As children, we're expected not just to believe in fairy tales, but to embrace them. Boys can fly and live as children forever, girls can be rescued from their evil step-mothers and whisked away to castles in pumpkin coaches; the world is an endless stretch of possibility set against a backdrop of inherent freedom.
It is only a fiction. The world eventually reveals itself to be an unkind place, the villains not easily defeated, no fairy godmother to come to the rescue. The loss of innocence is taken in stride by some, and those fortunate masses go on to become grown-ups, to live out their lives in some boring profession or another, to forget magic after passing it along to their own children.
But what of those who grow older without growing up? What if Alice witnessed something so terrifying that she never wanted to leave Wonderland? What if Belle's beast was so cunning and so cruel that she could not bear to part from him, his murder of her father aside? For all of those who fell through the cracks, for the most unique and the least privileged, the untouchable and the uncared for, for the most heartbreaking and horrifying, there exists a refuge. The shelter? A deceptively quiet New England hospital; Cheshire Crossing.
