Wonderland 2024

F-2. The Mad Hatter

PROMPT ▼

Forever stuck in time! Write a story (or short poem) where your character is always stuck at 3 p.m. (<1000 words or < 40 lines)

Did you ever see that old movie Groundhog Day where Bill Murray has to relive the same day in a small town over and over again? Well, I've kind of got my own "Groundhog Day situation" that I'm dealing with and I'm not really sure what to do about it. Even in writing this down, I know it's not going to survive once the clock rolls over to 4 p.m. But I'm writing it anyway, because what else am I going to do?

See, I seem to be reliving only the hour of 3 p.m. over and over again. And if you ask me, that's just about the worst hour of the day because it's right as school is getting out. It's not even after school is already out; the first fifteen minutes of my existence are the last fifteen minutes of gym class which is, everybody knows, the absolute worst class. I literally regain consciousness in the middle of the locker room surrounded by people changing out of their gym clothes to go back home.

I've tried everything. Staying put, running away, asking people for help. No matter what happens, when the clock strikes 4:00 p.m. on the dot, I instantly black out and come to at the stroke of 3:00 p.m. in gym class again. At this point, I've been through all the phases that Bill Murray went through in that movie. Started with denial, of course, then moving quickly along into nihilism. One "cycle" (that's what I'm calling them) I ran into the girls' locker room, while another cycle was spent defacing school property. I even jumping off the roof of the auditorium once just to see what would happen.

Eventually the novelty of it all wore off, though, and I turned my efforts toward what I could accomplish with an hour a day. I got in ridiculously good shape by hanging out the gym equipment after school. I worked ahead and completed all my schoolwork for the entire year. I wrote multiple college admissions essays, refined my valedictory address, and filled out countless applications for summer internships. I greatly improved my conversational Spanish, picked up coding, and got pretty decent at sleight-of-hand magic. The hardest part was doing everything in one-hour increments. I almost envy Bill Murray for his entire day of time each cycle. What luxury!

The strangest part of all of this? Since it's always the same hour of the day, I'm never any more or less tired, hungry, etc. than I was at the beginning of the hour. Twenty-four hours in a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year ... if you add them all up, I've been awake for years.

The worst part of all of this? I'm not sure when it's going to end. The loops in Groundhog Day ended when Bill Murray finally learned to love someone other than himself, and to find happiness in the simple things. I don't feel like I'm particularly out of touch on either of those points, so what do I need to do in order to break the cycle?


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(524 words)