process. He was not happy and covered in dust from the fall. The mom called to her husband that he must come to their daughter’s side as quick as he could.

The dad made his way to the daughter’s side, a little more slowly than the Queen, as he was recovering from the fall. On his way to the other side of the room, he noticed how filthy he was from the dust. He was appalled at the thought of a man being so filthy. His face squished together in a look of most discontent as he began to clean his clothes, skin, and hair of the dirt.

As he made his way to his daughter’s side, he could see why Lilly was crying. He took one look at her, and he was so shocked he fell over again.

The dad finally recovered from fainting and looked again at his daughter and then to his wife. The look in his eyes told his wife everything. They both looked at each other completely frightened.

Lilly had been crying for quite some time now. And rightfully so. Her body was covered in red dots all the way from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. She was rubbing all over as if she was trying to get out of her own skin.

Luckily, the dad was a doctor. The mom advised him to take notes on what he saw. He pulled out a pen and pad of paper to write down his observations. He noted the feverish look to her pale skin. Next, he wrote down where and how many red dots covered each portion of Lilly’s skin. He kept writing until it was clear he had no more to write.

The mom looked at his notes and was thoroughly confused. It all seemed like gibberish to her. The words could have been written backwards or in a different language for all she could make out of what her husband wrote. She was intrigued by his observations of their daughter and how he would cure her, but she could not comprehend any of the scribbles on his page. She just had to have faith that he knew the meaning.

 

Author’s Note: I decided to take the story of The Looking-Glass house and recreate it to be a realistic story. In the original there is a King and Queen chess piece who make their way to the Pawn (their daughter Lilly) and try to comfort her. Alice carries the Queen to the pawn, and because the Queen cannot see Alice, she is surprised how she gets there so quick. The King falls into ashes (falls into dust) and Alice then tries to clean him. He is again appalled at being in the air and cleaned by something he can’t see. The King decides to document his story in a memorandum of his feelings (doctors notes) and then writes the JABBERWOCKY poem. But, because it is in a looking-glass house the writing is backwards and Alice can’t understand it (just like the queen can not understand the medical notes). My story stretches the original but has the same essential plot line. My story just removes the “mystical” element that the Alice stories encompass and makes it a common story. 

Bibliography: The Looking-Glass House. Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll (1871).