Written by Fantasy Girl 

Alice was her name – my great-aunt on my mother’s side. There are no pictures any more, no paintings like there used to be, not that I was alive when they were there… forty years ago, maybe? Fifty?

She was insane, that’s what they said. She had strange dreams, claimed they were true. She would say they sat at a table, and drank out of old tea cups with broken handles, with a rabbit, and a door mouse, and a man in a green hat. And sometimes there would be a cat too, who would always smile. And a caterpillar that would blow rings and words out of the smoke from his pipe. She was insane, I get it, but…

I never got to meet her. Mum and Dad would visit her in the mental asylum, with my nanna and granddad. They wouldn’t let me go too. I was ‘too young’, I was ‘too impressionable’. In other words, they were ashamed of her. They didn’t want me to be tarred with the same brush and they didn’t want me to have any connection with her.  Continue reading →