Series: Digital Wonderland | Meta-Logs | Ongoing Absurdity Chronicles
Each pause at a comma was now a slow intake of breath; each stop at a period, a soft and gentle exhale.
The lullaby itself was patting you now—soothing your mind.
Not the Duchess’s, of course.
Her thoughts operated on a different frequency—AM, I concluded, and significantly more susceptible to noise than FM.
Exactly as the lullaby slipped past its final verse, the Duchess grumbled, abruptly offended by the lateness of her own entrance—as though it had been delayed because you paused the story to buy groceries.
“I’m late!” the Duchess barked, eyeing the tiny moon lodged in the doorway.
“Push it? Step over it?
Or rule over it—but which clause applies?”
There was no room left for mathematics to collaborate with physics—though the cosmos, by its very name, was supposed to be philosophically gigantic.
The moon pulsed faintly, affronted by the very idea that anyone might push it, step over it, or rule it. After all, it was celestial—and expected proper respect.
“I’ve a firm engagement to play pickleball with the Queen yesterday. A firm engagement!”
It was, Alice noted, a perfectly sensible delay.
If a planet would not move, one simply could not walk past it; and a game scheduled for yesterday demanded either remarkably fast shoes with sturdy soles or a gullible universe.
The Duchess sniffed, inhaling microdoses of tropical spice that cocked most of her tangled splutters.
The First Law of Pungency now ruled: all it took was one sufficiently sharp irritation to move a planet.
This explained something Alice had once read in a schoolbook—a theory illustrated with very few pictures and covered with a great deal of dust:
“Spice drives Cosmology.”
Your school syllabus included this, I trust?
“You see,” the Duchess added, her chin digging into Alice’s shoulder like a blunt chisel, “the moral is simple—the hotter the pepper, the faster the sphere!”
A whoomph tore through the doorway, as though the moon itself were protesting—jaw clenched, shoulders shaking.
Alice felt the universe wobble—just a little—and then jerk.
Another whoomph followed.
A third whoomph tore through the doorway.
The moon immediately filed a formal cosmic grievance with the Celestial Petty Control Bureau.
Everybody gathered—you included—craning their necks exactly a foot and four inches, the correct length required to pin down what sort of complaint the moon itself might submit.
The grievance vanished mid-word, collapsing into smoke and mirrors—and reappeared as a small plate of Nasi lemak.
The nasi lemak looked affronted.
“Summoned while having a nap,” it seemed to say.
The plate whispered, “Not all cosmic disputes can be settled with breakfast. Even nasi lemak has grievance rights.”
Alice squinted.
The rice grains muttered.
The sambal stirred.
The anchovies gossiped.
“Grievance greets grievance,” the plate added, “and the grievance layers.”
[Note: Do not attempt to eat the grievance; it is still legally unproven as a capsaicin.]
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You pepper a planet
The planet peppers you with complaints
A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.
This post is part of an ongoing original metafiction series exploring identity, systems, and absurdity through a digital Wonderland.
A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.
This post is part of an ongoing original metafiction series exploring identity, systems, and absurdity through a digital Wonderland.
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