A Victorian era preteen named Alice was sitting idly by a brook when she happened to notice a white rabbit standing next to her and fingering an iPhone.

“Bloody hell!” exclaimed the Rabbit, his whiskers twitching anxiously. “I’m late for a very hot date!”

A country-bred girl, Alice was on terms of easy familiarity with most animals, but this particular one struck her as being rather unusual.  Still, she felt obliged to engage in polite conversation with him.

“What do you mean by ‘a very hot date,’ Mr. Rabbit, sir?” she inquired.

“Her name is Cyndi,” the Rabbit replied. “She’s my current inamorata and, if I may be blunt, she’s quite a luscious babe. Here’s her photo.”

He played with his iPhone for a moment, then showed Alice Cyndi’s picture.

“She is indeed nice-looking,” Alice said, “but she seems to be missing her whiskers.”

“They were removed by the Brazilian wax treatment.  But here’s a photo of my previous gal, Gillian. She kept her whiskers.”

“My, my,” said Alice, clicking her tongue. “You certainly seem to have a lot of girlfriends, Mr. Rabbit.”

“What can I say?  Being a lagomorph, I tend to mate with my fellow lagomorphs at the proverbial drop of the hat.”

Alice was a quite intelligent girl, but somehow the word lagomorph had escaped her vocabulary. She asked her new companion for its meaning.

He responded: “A bunny. A cottontail. A snowshoe hare.  Even a pika. And, of course, yours truly. Let me show you something that might help enlighten you…”

He handed Alice his iPhone, and she found herself looking at the Randy Lagomorph Facebook Page, which boasted a gallery of rabbits of both sexes grinning lasciviously. She was only able to look at the page for a moment, however, because the Rabbit reached over and grabbed his device from her, then gazed at it himself.

“I just got a text message from Cyndi,” he said.  “She wonders why I haven’t shown up and thinks I might be hanging out with some other bunny. I’ve got to find my way back down the rabbit hole…”

Whereupon he ambled off, and Alice went back to sitting idly by the brook, but he returned only a few minutes later with an expression that suggested vultures were gnawing at his heart.

“My GPS has gone awry,” the Rabbit lamented. “It told me to walk 100 meters north, then turn left and walk for 60 meters, and then I’d find my hole. All I found was a very large cow pat.”

Ever the optimist, Alice observed, “Perhaps the cow pat was covering the hole?”

“Splendid idea!” the rabbit exclaimed. He raised his device to his mouth, and using the GPS app with voice commands, said, “Find cow pat.” And off he went again, only to return a short while later.

“This time it routed me to a pile of horse poop,” he observed sadly.

“Well, this is a rural area…” Alice began, but the Rabbit interrupted her.

“OMG!” he declared. “My old friend Humpty Dumpty has just fallen off a wall, and he’s been smashed to smithereens. Have a look at his Instagram photo. You can see that he is — or was — a good egg.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, sir,” said Alice. She offered the Rabbit a handkerchief for what she figured would be a sudden cascade of tears.

He refused the handkerchief. Instead, he bent down over his device and began tapping on it. “I’m offering my condolences by way of a posting on social media. It’s much less arduous than sobbing. Much quicker, too.”

Alice was now curious about the world down the rabbit hole, and she asked her companion about it.

While he was tapping his condolences, the White Rabbit answered her question. “It’s a veritable wonderland down there,” he said.  “For one thing, there’s Wi-Fi everywhere. And anyone can access it at any hour morning, noon, and night. Even, in fact, dodos.”

“But I thought dodos were extinct,” Alice observed sensibly.

“Perhaps, but that doesn’t prevent them from getting Wi-Fi…”

Stuff and nonsense, thought Alice.

“We also have hookah-smoking caterpillars, perpetually grinning Cheshire cats, Mad Tea Parties, and…blast it, Cyndi’s just attacked me with a drive by crucifixion on Tinder.”

This is getting curiouser and curiouser, Alice said to herself.

“Blast it again!  Now I’ve got a text message from the Queen of Hearts inviting me to play croquet with her tomorrow morning. If I don’t show up, it’ll be off with my head.” A pause. “I’ve really got to find that bloody hole!”

Fingers crossed that you find the hole, thought Alice, because I’m starting to find your presence more than a little tiresome.

The Rabbit started ambling away yet again, but he suddenly stopped dead in his tracks. “Well, fry me for an oyster,” he said. “Here’s a chap who can help me locate the hole.”

The chap in question was the Rev. Charles Dodgson, otherwise known as Lewis Carroll, and the Rabbit immediately took a selfie with this well-known individual.

Carroll removed the top hat he was wearing, quickly grabbed the Rabbit, and stuffed him into it. Meanwhile, Alice curtsied in deference to her benefactor.

“We authors are magicians,” Carroll declared with a broad grin.  And he pulled the White Rabbit out of his hat sans device…

Whereupon the Rabbit now joined Alice in sitting idly, not to mention happily by the brook.

Lawrence Millman’s most recent book is The Book of Origins, a collection of satiric short stories in the style of George Carlin, but not, definitely not, Jane Austen.  Visit his website (www.lawrencemillman.com) to find out more about this celebration of political incorrectitude.