The cookbook stated as Alice read, "'Let simmer for thirty minutes to an hour, adding seasoning to taste. The vegetables should still be firm but cooked when a fork easily comes out of it. Serve when done.'"

"Hmm, I suppose we have time," she joked, tapping her chin with slight boredom. "What about you, Mr. Rabbit? What do you want to do? Nothing too hard please since I'm feeling under the weather." Alice raised her hand towards her forehead. It felt warm as a fireplace and her headache was currently ebbing away.

She closed the cookbook and set it to the side. The plush rabbit's arm was grabbed. Alice walked at a slow pace around the kitchen table towards the living room where a tea party was still set up from a few hours earlier. Moving from the stove to there was a short distance, but she felt the absence of heat. Some of her dolls and other plushies sat on small chairs, whittled out when she was five after her papa noticed she felt sad that they had no chair of their own. The chairs ranged in size, each of them unique with carvings or paint marks. She sat down at the head of the short table, her chair being gigantic compared to them, but they paid no mind.

Plopping Mr. Rabbit in his seat next to her, Alice felt nice. Everything was in place; she just had to pass the time. She rubbed her hands in front of the fire, her fingers ice cold and her teeth chattering a bit. Despite the fact that she felt extremely cold in the comfy environment, she was grateful for the fireplace doing its best to keep her warm. It was the perfect place for tea too. As she poured some tea from a hot kettle left heating nearby the flames into a teacup, she also pretended to pour tea in her playmates' cups. Some of the tea spilled over the cup as her focus wavered from her dizzying headache and it stressed her how the liquid goodness seeped into the tablecloth. Alice dabbed at it with a napkin as she tried to distract herself from it. With it barely made better, Alice let out a sigh and started suggesting things to do through Mr. Rabbit.

"How about a game of chess?" he asked. "You always love that."

Alice clicked her tongue as she casually added a squeeze of lemon and two sugar cubes to her tea, mixing it in with a small spoon. Usually she'd add in a splash of milk instead of lemon, but she knew how important it was for colds, good health, and keeping scurvy away as her papa always reminded. "I'd say yes. But I think you'd beat me at it this time if we do." She set the spoon down on the tea saucer. The girl knew that she was the one depicting what moves would be made and who'd win, but thought she might be unable to parry the moves she'd let Mr. Rabbit make.

"Afraid to lose or are you a sore loser?" Mr. Hatter chimed in. She liked to make him say riddles she couldn't find the right answers to. He was a black velvet top hat that had no mouth, but that didn't stop Alice from trying her best to add him into the conversation, speaking in her best posh accent.

"No, I'm not." She crossed her arms brashly. "Just tired is all. Wouldn't want Mr. Rabbit to feel like I'm letting him beat me that easily."

"Or maybe you just like how that sounds," he retorted. Mr. Hatter was more rude than she knew him yesterday. Then again, she wasn't sick that day, just had little sniffles. Maybe it was the discomfort of her being ill that made him so.

Mrs. Honeybee snapped with as much aggression as she could muster in a shaky thin voice, "Oh, hush you all. I have some sewing to do!" Her hair wasn't gray or white, but Alice liked to think she was the wisest and a matriarch of dolls. She was a stout doll with brown curls, dark eyes, a pink bonnet, and a dress with a honey bee embroidered on the corner of her pale pink apron. In her tiny basket were some yarn scraps Alice found fitting for her and part of a split hairpin to act as her sewing needle.

The plush rabbit said, trying to clear the air, "Wouldn't want any unfair matches or fights at all." Inside thin wooden boxes placed on the floor of a rounded corner of the tower were wooden pieces with painted images covering one side. As individual pieces, they were merely bold colors clashing, a glimmer of some other hues catching at each core, reaching out as if there was a pair to match and extend. Be that as it may, when put together, they created picturesque sceneries of places far away, depicted by wary travelers or imaginative artists. "What about puzzles?" he suggested.

She hesitated. Alice knew it would be a great way to spend time and had a rewarding masterpiece at the end, showing worlds she felt were just a fingertip away. "If I start, I'll want to finish." Her fingers touched her lips, pulled away from the consoling porcelain tea cup, her teeth pressing gently against her nails, ready to bite. "I'll be too invested to get some rest. Another time?" She didn't feel like she had enough strength in her to follow through, imagining herself straining her eyes in the golden glow to see blurred pigments in the inky darkness.

"Definitely," he agreed.

The tea party continued. She lifted the mellow teacup, clinking it against each of theirs, their small and mighty table of ten. Alice let out a cough, trying to clear out her airway lest she choked drinking the tea. "Down the hatch it goes," she said, bringing the teacup to her mouth. One swig of the amber liquid made her stomach feel warm as if she was basking in the sun. It was mild and sweet. Her throat felt less discomfort and her voice became less hoarse. Meanwhile, the pot on the stove bubbled, in desperate need of a churn before the contents boiled over.

"Oh!" Alice put down the teacup and ran over to the stove top, quick as a rabbit, to stir the soup. She had made it in time and the bubbles diminished, getting scrambled in the starchy and healthy mixture. "Bloody hell that was close!" The girl continued stirring, making sure she had time to breathe. "Maybe I should do something a little bit less distracting and nearby. Some reading perhaps?"

Mr. Rabbit asked as she tried to bounce her voice off the walls, "All in favor, say aye!"

A bunch of various ayes created by the blonde youth reverberated in the circular stone room, but this time it was quieter than before. Seeing as to how the pot seemed bubbly but less likely to boil over, Alice walked to the tea party area to grab Mr. Rabbit for him to choose a book. It was his choices that made things a bit more fun. They skipped over to her bedroom, about five wide skips distance, went around the pram full of baby dolls, and looked at the shelving. There were a bunch of knickknacks, an angelic doll, some trinket boxes, and her favorite books she liked to keep nearby. A peruse of the selection would shout in brilliant imagery how wide the world could be; they were filled with fantasies and adventures in far off places, the wild depths of sea life, vivid descriptions of just about anything in poetry, and a collection of her favorite stories her papa told her written in his hand for those nights when he was too sleepy to tell her one.

"Which one?" she asked, holding the soft plush up to the books, the book spines visible in his eyeline.

"We could use a crumb of courage right about now to tide us through your malady, don't you think, my dear Alice?" Mr. Rabbit questioned. "What poem was that again?"

"Indeed, Mr. Rabbit!" She grabbed the tome and put it in the crook of her arm, its weight being quite hefty as if it were a small babe. "I think that was something by Emily Dickenson."

Together, they headed back to the warmth of the stove and she placed Mr. Rabbit and the book gently on the kitchen table. Alice stirred the pot once more before opening up to the index section of the poetry book. Once she found the author in the alphabetical list, the girl skimmed the book, one hand holding the spot of the index and the other searching for the right page. After all, Emily Dickenson had written many poems and some of what Alice assumed were her most famous pieces were scattered across the work. "There it is, page 78," she announced. She turned to the page, the large cursive letters labelling the poem as 'Hope'. The poem went as follows:

'Hope' is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

I've heard it in the chilliest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.

Alice was always motivated by the poem, in and of itself that she could do anything she put her mind to. The desire for something to happen and the expectation that it would come to be was never lost to her. Even in the most upsetting of days, the invisible feeling would come to push her out of her misery with the thought of something better than what she was currently forced to suffice with. It was as sure as the sun was to rise and the moon to come back after a brief disappearance. Emotions and uneventful situations were temporary. Hope kept her afloat as the winds kept birds aloft. A morsel of the heart was all it needed and could never be taken away by anyone lest she let them.

"This is just a small sickness. 'It will be over before we know it.' Just like Papa always said," she assured herself, closing the book with a flame in her chest. She'd be free someday, her heart longed. Alice felt as if she just willed and believed it enough, it'd manifest from her wildest dreams and give her the most captivating view she'd never known before.