Alice and the Ogre

Alice's life changes on a Tuesday morning. The coffee shop she works at, close to campus, is crowded with professors and students getting their caffeine fix before class. So when the bell above the door chimes yet again, she barely looks up. When she does, she sees the beautiful

golden light of morning sunshine falling on what can only be described as an ogre: bright green, gap-toothed, and snaggled-haired, it resembles a human but is anything but. “Alice,” comes a gruff voice, “you have to save the kingdom.” Alice blinks and looks around the coffeeshop.

The ogre, no longer there, was very real to Alice. People ordered drinks and continued their conversations around the coffee shop. Was she hallucinating? She looked in her cup, for what she wasn’t sure. Then from where the sun fell on the ogre she saw it. Above the espresso

hovered a jellyfish that had millions of stingers sunk within everyone in the coffee shop. A dozen had sunk into her, manipulating what she saw. The ogre flickered into an elf, a dwarf, a normal human, and back into an ogre again. Alice shuddered and the jellyfish disappeared.

With her vision properly restored, she downed the last of her lukewarm coffee in one giant swallow, picked up her sledgehammer, and chased the ogre out of the coffee shop, roaring mightily. The cowardly hipsters cheered her on but stayed safely inside with their scones & lattes.

Little did they know that an ogre’s only weakness is an angry mob. The ogre would be back with friends, and thanks to the failure of the hipsters to act, this would ultimately be their last day of freedom and coffee.