by Ellen Datlow
Standing on unsteady legs behind me—it was me, naked and starved down. New, born again in steam, from a box I was only just now realizing was shiny enough on the inside that it must have been like living in a mirror.
No, behind a mirror. For years and years. Seeing only yourself.
Of course, if you ever got out, you would want a new face. A series of new faces.
Crawling into the back of the other me’s calf was a blue and bloody cat with a smile forever wide, and sharp. The sounds—no, I told myself. Don’t remember those sounds. Or the smell.
When the other me raised a hand to touch my shoulder, or my neck, like to balance from this thing that was happening to it, I fell ahead, only Tabby was standing in my way.
I juked to the side. Into the hall.
And of course, like you do when you’re a weak, weak human, I looked to the deep end first. To the dark end of the tunnel.
Dimly, there was a shape down there. A bleeding, raw shape.
Alice.
Just seeing her wavering there like she was injured, like she was failing, like she was about to fall, I understood.
She hadn’t sneaked the basket of blades back to her bedroom like I’d thought.
There’d been another. There was another.
Tabby. She hated what happened to Lewis, and she knew Alice was a cutter, so, she’d delivered her some cutting tools. She’d walked the basket right down the hall, opened the door, and pushed them in, then come back to me in the living room like nothing had happened. Like she’d wimped out.
I should have seen it. I should have listened closer. I should have known.
I took a limping step across the hall, planted my shoulder into the wall, kept my eyes on Alice.
Every part of her was bleeding, each cut tiny and precise, just like she needed. There were a hundred, a hundred and fifty small, triangular flaps curling up from her. Like when your shoulders are sunburned and the dead skin is all peeling off. Only, her skin wasn’t quite dead yet. Just the rest of her.
She held her hand out to me, the razor blade shiny in her palm, a tiny mirror I could probably see myself in, if I came close enough.
Or maybe I was already seeing it in me.
I could—if I cut just a small, nothing-line in the already-open meat at the back of my calf, then it wouldn’t even matter, would it? It wouldn’t even count. It wouldn’t be backsliding; it wouldn’t be starting anything all over again.
Alice, she could even hold her hand over mine, couldn’t she?
We could do it together. Line after line in that new meat.
I sucked my breath in with the deliciousness of it, and when Alice’s face back in the shadow cracked into a smile, I felt it spreading to my own face.
Never mind what had happened in the kitchen, at the dining room table, on the floor in the living room.
This was the hall.
This was a long corridor I could feel my way down. A tunnel I could walk down.
That’s the thing about tunnels—they go both ways.
We were all so worried about what might crawl up. We should have seen that long hole in the mirror for what it was, though: an escape hatch.
A story indeed, Mr. Carroll.
And then it came to me as it must have to him—that soft flash of insight I was always waiting for in the math classroom, in the math basement. That eureka moment I’d been planning to build my future on, once upon a time.
Lewis, my friend Lewis, would appreciate this. Tabby would scoff. Alice just cocked her head at me.
There is a way around the Dichotomy Paradox, Lewis, Zeno—that paradox where, to cross a distance, you first have to go half that distance, and then half of that distance.
All you have to do is hold your wrist out, for the delicate girl at the end of the hall to open it with her handful of jagged brightness.
The red strings she exposes, she can pull you ahead with them, pull you to her bit by bit, slowly, so that you seem to be standing still, stuck in time.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
ALL THE KING’S MEN
Jeffrey Ford
All the king’s men and all their horses showed up one night at my estate some months ago. It was late, I’d already retired, and it was raining quite fiercely. A pounding at the door and I heard my butler get up to answer. A few moments later—hinges squealed, light from the hallway fell across my face and then was blocked by Brazzo’s hulking silhouette. “My lady, the king’s men are here to see you.”
“All at once?” I asked. “Show them in.”
“Very good,” he said, and closed the door behind him.
I got up and put on my short silk robe, white peonies on an indigo background, and went out into the parlor with my hair a fright from the pillow. There sat three of the king’s men in their uniforms, caps resting on their knees. As I entered, they stood and bowed. I gave them a flip of my hand, and sat in my own seat next to the glass table.
“We’re here on important business from the King,” said Montcrief, captain of the king’s men. I’d known him for years, spent many excruciating hours with him at royal functions. A total blowhard. His two porridge-faced compatriots nodded.
I lit a cigarette and pulled the ashtray closer to me. “To what do I owe this disappointment?” I asked.
“This is top priority. Top priority!” he said.
I couldn’t help but smile. “Get on with it.”
“Seriously, Cinder, you can’t breathe a word of it.”
He spoke my first name, and it startled me. The dolt wouldn’t think of calling me by any other moniker than Lady Syres. I realized he must really be warning me about something.
He put his finger to his lips in a sign of conspiracy, and whispered, “Humpty Dumpty.”
Right then, I should have realized how twisted and off-putting the story that followed might be. Dumpty was an enigma. No one knew his origin—the clouds, beneath the earth, or if he crawled fully formed from the king’s own backside. A nightmare hatched into daylight—a four-foot creamy blue egg in short pants, blue jacket, and red bowtie. Pipe cleaner arms ending in white gloves, legs in loafers. A wide mouth, one side turned up in a sneer, the other, down. Shell jowls that waggled without cracking, a high-pitched chuckle, and a pair of droopy eyes.
“Humpty Dumpty,” whispered Montcrief, “met his end this evening.”
I was heartened by the news. No matter how many times I’d been in that creepy wanker’s company, he never seemed to belong to reality. The impossibility of him made me feel like too many rides on the carousel. “How could he exist?” was definitely the question at hand, but there was no reasonable answer.
Beyond the feverish fact of his existence was his personality, which was deeply unpleasant. He never shut up—pontificating, gossiping, sniping at the weak and downtrodden. He was protected by the King. When asked by my sister, the Queen of Hearts, why he kept the perverse egg in his court, the king’s response was, “Where will I find another?”
Dumpty had free license to run wild in the streets. Whatever mess he made or trouble he got into, the king would make a decree and all would be made right again, no matter the effort or expense. But these acts became increasingly outrageous. Citizens were harmed, property was destroyed, and children were put in harm’s way. One misadventure ended in fire, half of the business quarter turned to ashes. Dumpty’s only response was a shrill chuckle. Those who threatened to break his shell were eventually found in darkened alleyways, a porcupine needle shoved deep into each eye. I knew a woman who’d slept with the egg/man. She said he rubbed her the right way, burrowed deep into her heart, but left her gagging on a rancid, runny yolk.
“Was it at the Wishing Wall?” I asked.
Montcrief nodded. “Yes, he perched atop it, as is his wont every evening, and made miserable the lives of those who traveled there to make wishes. Hurling at them epithets and accusations. Sometimes when the pilgrims reached out to touch the wall in order to make their app
eal to fate, Dumpty undid his zipper, removed his snowflake pizzle, and rained insolence down upon those desperate hands.”
I laughed aloud at “his snowflake pizzle” and Montcrief looked put out.
“You’re as dramatic as a schoolboy, Montie,” I said.
“Obviously, Lady Syres, you underestimate the seriousness of these events,” he said.
“What events?”
“Aren’t you curious, my lady, as to how the egg-cur died?” said the king’s man to the left of Montcrief.
“Assassination,” said the one to the right of him.
“By whose hand?” I asked.
Here’s what Montie recounted in a whispered voice so annoying I wanted to set his mustache on fire. An hour before dusk the king’s carriage came down the Pellham Road. While passing by the Wishing Wall, it stopped. The king stepped out and saluted Dumpty up above. The egg remained seated atop the brickwork but kicked his legs out in front, clapped his hands, and gave a high-pitched chuckle.
“And how art thou, Citizen Dumpty?” inquired his highness.
“Where’s our lovely Queen?” asked the egg.
“At the chapel.”
“Wrong, your blindness. She’s making the beast with two backs on the floor of a stable with one of your most trusted councilors.” The crowd of bystanders gasped in unison at the revelation.
“What?” said the King, obviously enraged. Dumpty got up carefully, his balance a tenuous affair, and danced trippingly across the top of the wall, all the time chuckling and singing “La-la-la, the Queen of the realm is rutting.”
“Lie,” yelled his highness, but Dumpty danced and chuckled. The King soon reached the end of his amusement with the oddity and went back in his coach for his dueling pistols. He had his attendant load one of the guns for him and then told the young fellow to load the next and to keep them coming until Humpty Dumpty breathed his last.
“Are you sure he breathes?” asked the attendant.
Dumpty stuck out the index finger of each hand and put up his thumbs, pretending to be shooting the crowd.
The King aimed the first pistol with a wavering hand, fired, and chipped a piece off of the top of the wall at the egg’s feet.
“Shitty shot, shitty shot,” said Dumpty.
The king took the other pistol from the young attendant and aimed up at the prancing figure. He fired and the bullet went wide of its mark.
“No good with the gun. That’s what she said.” Dumpty turned and shook his bottom at the king.
This time his highness waited until both pistols were loaded. He took them and drew closer to the wall, standing right beneath where Dumpty danced. “I should never have allowed your existence in my realm,” he yelled, and fired. The left pistol again shot wide, but the right pistol’s lead ball grazed the side of Dumpty’s shell head. It was a minor scratch, not causing so much as a hairline crack, but the impact was just enough to throw him off balance. He spun his arms and twirled on one foot, swaying forward and back. Amid a storm of chuckling, the ridiculous dance went on for whole minutes as he tried to regain his balance.
All watched the fall without breathing, and it seemed to take forever. The mad egg/man landed directly atop the crown on the head of the head of state, shell caving in, yolk and the secret bodily juices of Dumpty spewing out in all directions. The king cleaved the egg, each side falling further to the cobblestones and smashing into a hundred pieces. His highness was laid low, bathed in the ichor of life, and all his men assisted him to his feet.
Montcrief’s doltish companions nodded. I lit another cigarette. “So why did you wake me? I couldn’t care less if Dumpty’s a broken heap somewhere. Good riddance to the abomination,” I said.
“There’s more,” said the man to Montie’s right.
“Quite a bit,” said the man to his left.
Montie carried on, telling the rest. “The king went into a rage and yelled, ‘I want this shit heap swept up. Every last insidious bit of it. Put it in a burlap sack, toss it into the blacksmith’s furnace, and then put the ashes in a sealed box containing three rocks. Take the box to the bottomless lake, row out to the middle, and toss it in.’
“My men and I set to our assigned task, combing the cobblestones for pieces of Dumpty. Most of the shards were sizable. I found the bit of shell with his droopy left eye, which shifted its gaze even though it was no longer attached to anything. Yes, the mouth still chuckled, until the king pounced on it with the heel of his boot and silenced it. His highness then got in his carriage, yelled, ‘To the chapel,’ and the driver let the horses run.
“When we had every crapulous scrap in the bag, we took it to Harbrough’s smithy and ordered him to get the furnace piping hot. We were just about to toss the sack of shell into the blaze when the king stepped through the doorway near out of breath as if he’d been rushing to get there. Still, he managed to yell, ‘Don’t burn those remains. I want that horrid imp reassembled.’ He gave no explanation, but put me in charge of the task. ‘Whatever it takes,’ he said.”
I laughed so hard the cigarette fell out of my mouth and I had to retrieve it from the floor.
“Enjoy your moment of jocularity,” he said.
“Well, Montie, I’d like to know who’s a bigger dolt, you or my brother-in-law. Of course, he’s bringing him back to find out who my sister’s sneaking around with,” I said.
“Maybe. Are you through laughing? I’m here to tell you that I have authorization from the crown to enlist you in the effort to reassemble Humpty Dumpty.”
“Why me?”
“You repair things, invent things. You’ve no equal in that respect. That flying carriage with the flapping wings was ingenious. You’re just what this undertaking requires. And why? Because this is one of those instances where shit is running downhill. In fact, it’s an avalanche.”
“I refuse.”
“Refuse and you’ll be sent to the Isle of Misery.”
“If I fail?”
“Then we’ll all be accompanying you.”
“I’ll get my sister to intercede.”
“If anyone finds out about this, you’ll lose your head.”
“Get out,” I told them.
Before leaving the parlor, Montcrief looked back at me and said, “Let me know if we can help. We’ll hand the sack of shell over to your man, Brazzo.”
How could I sleep? I ordered Brazzo to take the sack of Dumpty to the workshop. Back in my room, I dressed in a full-length gold lamé evening gown and extra-high heels. Loved that golden gown—it gave me a sense of power, and I knew I’d need it for the task at hand. The heels weren’t the best but they allowed me to get up above the problem, so to speak.
Crafting weapons for war, giving life to my daydreams, flying machines and perpetual motion was one thing, but reassembling a broken egg was the ultimate puzzle. I’m certain my jackass brother-in-law had never once considered the fact that even if Humpty Dumpty could be put back together, it didn’t necessarily mean he’d be alive.
I pondered that very dilemma until I took the sack and emptied it on my largest work table. Spreading the heap of pieces out across the surface, I noticed that both of those shards holding eyes showed pupils still moving, and the three dozen or more pieces of lip that I readily spotted still twitched. A theory came to me and I went to the wall shelf to take up the hearing trumpet I’d bought for one of my early inventions. With the bell of the horn above a fragment of lip and the other opening to my ear, I could hear, like the cry of a flea, a voice screaming, “Help me.” I listened again intently and shivered at the possibility when I heard a pin prick of chuckling.
By the time morning finally arrived and Brazzo had brought my coffee, I settled down to strategizing about the task the way I normally would with any project. My initial plan was to draw grid work upon the three large tables in my shop, number each piece of shell and organize them, one to a square. I was convinced I needed to see the problem from above. I wanted it laid out before my eyes.
&n
bsp; It was later, during the day’s first gin and a cigarette that my mind made an incredible leap and I saw a radically more direct approach. I reasoned that if the lips could still speak and the eyes perhaps see, why not reconstruct Dumpty’s face first, in hopes that upon seeing the pieces of himself, he might be able to tell me where they each go.
I settled on a type of paste I’d invented for the repair of the very delicate furniture of a doll house—a concoction of swift’s eggs and volcanic ash. The sheerest swath of it on Dumpty’s backside when the king came by the Wishing Wall, and he’d never have been able to fall. I summoned Brazzo and sent him off to speak to Montcrief about mobilizing all the king’s men to go afield and gather as many swift’s eggs as they might. I told my man to make it clear that the sooner I got the eggs, the sooner I could start the reconstruction.
In the meantime, over the next few days, I sorted out as many of the shell pieces that were part of the mouth and put them on a separate table, fitting them in approximately the right places to create a pair of puzzle lips. When all was said and done only two or three very small pieces were missing. Bringing them into close proximity of their original form, as it was before they’d shattered, had them mumbling with one louder voice. I knew it would not speak clearly until all was affixed.
The feel of those shards of shell with bits of the lips on them was slimy and warm, as if I was holding a slug picked straight from a paving stone on a bright summer day. The effect made my skin crawl. My solution? Opera gloves made from lamb intestine—Black. I matched them, of course, with a simple black dress, low cut, and a string of pearls. Nothing daring, but serviceable for workshop toil.
I found the two rather larger pieces holding Dumpty’s eyes. They were peering left and right. I set them above the mouth and then went in search of pieces of nose. I noticed that every time I leaned over the table, the scurrilous Dumpty was shifting his glance to look down my dress. The next time he did it, I stuck my thumb in his left eye, and a chaotic muffled scream leaked out from behind the lips.
The following day, Montcrief and the king’s men arrived with a wagon load of swift’s eggs. They assisted me in the production of the paste and with their help the process took only a day. I was ready to begin the reconstruction, half full of excitement, half of dread. I was curious to see what I could learn in trying to restore a magical entity to life. As the king had said, “Where will I find another?” But the fact that it was Dumpty being restored felt to me like committing a sin.
