Story: The White Rabbit's Run

The White Rabbit's Run

by

George R. Shirer

Copyright 2026

All Rights Reserved

Steve the White Rabbit had a very specific, very precise internal clock. It ticked not in seconds, but in milliseconds of anxiety, and for years, its pendulum had swung to the tyrannical rhythm of the Queen of Hearts’ voice. “You’re late, Rabbit!” “Faster, Rabbit!” “Off with your head, you dawdling laggard!”

The final straw wasn’t a beheading order. It was a teacup. A delicate, bone-china teacup, thrown at his head during a croquet match because the pink flamingo mallet had been placed three inches left of where Her Majesty had imagined she’d left it. The cup missed, shattering against the Mock Turtle’s shell with a pathetic tink. Steve didn’t flinch. He just checked his pocket watch. 4:17:23 PM. Precisely 2.7 seconds late for the 4:17:20.3 tea-pouring ceremony.

Something inside him, something wound tighter than the Hatter’s favorite clockwork, went snap.

That night, while the Queen snored over a half-eaten plate of stolen tarts and the Hatter mumbled about six-legged pocket watches, Steve ran. He didn’t just run; he fled. His short-burst superspeed, usually reserved for frantic errands, became a marathon of panic. He ran past the bewildered Dee-Dum, a blur of white waistcoat and twitching nose. He ran out of the warehouse, through the rain-slicked alleys of Oldwick, across the Indigo City Bridge, a pale streak against the dark Atlantic. He ran until the manic, colorful chaos of the Wonderland Gang was replaced by the vast, indifferent sprawl of America, and he didn’t stop until his paws ached and his watch had lost all meaning in the time zones.

He stumbled into a place that felt less like a city and more like a sigh. New Toshi, California. The City of Broken Promises. To Steve, whose soul craved order, it looked like a grand clock that had been dropped, its gears spilled and rusting. The perfect circular layout was still visible, but the mag-lev tracks of the Sakura Express were graffiti-covered skeletons. Buildings stood empty, windows like dead eyes. The air hummed not with industry, but with a strange, soft static—the whisper of spirits.

Steve, clutching his now-useless schedule, felt a profound, soul-crushing sadness. He’d traded a mad queen for a ghost town.

He found shelter in the hollow shell of a former bank in the hollowed-out City Center. He spent days wound tight, flinching at every strange glow (a passing Will-o’-the-wisp spirit) and every odd noise (Mordelon, the hallucination-inducing spirit, grumbling in the distance). He was a creature of punctuality in a place where time had clearly given up.

The change began with a thump. Not a violent thump, but a rhythmic one. Outside his bank, a group of humans and spirits were trying to push a stalled, solar-panel-covered van. A woman with bark-like skin (a dryad from Esperanza Verde, though Steve didn’t know it) called out, “Hey! Fast-looking guy! Give us a push on three!”

Habit made him check his watch. It was broken, frozen at the moment he’d left Indigo City. The sadness welled up again, but so did a strange, unfamiliar impulse. He didn’t have a schedule. He didn’t have a queen. He just had… a request.

On “three,” Steve became a blur of white. He hit the back of the van with gentle, rapid-force shoves. The vehicle lurched forward, its solar cells catching the sun with a happy glint. The people—and spirits—cheered. The dryad woman handed him a warm, slightly misshapen muffin from a communal bakery in Fairland. “Thanks, speedy. You new?”

Steve, mouth full of blueberry goodness, could only nod. It was the best thing he’d ever tasted.

Slowly, Steve found his rhythm. It wasn’t the staccato panic of the Queen’s demands, but the steady, collaborative beat of a community surviving. He’d use his speed to help old Mrs. Gable in Delta Beach (who was 103 and claimed to chat with a sea-spirit in her kettle) by fetching water from the community well faster than anyone. He’d zip along the Boardwalk, delivering messages between the human-run taco stand and the spirit-run luminescent ice cream parlor (the flavors were concepts like “Nostalgia” and “Quiet Joy,” and they were delicious).

He met Kage Onna once, a silhouette of beautiful darkness drifting under a lamppost in Fairland. She’d smiled, a crescent of moonlight. “You run from something, little rabbit,” she’d said, her voice like silk over shadows. “But here, you run to. Interesting.” She drifted away, leaving him with a shiver that wasn’t entirely fear.

He even found a use for his obsession. He became the unofficial timekeeper for the Spirit Night Parade, not with a watch, but by feeling the crowd’s energy, coordinating the float-builders in the Yard with the lantern-lighters in Esperanza Verde. He discovered that “on time” in New Toshi meant “when the community is ready,” and that was a far richer, warmer schedule than any he’d ever known.

One evening, as he helped Mayor Mark Singer untangle a snarl of extension cords powering a documentary screening in Zaleidos Center, the Mayor clapped him on the back. “You’ve found your warren, Steve.”

Steve looked around. At the glowing spirits floating beside humans laughing at the film. At the solar-powered lights strung like hopeful stars. At the Heavy Metal Rangers’ HQ in the distance, a quiet guardian presence. The city was broken, yes. But it was mending itself in weird, wonderful ways. And he was a part of it.

He wasn’t the White Rabbit of the Wonderland Gang anymore. He was just Steve. The fast guy who helped out. Who liked Mrs. Gable’s stories and “Quiet Joy” ice cream. The sadness for his old, frantic life was still there, a faint, bittersweet chime in his heart. But it was soothed by the warm, comical, and deeply earnest symphony of his new one.

He pulled a new timepiece from his pocket—a gift from a clockwork spirit in the Yard. It didn’t tell hours or minutes. Its single hand pointed to words around the dial: Now, Soon, Later, When Ready. It was perfectly, beautifully useless. And Steve, for the first time in his life, was perfectly, wonderfully on time.

* * * * *

The silence in the Wonderland Gang’s latest hideout—a disused florist’s shop in Gilman, its air still thick with the ghostly scent of lilies and despair—was not peaceful. It was the silence of a broken mechanism.

Iris deClerk, the Queen of Hearts, slumped on a throne made of stacked phone books and a moth-eaten velvet cushion. Her scepter lay across her lap, its jewel dull. She wasn’t shouting. She wasn’t even pouting. She was… listless. “The tarts are stale,” she murmured, poking at a pilfered danish.

“Stale as a / week-old joke,” Dee and Dum chimed, but their usual synchronized glee was absent. They just leaned against each other, not practicing flips.

Seymour Shandry, the Hatter, was trying to fix a cuckoo clock he’d pulled from his hat. But his hands were shaking, and his eyes kept losing focus. “The gears are all a-jumble,” he whispered. “The little bird won’t sing. It’s all wrong. The time is… is sticky.”

The Mock Turtle whirred in the corner, its clockwork eyes scanning slowly. It had no personality to mourn, but even its movements seemed slower, less certain, as if awaiting an order that never came.

The problem was a gaping, rabbit-shaped hole in their reality.

It had been weeks since Steve’s abrupt departure. At first, the Queen had been enraged (“Find him! Bring me his head! Or at least his pocket watch!”). The Hatter had tried. He’d concocted a “Lagomorph Locator” from a soup spoon, a spool of thread, and a dash of stolen nuclear medicine. It had spun wildly and then melted. Dee-Dum had asked around their network of street-level informants, but “twitchy guy in a waistcoat who runs fast” wasn’t a unique identifier in Indigo City.

Without Steve, their madness had no tempo.. Raids fizzled because no one was screaming about schedules. The Queen’s whims arrived at the wrong moment, or were forgotten entirely. A planned heist of the Aisling Museum’s “Clocks Through the Ages” exhibit degenerated into the Hatter having a tearful conversation with a sundial while Dee-Dum got tangled in a grandfather clock’s chains. They’d fled empty-handed, the Queen’s hair a mess.

The chaos was still there, but it was sluggish, discordant. It was chaos without purpose. It was, they were horrified to realize, boring.

“It’s my fault,” the Queen said suddenly, her voice small. The others stared. The Queen of Hearts admitting fault was rarer than a polite Regulator.

“Nonsense, Majesty!” the Hatter said, but it lacked conviction.

“It is!” she wailed, standing up, the danish tumbling to the floor. “I was too harsh! I called him names! I threw a teacup! A teacup, Seymour! At his head! What if… what if it chipped?” The thought of a chipped, traumatized Rabbit seemed to horrify her more than the act of violence itself.

“He made the madness make sense,” Dee whispered, looking at his joined brother.

“He gave the crazy a schedule,” Dum finished, nodding. “Now it’s just… crazy.”

The Hatter snapped his fingers, the cuckoo clock forgotten. “That’s it! He was the metronome! The pendulum in our grandfather clock of glorious nonsense! We need the tick to our tock! The haste to our waste! We must find him! We must beg, borrow, or… or politely request his return!”

“But how?” the Queen moaned, sinking back onto her phone-book throne. “He could be anywhere! He could have hopped a freighter to… to Belgium!”

The Hatter’s eyes went distant, the way they did when he was accessing the stranger corners of his mind. “We cannot find the Rabbit by chasing him. We must think like the Rabbit. He craves order. Precision. He fled from chaos, so he will have sought out its opposite. A place of quiet, of rules, of… of punctuality.”

Dee-Dum frowned in unison. “Where is there / a place like that?”

The Hatter began rummaging in his hat, pulling out a battered atlas, a pair of novelty glasses glasses with windshield wipers, and a vibrating tuning fork. “We need data! We need to listen to the world’s rhythm! The Rabbit will have settled where the rhythm is steady, but… broken. A place that needs a keeper of minutes!” He placed the tuning fork on the atlas and let it hum. “We shall ask the city!”

Their method was, as ever, completely unhinged. The Hatter strapped the atlas to the Mock Turtle’ss back. Dee-Dum held the tuning fork aloft as the Turtle clanked out of the florist shop and into the Gilman streets. The Queen followed, holding her scepter like a dowsing rod for anxiety.

They became a slow, bizarre parade. The Hatter would shout questions at mailboxes. “Has a nervous man in white passed by? Did he check your posting schedule?” Dee-Dum would ask pigeons about air traffic patterns. The Queen accosted a bewildered college student, demanding, “Do you have any overdue library books? HE CARES ABOUT THOSE THINGS!”

They gathered fragments. A barista in Uptown recalled a jittery man who’d asked if the espresso was extracted at “exactly 93 degrees Celsius.” A bus driver in Pickford remembered a fare who’d vibrated in his seat, complaining the route was “47 seconds behind the posted timetable.” Each clue was a piece of Steve’s trail of temporal fastidiousness, leading vaguely west.

Finally, they stumbled into The Nook in Pickford. Milo Tunt, wiping a glass, watched the bedraggled, bizarre group enter his bar. He didn’t blink.

“We seek a Rabbit!” the Hatter announced. “A white one! Prone to chronometric panic!”

Milo slowly put the glass down. “Fast talker? Always looks like he’s missing a train he never booked?”

The Queen gasped, her eyes filling with dramatic tears. “YES! That’s him! Our Steve!”

Milo leaned on the bar. “He was in here a few times. Always sat alone. Drank chamomile tea. Tapped his foot like a hummingbird’s heart. Last I saw him, maybe two months back, he was muttering about ‘inefficiencies in coastal public transit’ and looking at a map of California. Said something about a ‘circular city.’ Thought it sounded orderly.”

“California?” the Queen shrieked. “That’s full of… of sunshine and movie stars! He’ll hate it!”

The Hatter’s eyes lit up. “A circular city… A planned community! Geometrically sound! But… but if he went there, and it’s not orderly orderly… the cognitive dissonance!” He clutched his head. “He could be in a state of perpetual temporal shock! We must save him from the tyranny of poor urban planning!”

They bought a terrible, glitter-covered tourist map of California from Milo (pulling the payment from the Hatter’s hat—a handful of bottle caps and a live goldfish), and huddled over it back at the florist shop.

“There!” the Hatter jabbed a finger at a small, perfectly circular dot on the coast. “ “New Toshi! ‘The City of Broken Promises!’ A grand design, now a ruin! The ultimate test of a orderly mind! He’ll either be trying to fix it… or having a nervous breakdown in its geometric center!”

The decision was made. They would go to New Toshi. They would find Steve. They would apologize (the Queen practiced in the mirror: “I’m sorry I implied your ears were slightly too long…”). They would bring him home.

Packing was chaotic. The Hatter filled his hat with supplies he deemed essential: a compass that pointed to the nearest source of whimsy, a jar of “instant Pacific Ocean” (just add water), and a self-inking stamp that said “LATE.” The Queen insisted on bringing her throne cushion. Dee-Dum practiced carrying it.

They commandeered a vehicle—not by stealing, but by the Hatter convincing a bewildered owner of a vintage, canary-yellow VW bus that it “yearned for a road trip to find its destiny.” The man, hypnotized by the Hatter’s description of sentient automotive longing, handed over the keys for a bag of what felt like jelly beans.

As the sputtering bus (now with the Mock Turtle strapped precariously to the roof rack) pulled away from the curb, the Wonderland Gang looked back at Indigo City’s skyline.

“We’ll be back,” the Queen said, with more hope than she’d felt in weeks. “With our Rabbit.”

“And then,” the Hatter giggled, adjusting a pair of goggles, “the madness will be properly timed once more! Off we go! To the land of spirits and shattered grids! Tally-ho!”

The bus backfired, spewing smoke, and lurched into the flow of traffic, beginning its long, uncertain journey west. In the back, Dee and Dum looked at each other.

“Do you think they have / proper time zones there?”

“I hope so. For Steve’s sake.”

And with that, the Wonderland Gang left Indigo City, a comet of beautiful, desperate nonsense shooting across the country, chasing the steady tick-tock of a heart they hadn’t realized was their own. The city’s rhythm would be a little less frenetic, a little less precisely unhinged, in their absence. But in a forgotten florist’s shop, a single, stolen cuckoo clock finally sprang to life, the little bird shooting out with a feeble, rusty “Cuckoo!”

It was, everyone would agree, hopelessly late.

* * * * *

The Wonderland Gang's journey to New Toshi was a masterpiece of beautiful, chaotic misadventure. Their yellow VW bus, guided by the Hatter's "whimsy compass" and Dee-Dum's bickering navigation, crossed the country in a series of detours that involved a spontaneous croquet tournament in a Nebraska cornfield, a brief attempt to declare a roadside diner a sovereign nation (the Queen was deposed over a disputed piece of pie), and the Mock Turtle accidentally deploying its flamethrower to "defrost" the engine in the Rockies.

When they finally sputtered into the circular ruins of New Toshi, they were a spectacle even by the city's standards. Their garish madness clashed with the quiet, resilient weirdness of the spirit-haunted town. They found Steve not in the geometric center, but on the Delta Beach Boardwalk, calmly helping a human baker and a water spirit coordinate the timing of sourdough rises with the tidal patterns.

The reunion was not what they expected.

Steve stood at a makeshift stall, carefully arranging spirit-luminescent pastries on a solar-powered display. He wore simple, practical clothes—khakis and a blue work shirt—with his old white waistcoat neatly folded on a nearby chair. His movements were measured, purposeful. When the garish yellow bus backfired to a stop at the curb, he didn't flinch. He simply finished placing a "Nostalgia" muffin, wiped his hands on a towel, and turned.

The Queen of Hearts burst from the bus first, her crimson gown trailing in the salt-tinged air. "RABBIT!" she shrieked, a mixture of fury and desperation in her voice. She stormed toward him, Seymour Shandry scrambling behind her, Dee-Dum tumbling out in a synchronized somersault, and the Mock Turtle clanking ominously as it disengaged from the roof rack.

Steve stood his ground. "Your Majesty," he said, his voice calm. Not the frantic squeak they remembered, but a steady, quiet tone. "You're approximately 2,800 miles off-course. And 47 days late."

Iris deClerk skidded to a halt, her dramatic entrance undermined by his placidity. "Late? Late? You dare talk to me about—" Her anger faltered. She looked him up and down, taking in his calm posture, the faint smile on his face, the complete absence of twitching. "You... you look... rested."

"Sea air," Steve said simply.

The Hatter pushed forward, his eyes wide behind his spectacles. "Steve! Dear boy! The gears! They've gone all wobbly! The clocks weep! The schedules have developed a stutter! We've been lost in a sea of untimed whimsy!" He grabbed Steve's shoulders, peering into his face. "Your chronometric panic! Where is it? Have you had it surgically removed?"

Steve gently extracted himself. "I've been learning new ways to measure time, Seymour. Not everything needs to be counted in seconds."

Dee and Dum circled him, a six-limbed orbit of confusion.  

"He's not checking / his watch."

"Not even a pocket / glance."

"It's unnatural."

The Queen recovered some of her imperiousness, though it was tinged with bewilderment. "We have come to retrieve you, Rabbit. Your... vacation is over. There are tarts to be stolen, parties to be late for, heads to be threatened! The madness lacks its metronome!"

Steve looked past them, at the Boardwalk. A spirit made of shimmering light floated over to a human fisherman, offering to illuminate his bait bucket. A group of children—some human, one that looked like a small, walking tumbleweed—raced by laughing. The solar panels on the rooftops hummed softly in the afternoon sun.

"This isn't a vacation, Iris," he said, using her real name. The Queen blinked, startled. "This is my life now. I have responsibilities. I help Mrs. Gable fetch water. I coordinate the parade floats. I make sure the community bread oven is at the right temperature at the right time." He gestured to the pastry stall. "I help Kenta here sync his baking with the tide-spirits. The dough rises better."

The Hatter stared, his mind trying to process this. "You... you've applied your gift for temporal precision to... carbohydrate logistics?"

"It's important work," Steve said, a note of pride in his voice. "Here, being 'on time' means the community eats. It means the lights come on when it gets dark. It's not about avoiding a beheading. It's about... helping."

The Queen's lower lip trembled. The bluster drained from her, leaving a confused, lonely woman in a ridiculous dress. "But... we need you," she whispered, the admission costing her dearly. "It's not fun anymore. The chaos is all... floppy. The Un-Birthdays are poorly attended. I threw a tantrum last Tuesday and even I thought it was lackluster."

Dee and Dum nodded in sad unison. "The screams lack / syncopation."

"The panic has no / rhythm."

Steve felt it then—the powerful, tangled pull of them. The shared history of impossible heists and deranged tea parties. The loyalty that was as fierce as it was irrational. He saw the genuine misery in Iris's eyes, the Hatter's creative mind starving for its favorite constraint. They were his family, as broken and bizarre as they were.

He looked at his new home. At the mended, hopeful faces around him. He thought of Mayor Singer's quiet gratitude, of the spirit-child who called him "Uncle Fast-feet." He had built something here. A place. A purpose.

The war within him was silent but immense. The frantic, colorful past versus the calm, mended present. The heart that could love a mad queen and a dryad baker in equal measure.

It was Seymour who broke the stalemate, his eyes going distant in that way that meant he was accessing the strange, brilliant gears of his insanity. He watched a nearby spirit—a minor kami of lost keys—momentarily shift its form from a jangling cloud to a perfect, geometric keyhole before reverting.

"Two places!" he exclaimed, snapping his fingers. "Of course! Why be one thing? The Rabbit isn't a pendulum, he's a... a synchronizing satellite! Orbiting two worlds! A dual citizenship of the soul! A shared custody of chronometry!"

The Queen frowned. "What is he babbling about?"

"He means," Steve said, understanding dawning, a solution forming that felt right in its perfect, impossible balance, "that I don't have to choose. Not entirely."

He turned to Iris. "I will come back to Indigo City. With you. The madness... it is my home, too."

The Queen's face lit up with incandescent joy.

"But," Steve continued, holding up a hand. "I am not surrendering this. I get two weeks. Every year. Unquestioned. Uninterrupted. I come back here. To New Toshi. To be Steve. To help with the parade, to check on Mrs. Gable's kettle-spirit, to eat ice cream that tastes like 'Quiet Joy.'"

The Queen's joy turned to a pout. "Two weeks? But what about the annual 'Steal the Mayor's Gavel' gala? That's in spring!"

"Then we'll move the gala," Steve said, with a firmness that brooked no argument. It was a tone he'd never used with her before. "Or you'll manage without me. For two weeks."

The Hatter clapped his hands, delighted. "A Royal Holiday! 'The Rabbit's Reprieve!' It shall be marked on a calendar made of cheese and dream-logic, which only he can read!"

Dee and Dum grinned, their energy returning.

"A working vacation! / For our Rabbit!"

"He can bring us back / spirit recipes!"

The Queen looked from Steve's resolute face to the hopeful, bizarre faces of her court. She saw the alternative—leaving without him, returning to the flaccid, boring chaos. She drew herself up, the Queen once more.

"Very well," she decreed, trying to sound magnanimous though her eyes were wet. "A Royal Decree is issued! The White Rabbit is granted a... a sabbatical. Two weeks per annum. To indulge in... tidal baking and spirit parades." She leaned in, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "But you must promise to bring bring back some of that 'Nostalgia' muffin. It sounds decadent."

Steve smiled, a real, full smile that reached his eyes. "It's settled then."

The farewells in New Toshi were warm. The community, who had come to see the frantic, fast man as one of their own, understood. Mayor Singer shook his hand. "A heart can have more than one home, Steve. Just make sure this one's always on your itinerary."

Kage Onna watched from the shadows of a lamppost as they loaded the bus, her moonlit smile enigmatic. "Running to and running from," she murmured. "How very human of you, little rabbit."

As the refurbished bus (its engine now quietly humming with a benign blessing from a motor-spirit) pulled away from the Boardwalk, Steve sat in the back, with Dee and Dum. He held his old, broken pocket watch in one hand—the one frozen at the moment of his escape. In the other, he held his New Toshi timepiece, its single hand pointing peacefully to "When Ready."

He wasn't looking at either.

He was looking out the window at the fading, circular silhouette of the City of Broken Promises, now mended with strange magic and stubborn hope. The sadness of leaving was there, a sweet ache. But it was balanced by the eager, chaotic love of the family squabbling around him—the Queen already debating if his new calm demeanor meant they could finally attempt a heist synchronized to a lunar eclipse, the Hatter designing a hat that could store two time zones.

The White Rabbit's run had begun as a flight from tyranny. It had become a journey of discovery. And now, it ended not in escape or capture, but in a perfect, personal, and beautifully negotiated truce. He had outrun the madness only to realize he was part of its heart. And he had found a way to keep time with both halves of his soul—the frantic, glorious tick of Indigo City, and the deep, steady tock of a community that had taught a rabbit that sometimes, the most important schedule is the one you write for yourself.

As the bus merged onto the highway, heading east towards the city that never stops, Steve leaned back and closed his eyes. For the first time in his life, he wasn't late. He wasn't early. He was, exactly and perfectly, where he needed to be.