How Alice by Heidi Kasa

You’re standing in the woods, staring at a common American red maple tree. Your chocolate eyes are drawn to the bottom of the trunk where bark splits in a teensy tent shape, big enough to fit your chipped yellow-nailed fingertip. You’re reminded of the much larger fire cavities, or goosepens, in Redwood trees—the spaces that look like a tree cave you can crawl into.

Your mind pings around like pinballs in a machine, and you try to follow each ball: deadlines for work-plink-constant housework-clank-kids-bang-spouse-clang-parents-clash-friends-smash-birthday planning-clunk. Adding any other stimulation, you then seize up and feel overburdened. You don’t know what to do with people’s constant needs that have followed you into the forest. Fuzziness around you buzzes like television static.

Truth: You’ve been asking yourself to carry more than one person can hold.

You feel too heavy for your own body and yet ready to fly apart. Disconnected and uncentered. You came to the forest looking for a stillness that you don’t feel around people. Out here, you’re hoping to get a break so these obligations don’t break you.

Yet nature is a constant seething surge. Earthiness is under and all around you, the thick smell of life carried through the air. Unstoppable plants and animals, in heaving wind and unrelenting sun, though the light is refracted by leaves.

Your eyes stray to the crack in the tree. Does it hide a world? You think of Alice in Wonderland, and in that moment you feel your stained shirt, your ripped jeans, and your olive body within them shrinking. Didn’t Alice have to eat or drink something? Consumption as a vehicle for change. Vehicle for change. Change. As you get smaller, even your thoughts decrease.

Now you stand in the woods but can’t tell. You stare above at the bark split of the maple tree, looming overhead like a giant circus tent. Your body wavers for a tense moment. Should you add the confusion and uncertainty of where you are and why this is happening to your heaviness? You look at your hands, which appear normal, but are miniature to the surrounding trees. Your hands—they can’t contain everyone.

Still, you’re curious. The desire to explore tugs your bony body forward.

You enter the cave, ducking and instinctively covering your head with your hand, thinking you’ll hit it on the roof. But there’s plenty of space; this cavern is a full-size room. As if you had passed through an invisible membrane separating two worlds, you feel a huge shift. Your weight moves into your trunk, your core, and you walk upright with awareness of your full power. The hole in the tree has sucked up your anxieties; the bulk settled amorphously around you is lifted.

Your feet tread on lush dark brown soil as you move further inside. In the middle of the cave, something bunched up looks like a contemporary art exhibit, appearing as gathered bones in the shape of a round cage. As you get closer, you realize they’re fingers of white roots reaching out of the ground.

You lie down in the middle of their clawing circle. The roots clasp around you, forming a hug, and press on your forehead between your eyes. Other strings search for tender, fruitful spots. Tendrils rove over your hips, tugging and touching down with the soft certainty of a dog nosing out which person in the room needs the most comfort.

The roots rock you like you’re in a hammock, lulling you to sleep. Strands continue to rearrange around you like active computer circuits. Waves of color pulse through the network. You’re connected. While you’re sleeping, a rainbow runs over you, and sounds like tiny bells tinkling.

Your deep breathing slows, then stills.

The roots turn electric blue and straighten like pins. Zip. Zap. They light up in small shocks all over your body, mini fireworks bursting on various pressure points, blinking on and off in irregular patterns. Your skin takes on a blue cast.

Your breath is stopped.

Are you dead?

A dash of madness on your tongue, in your eyes.

You awaken because the roots release you. The tree cocoon knows you are ready to leave one network for another. You smell like wood, dirt, fire—a wild creature roaming open air.

Your entrenched body looks upward. The center of the tree is an endless black like the night sky. Rising and moving outside, you wade through large blades of forest grass around you, each step bringing on growth. As your body enlarges, you feel a shrouded weight returning. The load distributes more evenly over your defined recalibrated shape, this time like a coat instead of a plank. You’re a charged being. Your full lips open and an electric shock comes out. You know how to answer people. The universe’s voice adds to yours. no. nO. NO.

No more onslaught.

You notice others stepping out of trees and also swelling. You turn to look at your tree, finding green pulsing bark, and reach out to feel it warm and light under your regular-size hand. You lean on the trunk, setting your worries down like a backpack. You riffle through the bag like you’re looking for a snack and some water. A plan. You don’t stop to think why you’re looking for guidance in the pack full of worries.

Out of the corner of your eye, you see a spigot forming in the trunk. Water trickles out. Nuts drop in a clump from branches above. As you watch, the tree bark rearranges itself into a map.

You ask, “anything else?” and light glows beneath the divisions in the bark, practically winking at you. You almost laugh.

Satiated and relaxed, your dark skin is refreshed like a baby. You shoulder your pack.

Feet away from the tree now, your hands curl. You feel the tree’s glow on the tips of your fingers, the beat of its heart under yours.

You step forward to join the others.

 

The End

How Alice (c) Copyright 2026 by Heidi Kasa