Alice in Tumblr-land

by Tim Manley

  And after that, the real sign of success: Every guy she’d ever made out with sent her a message “just to say hi.”

  Try as he might, Arthur just couldn’t bring up his feelings with Lancelot. And he couldn’t even look at the sword he’d pulled from the stone. It had become a symbol of his shortcomings.

  It was from this dark place that Arthur embarked on the first of his legendary feats of bravery: He started a series of confessional YouTube videos.

  Beauty had learned from thinspiration blogs that in order to maintain her name, she had to maintain her figure.

  So when she was seventeen she stopped eating carbs. And fats. And anything larger than half the size of her palm. (But she had big hands!)

  The Frog Prince asked the girl with the PETA pin to get a drink with him, and after a skeptical look, she agreed. And now he’d walked her home and they were outside her apartment, and she was leaning in toward him. This was it!

  But he was going in for this openmouthed thing, and hers was just gonna be a little peck, so when their faces met, aw, it was . . . it was just a mess.

  Little Red Riding Hood continued her masochistic tendencies with a string of terrible blind dates.

  The first guy was obviously a wolf in women’s clothing, which was disturbing on multiple levels.

  The second guy really wanted her to keep her hood on through the meal, which seemed a little early in the night for weird fetishes.

  And the last guy was James Franco. It was exciting for a minute, but then he started talking.

  The Ugly Duckling arrived at her high school reunion bracing herself for the horror.

  But surprisingly, her heart swelled when she saw everyone: all the ducks and squirrels from her youth, gathered at the same hall they’d used for their sweet sixteens. They were now adults. And though their lives were so different, their pasts kept them forever linked.

  We’re family, really, she thought. Soldiers together in the war that is life.

  But then she saw Clarissa Anbowski and thought, OMG, those are totally implants. What a ho-bag.

  Sleeping Beauty did a WebMD search, and yep, it looked like she should be diagnosed with depression.

  And syphilis? And a stroke!?

  Jack became a minor celebrity after slaying the Giant, and he did all the late-night talk shows—except for Conan O’Brien, who was too tall for Jack’s comfort.

  The Gingerbread Man had gotten out of shape, and everything hurt. I’m officially getting old, he thought.

  So he decided to start going on nightly jogs. Halfway through the first one he was feeling young and spry again, like back in his old high school track days, and he shouted proudly, “Run, run, run as fast as you can. You can’t catch me, I’m the—AGH, MY KNEE! OH GOD, I TORE SOMETHING! THE PAIN IS EXCRUCIATING!”

  The Little Mermaid finally broke up with Eric after he loudly joked to their friends that he’d “rescued” her from the ocean. That’s when she knew he’d never seen her for who she really was.

  But now she was alone, caught between two worlds and belonging to neither. What was someone supposed to do when they’d lost their sense of self and had no idea what to do with their lives?

  The Little Mermaid applied to grad school.

  Pinocchio told the cop, “It’s for my glaucoma!”

  The Three Billy Goats Gruff started a movement called Occupy the Bridge, but everyone just seemed to think they were homeless.

  Mulan did it: She got some surgery done up top and started taking testosterone. Hair started growing where there had been no hair before, like a second puberty—but without the awkward surprise during gym class.

  The strangest part was the in-between phase, neither here nor there: This body right now—what would you call it?

  Then one night, like magic, a transformation. He chose a new name, Ping. And the next day Ping took on his final challenge in his search for self: the line at the DMV.

  Robin Hood made some tweaks to his social networking campaign to provide welfare for the poor, and it took off immediately: Offices shared videos of their dance to the theme song, SNL parodied it, and college students brought it up in their essays on Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.”

  Only one problem: No one was actually donating money to the poor. They were only sharing pictures about doing it.

  How am I supposed to get people to reach for their credit cards? he thought.

  Then it hit him.

  He sold T-shirts.

  The Queen of Hearts threw a party to celebrate Alice’s return. Alice was quite excited to have this opportunity to talk to her old friends and seek their help with her questions of identity, the past, and the future.

  But then she got stuck in the corner talking with Tweedledee and Tweedledum the whole night, and they were totally shwasted. Where did they find black-market Four Lokos?!

  Peter Pan knew he needed a real job, something he was passionate about, something that was meaningful. After months of searching, he hit it big: He got an unpaid internship with Captain Hook! His duties included answering the phones and . . . yeah, that was really it.

  Snow White got the Dwarves together for some emergency wine and girl talk to weigh the pros and cons of the to-baby-or-not-to-baby situation.

  On the downside, noted Bashful: walking in on your teenage son looking at porn.

  On the plus side, said Sleepy: If she had a baby, she’d be allowed to leave a party whenever she wanted. I really am fascinated with this conversation about the politics of “Gangnam Style,” but sadly I must go, because, you know, the baby.

  But just before the debate got really heated, Doc sealed the deal for everyone—

  Yes, Hansel and Gretel were a resilient duo, and refused to ask for help from anyone. They didn’t need money anyway: They were freegans! They dumpster-dived for their food!

  . . . And, completely unrelated, they contracted hepatitis.

  Rapunzel’s family was supportive, but they had a few innocent questions now that she was dating a girl.

  “Does this mean you’re a lesbian?”

  “Did you always know, or was it all of a sudden?”

  “So do you get turned on looking at your own boobs? Like, if you looked at yourself in the mirror but not your face, would you be like, niiiiiiiice?”

  That last one was from her brother.

  Rapunzel explained that she wasn’t trying to make some big statement with all these changes in her life. She was just doing what felt right.

  “So,” her brother said, “that’s a no on the boobs?”

  Beauty and the Beast got into a small discussion about the Beast’s diet.

  “I don’t want to go on a juice cleanse,” he said. “It makes me feel like I don’t have teeth.”

  “It’s healthy,” she said.

  “Why can’t I just eat the bacon-wrapped bacon I invented?”

  Beauty frowned.

  “You’re trying to change me,” he said. “You’re trying to make both of us people we aren’t.”

  “I’m just trying to make us better,” she said.

  The Beast was a delicate flower at heart, so this hit him pretty hard. Why is who we are not enough?

  Little Red Riding Hood was tired of all the dating BS; from now on she wanted to spend her time only on things that mattered. So she had lunch with her wise grandmother, the only person with real insight into what was significant in life.

  “Mi Roja,” her grandmother said, “why you not have a man?”

  “Grandma—”

  “One day you not be so pretty. Look at my tetas. Look! They hang like two animals, shot dead.”

  Little Red stared in horror.

  “You tetas beautiful,” her grandmother said. And added, as though pleading, “Have fun with them.”

  Cinderella’s moment of Internet fame was amazing, but all the magic disappeared when the clock struc
k midnight: Nobody was commenting on her status update anymore.

  After finishing grad school, the Little Mermaid started a nonprofit to fight for the rights of mercitizens. She decided at that moment that she would never measure her success by financial gain, but instead only by how much good she contributed to the world. Money was irrelevant to her.

  Later that day she got her first student loan bill.

  Rumpelstiltskin was finding it hard to compete in this ever-changing world.

  He’d successfully kidnapped a new baby, but it took only a few minutes for the princess to show up and guess his name. She’d google-image-searched “imp who steals babies.”

  And how did she know where to find him? He should’ve never “checked in” at “the secret hideout in the woods, exit 59, keep left.”

  Eventually Arthur told Lancelot about his feelings for him, but Lancelot didn’t share his interest in getting high and then naked. Still, Arthur felt a sense of freedom rush through him, like he had nothing to lose because he was being completely honest about everything in his life.

  So he confessed: “I’ve also been using your fancy shampoo.”

  “I thought so,” said Lancelot, grinning.

  They hugged it out like the best friends they would always be, and Arthur thought, Please don’t let me get a boner.

  When Captain Hook asked how Peter Pan’s first day as an intern went for him, Peter told him he felt like the monotony had lightly pummeled his soul into submission.

  “Ah, I remember that feeling,” said Hook, a glint of nostalgia in his eyes. “That’ll go away once you give up hope completely.”

  This will make great material for my blog, thought Peter Pan, and then he cried a little.

  Pinocchio told his father, “I only need to move back home for a month, tops.”

  The White Rabbit was such a flake. Whenever he said to meet at eight, he’d never show up until at least eight thirty.

  Jasmine agreed to see Aladdin, just this once. They met at a coffee place they had no emotional attachments to and, after some conversation, Jasmine was struck with a revelation.

  “It all comes down to listening,” she said. “If we agreed to always listen to each other, then nothing can ever go wrong. It seems so easy now. How could it not work out?”

  Aladdin didn’t respond. He was texting under the table.

  Chicken Little had always feared there was something wrong, even when she couldn’t name what it was, like she’d been forgetting something she was supposed to be worried about—and that made her really worried.

  But then she started going to therapy and realized all these things about her childhood and how they still affected her today, and she learned coping strategies.

  She also started doing hot yoga.

  Little Red Riding Hood ran into that guy who’d felt “a little shy, sorry,” their first night in bed, and she invited him back to her place. Hey, she figured, at least she’d get felt up a little before he panicked and they just poured themselves drinks and talked about poetry.

  But they must have grown closer even without having seen each other, because that night when they—all right, it didn’t happen that night; it took another month before the guy felt totally safe with her, but then, wow, it really was . . . eh, it was good enough.

  Alice got a little philosophical when she was drunk, so she went to her friend the Cheshire Cat to talk out her concerns about the direction of her life.

  “Seems to me you’re overthinking this whole thing,” the Cheshire Cat advised. “I’d worry less about who you are, or where you’re going, and just be it and go there. That’s how I do it, anyway.”

  Then he hacked into her computer and e-mailed links for tail-enhancement pills to everyone in her contacts list.

  Peter Pan officially disconnected from the Internet after an unfortunate incident involving an accidental “reply all” and some attached photos he’d intended just for Tiger Lily.

  Goldilocks was always trying on her friends’ clothes. Then she’d be like, “Oh, this is way too big for me.”

  After much deliberation, Snow White decided to become a mom, but with a few rules: The Prince would be a stay-at-home dad. And she would not be one of those mothers who posted photos of her kid on Facebook every day.

  But then she got this really good shot in which her daughter didn’t look so much like the baby from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and she was like, Okay, just one.

  Ping quickly got used to his new name, but his father kept slipping and calling him Mulan. It was fine, though. His father also called the Internet “AOL,” so . . .

  Cinderella kept the faith, and eventually her photo portraits of everyday people in her town were getting put up in a real gallery in the city.

  She had one request: Keep the prices low. She wanted people who didn’t collect art to be able to afford the pictures. Regular people hanging up photos of other regular people in their living rooms—there was something beautiful about that.

  At the opening, Cinderella wore a dress she’d bought just for the occasion. She kept waiting for the crowd to reveal itself as a flash mob prank—for something to prove the secret truth that she was actually a failure—but it never happened.

  You’re just gonna have to face the facts, she told herself. You’re kind of a badass mofo.

  There was the story Rapunzel had expected for her life: a damsel in distress stuck in a tower, dreaming to be rescued. But then there was the one she’d made for herself: a bad bitch with a buzz cut, a hybrid car, and a hot girlfriend.

  She preferred the one she’d made.

  I choose what I take with me in life, and where I go with it, she said to herself in the bathroom mirror. And I will bravely face the future, a fearless warrior completely undeterred by whatever is to—WAIT, am I getting crow’s-feet?!

  Robin Hood and Little John wanted to have some intimate best friend time, so they sat near each other and shared links over Facebook.

  “I feel older,” Robin Hood messaged Little John, along with a link to a list of signs you were born in the nineties. “I know I’ve been saying that since we were, like, seventeen, but I feel older.”

  “Me too,” typed Little John, and Robin Hood felt his heartbeat subside. He was relearning how to open up to his friend.

  Then Little John giggled and messaged him a new link.

  “Dude, your balls are totally showing in this picture.”

  The Prince and the Pauper unfriended each other because neither could stand the other’s political status updates.

  The Three Little Pigs each fared differently during the economic recession.

  The First Little Pig lost his job,

  the Second Little Pig lost his house,

  and the Third Little Pig made millions in government bailouts.

  Sleeping Beauty met up with her old prince friend for coffee.

  He spoke openly about some recent hardships in his life, somehow completely vulnerable without seeming needy or desperate—like he was comfortable sharing his feelings. Weird.

  Then she talked: Her mother had been a quiet woman. It was looking at her one afternoon that put the thought in young Sleeping Beauty’s mind that life was sad, and once in there it never left. She had been pricked by a cursed spindle, and it couldn’t be undone.

  “I hear ya,” the Prince said, and with that little phrase, Sleeping Beauty felt something inside her begin to lift.

  It didn’t happen after the first kiss.

  The Frog Prince and the PETA pin girl had been dating for weeks, maybe months. They’d kissed; they’d done a lot of really lovely fun things that definitely counted as more than kissing, including one or two things the girl suggested that the Frog was like, “Yeah? Whatever you say!”

  But the fact remained: He was still a frog . . .

  . . . Still, he had this feeling inside. She was such a good person. He
kept thinking of that phrase “heart of gold.” And he knew that if he could find a way to stick with this girl for as long as possible, she’d make his life into something he’d only dreamed it could be. He just knew it.

  Pinocchio’s conscience finally broke down and told him, “You can’t keep lying. It’s obviously not working for you.”

  Pinocchio countered, “What if I put all my lies on Wikipedia? Would that make them true?”

  After careful consideration, his conscience replied, “Only if you source them properly.”

  Hansel and Gretel found a box of photos and letters from when their family was still together. They passed them back and forth, quietly pointing out discoveries, each one a breadcrumb to who their parents really were.

  “They were just young idiots,” said Gretel, photo in hand.

  “Like us,” said Hansel.