She looked up at me, smiling slightly. Her eyes were rimmed with pink, and dark from crying. Her fingers tightened on the rabbit she clutched to her chest. Her dress was blue and white and her stringy hair was faded yellow. I’d never met her before, but I didn’t need to. I knew who she was.

“Alice.” It was supposed to be a question, but it really wasn’t.

Her smile widened a bit. She leaned back against the door, and the motion dislodged some dirt that fell onto her shoulders in clumps. It looked unnatural, for her to be so dirty. Dusty. Almost forgotten. She didn’t bother brushing the dirt off, but it bothered me so much that I did it myself. She looked surprised at the contact, her face scrunching up in confusion. Her shoulder twitched.

She brought her knee up to her chest and rested her chin on it, her blue eyes staying on me stubbornly. She looked as if she belonged there, leaning back against the cracked blue paint of the door. There was no one else around us, except that one lonely cricket who seemed to be following me around. When he tried to sing, she turned her apathetic gaze his way, and he quieted immediately.

The Gate-Keeper, I realized, a bit belatedly. She must be the Gate-Keeper.

And as I realized it, I saw it. Resting against her dirty breast, as dull and as ordinary as the girl who kept it. The key. The Way Home. I could barely see it, hidden behind the bent and dirty ear of her stuffed white rabbit.

“Will you let me through?”

“No.” She thought about it. “You may only leave when you don’t want to.”

I looked around me at the decaying wasteland around us. “That will never happen,” I assured her.

Her lips quirked in the slightest smile. “Perhaps,” she agreed. She shifted, a slightly more friendly stance. She reached into her pocket and pulled out two teacups no bigger than my smallest nail. “Would you like to have a tea party with me?” I would have said no, but she looked so lonely, so small and dirty and forgotten, that I couldn’t bear to leave her alone. So I sat and took one teacup and rather than tea, we drank each other’s hearts. We talked until it was impossible to talk anymore.

When we was done, she got up, and put the key around my neck. Then she smiled at me, kissed me once on the forehead and left me, the Gate-Keeper, to my lonely and forgotten existence. She promised to visit, and I smiled and believed her.