Alice Moving Under Skies
by Amanda Sichter
Disclaimer: The Universe is Marvel's. The TCP concept started with Kielle and Laersyn. The poem is Lewis Carroll's.
The children are dreaming.
Soft dreams, sweet dreams, dreams that touch and soothe me - dreams that take away the fear. It is their gift to me and I love them for it.
I reach out to them in the night, drift among them like smoke, feeling their dreams - the happiness, the innocence, the love - tasting but never taking. Taking hurts them. I learned that early and have never repeated the mistake.
But some dreams there are that sting like spikes, that hurt and maim and these are the dreams I seek each night.
Here one dreams of the bully that waits for him in the school-yard tomorrow. It doesn't take me long to soothe, to turn the tables, to give him the courage and the knowledge so that tomorrow he will face up to the bully - whose dreams I also touch tonight to soothe the angers that drive him to hurt others. Perhaps tomorrow they may become friends, but I shall not know unless I touch their dreams again.
Here one frets and tosses - pursued by monsters in purple winged sneakers (I have learned not to wonder at the fears of children). My power wraps around her and in moments she has grown fangs and turns on them - they scream and run but I turn it into a game and leave her as she tumbles in joy with her fellow monsters.
The next one burns like a dark flame - a beacon of terror in the night. Her pain is exquisite as she lives again through what her uncle did to her that day and the shame and the fear of "their secret". Some dreams cannot be soothed away easily and I spend a long time with her, wrapped around her, holding her, comforting her, telling her that Alice loves her. I leave her in the early hours of the morning, content in the knowledge that tomorrow she will tell her mommy what has happened.
I seek out only one adult mind tonight and I leave him screaming in his bed.
I leave them in the early light of dawn when they first begin to stir and depart the realm where my power can touch them. One last tendril I send out and over the children. Happiness soars through me, the joyous light of children's dreams.
I have only a little time before day when I will have to lock myself away again - lock myself away from the light that burns my sensitive eyes and too-pale skin. Lock myself away from the world that terrifies me - the waking world, the adult world. Photophobic, agoraphobic - my home is my whole world to me. My home - and the dreams of children.
My mother named me Alice after her favourite character in Lewis Carroll. She never knew how apt is was - never knew her freakish daughter would come to something good. But she always hoped and she always loved me - and it is that hope and that love that I carry out into the night and the dreams of the children.
The children in my town do not have nightmares. And they always know that, no matter what the world has done to them - no matter how it hurts, in the night Alice will come and hold them and soothe them and love them always. In my town, no-one is afraid of the dark.
It is my gift to them - and they love me for it.
They are the world to me.
~Still she haunts me, phantom
wise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.
Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.
In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream -
Lingering in the golden gleam -
Life, what is it but a dream?~
The End