by Ellen Datlow
The fireplace is bright with flame, though there are no logs to burn. Above the fireplace, on a decorated mantel, are several glass-domed clocks, all ticking, and a large, flawless mirror that perfectly reflects the room. A girl in a blue-and-white pinafore paces on a circle of carpet before the fire, and every so often as the light plays across her face it’s clear she’s not quite a girl but a woman much, much older.
Above the circle of carpet, about waist high, held aloft by nothing at all, is a crystal sphere about the size of a grapefruit. And inside the sphere is a flickering nebula, neither jade, nor rose, nor teal, but a swirling mélange of all three colours that changes shape and shade continually.
“Tell me again,” she says, and hers is the voice of a little girl, of an elderly woman, of one who holds utter contempt and the deepest admiration for the man whom she addresses. “Tell me the story again one more time.”
And from inside the floating sphere comes a faint, wheezy voice, the sound of a sick man near death and perhaps beyond it, a man who wishes his soul could fly off to the next world, but is prevented from doing so by forces I don’t even pretend to understand.
Slowly, he begins, “Alice … was beginning to get very tired … of sitting by her sister on the bank, and … of having nothing to do…”
At this, the ancient little girl rubs her hands together. She giggles and skips, and Kitty, curled on the rocking chair, stirs awake, then goes back to sleep. And it’s this small motion that crushes me with despair. Despair for Kitty, so inured to this abhorrent sin she can only sleep. Despair for poor Mr. Dodgson, imprisoned in his floating sphere for all time. Despair for myself and for all of us trapped in this dreadful place. But most of all I despair for old Ms. Alice Pleasance Liddell. Because though she wears no chains, everyone knows she’s imprisoned too.
After a time, I step down from the stone and slink away from the window. My buzz has faded, and I want a fag more than anything in the world. It’s late, and I’m more tired than I’ve ever felt. I really should be getting home and getting to bed.
And it’s about this time every night when I start to wonder if I even have a home or a bed to lie in, if I was ever married or had a daughter. Maybe these are just stories I tell myself to get through the day. But I brush aside these thoughts as if I’m swatting away smoke. I really have to get some sleep. I’ve got work early tomorrow.
SENTENCE LIKE A SATURDAY
Seanan McGuire
Doors
Doors swing
Doors swing both ways.
* * *
Doors swing both ways, yes, that’s physics, that’s logic, nasty creeping crawling clinging logic that gets into all the cracks and crevices of a concept like sand inside a swimming suit. If something doesn’t swing both ways, it’s not a door. It’s a hatch, it’s a gate, it’s a barrier, it’s an accident of space and time and cruel causality. It’s not a door. Doors. Swing. Both. Ways.
Doors can look like something that’s not a door, because doors are tricky. Doors are traps masquerading as opportunities. So a little girl tumbles down a rabbit hole or stumbles through a mirror and ah! That’s the door, that’s the trap snapping shut, jaws of the Jabberwock claiming its prey. That’s the story starting. Stories are doors, you see. Stories swing both ways. Can’t trust stories. Can’t trust doors. Can’t trust anything, not once logic gets involved.
So snap! go the jaws, and slam! go the doors, and a little girl falls down a hole, and something else falls up, because doors swing both ways, and if something has gone in, something else must come out. There are rules to these things. Wicked, awful rules.
The rules say “cats do not speak.”
The rules say “if a thing can think for itself, why, it must be a person, and to be a person, a thing must look like so, and stand like so, and tie ribbons in its hair like so,” and suddenly the something that came out of the hole is a little girl, because the rules say it must be, and the rules are not to be denied, however much they should be. However much they burn to be.
Doors swing both ways.
The little girl who should not have been a little girl sat in the dust in front of the burrow, trying to sort through what had just happened. It was all very perplexing, and she did not care for it, no, not at all. Where was her fur? Where were her claws? It occurred to her that they might have gone off on an adventure together, seeking her whiskers and tail, which were equally missing, and equally missed.
“No,” she said petulantly, and clapped her hands over her mouth, which was entirely the wrong shape, and entirely lacking in proper teeth, or a proper tongue—or, it seemed, a proper yowl. She was accustomed to speaking as the humans did. All things in Wonderland could speak as the humans did, when they so chose. But she was also accustomed to having a strong meow at her disposal, and it seemed to have absented itself along with the rest of her.
“This will not do,” she said, and stood, wobbling on unfamiliar legs, feet pinched by unfamiliar shoes. The sunlight shone through the leaves above her, casting dappled shadows on her skin, where the stripes should have been. She attempted to brush it away, and it refused to go, behaving more like light than like syrup or molasses or any of the other things that afternoon sunlight should have taken after. She scowled.
“This will not do at all,” she said, and turned to peer into the hole she’d toppled out of. It was quite small, large enough for a curious cat, but not for the most curious of little girls; her head alone would have been sufficient to block all passage. Still, she got down on her knees, unforgivably mussing her tights, and scrabbled at the dirt. The hole remained a hole, which was something different than a door, and might not put her where she needed to be.
“Might” was not the same as “wouldn’t,” and so she stuck her head into the hole, which rewarded her, not with passage home, but with a great deal of loose dirt. She recoiled, hissing and spitting in a way which would have been quite sensible in a cat, and was quite unreasonable in a little girl. She clawed at her head, blunted fingernails doing no damage as she dislodged clots of earth from behind her ears.
She glared at the hole. The hole did not respond.
“Why is a raven like a writing desk?” she demanded, before climbing back to her feet and walking briskly away. Let the traitor hole know the pain of a riddle unresolved, and see how proud it would be then!
Really, she felt quite cruelly revenged, and did not look back, not once.
* * *
It was quickly apparent to anyone with eyes that this world ran entirely and unreasonably on logic, and hadn’t the sense to speed things along when it would have been narratively appropriate to do so. She walked across the field with locusts buzzing in her ears and dried grass whipping at her ankles, and it was dreadfully dull, and nothing of any importance was happening, and yet the scene didn’t skip ahead. Time stretched out like a string, rather than compressing like an accordion, and she was quite done with walking, and her destination had yet to conveniently appear.
This wouldn’t do. This wouldn’t do at all. She stopped walking and sat down where she stood, giving the story the opportunity to catch up with her. Surely it would realize its error and begin misbehaving properly, getting to the interesting bits.
A bumblebee buzzed past, off on unknowable insect errands. Its body was fat, furry, striped in a way she could only envy. It did not sing. It did not speak. It did not stop to dance for her, or to challenge her to a game of riddles.
Fear twisted in her gut, unfamiliar as a needle in a butterscotch pudding. The rules of this world, whatever they were, seemed to be consistent and cruel: they were not nonsense, no, not nonsense at all. Why, she could sit here forever, and the story might never realize the error of its ways and come back to get her! She could grow up, grow old, grow forgotten, and all for what? For a sunlight sulk on the wrong side of a door. It was quite unfair.
Unfairness was only proper if someone else knew about it. That was what unfairness was for. It was to be brandished, adverti
sed, bragged upon, shown off, because if the world was being unfair, then surely you were a personage deserving of better treatment. Why, this might even be enough unfairness to buy her a dish of cod and cream! The thought was enough to get her feet back under her, and then moving besides, until she was striding across the field with a newfound sense of purpose. She was going to find someone. She was going to Make a Complaint. Yes! And once it was made, everything would be sorted. The hole would be taught the error of its ways and would become a door once more, and she would be able to go home, where things were sensibly senseless, and no one insisted she be anything but what she was.
The field went on for quite some time, persistently refusing to yield to narrative pressure, until finally, with neither barrier nor battle, it ended at a close-cropped expanse of green. She paused before cautiously tapping the new surface with her foot. It proved to be solid, and not a swamp, or a discolored lake, or a very large frog lying in wait for an easy meal. She stepped onto it.
On the other side of the green was a house. It was small, and tidy, and altogether boring, with a roof on the top and a porch around the bottom, and windows gleaming in the sunlight. Bunting hung on lines behind it, white and flapping in the wind. It was dull enough to become interesting, for houses this straightforward were virtually never seen in her homeland, and so she started toward it, sniffing the air, shoulders hunched, obeying the instincts of a body she didn’t currently have.
A door at the back of the house opened. She shied away, suddenly afraid. Doors swung both ways, after all. What if she found herself pulled through this new door to balance the load, and wound up one step further from her home, from her stripes and whiskers and proper place?
A woman emerged. The door swung shut, apparently content to serve as egress only. The woman took a few steps before she stopped, spotting the girl on her lawn.
“Oh, my,” she said, and her voice was soft and gentle, and her words were straightforward and plain, impossible to tie into ribbons. “Hello there. Are you lost?”
“Are you lost?” echoed the girl. Sometimes that was the proper thing to do with riddles, and this must be a riddle, because clearly, she was not lost at all: clearly, she was standing exactly where she was, and if anything, she was found.
The woman looked perplexed. “No, sweetheart, I’m not. This is my home. What’s your name? Where are your parents?”
Too many questions and too many answers and none of them made proper nonsense. The girl decided she wasn’t going to play this game until she knew the rules. Drawing herself up straight and tall, she said, “I am a Cheshire cat, and my parents are far away, doing whatever pleases them.”
“You’re from Cheshire? Why, that’s a hundred miles from here! They just left you on your own?”
The girl preened. “They knew I was clever enough to survive, and so they washed their claws of me. I might see them again someday, but then again, I might not. Who you’ll meet each day is one of the greatest riddles of them all.”
“You poor dear. Come inside. There’s cold beef from last night, and lemonade, and bread. I can feed you.”
“Is there butter?” the girl asked hopefully.
The woman was surprised into a laugh. “Of course there’s butter, silly girl. Come inside.”
The girl, who knew many ways of spotting danger, but not all of them—not enough to spot a door in the shape of a hole, or a trap in the shape of a farmwife—nodded and trotted across the green, toward the farmhouse, toward the door that looked like a door, and nothing else. Nothing else at all.
* * *
That night, belly full, body swimming in an old shift of the woman’s—whose name was Agnes, and wasn’t that a solid, sensible name for a solid, sensible person—the girl lay drowsily in the spare room, struggling to keep her eyes from closing. They didn’t want to listen to her. Fighting sleep was not a feline thing to do; she had no practice at it.
But Agnes, in the other room, was speaking with a man, whose name was Wesley, and they were talking about her. It seemed better to stay awake than to go to sleep. It really did.
Oh, but she was yawnsome.
“—just a little girl. Her parents left her.”
“So she says, Agnes. Do you want to go to prison for kidnapping?”
“It’s not kidnapping if we take her in until her parents come for her. She’s a pretty thing. Surely someone will come looking, and she’s safer here, with us, than she is out wandering the world, where anyone could take advantage of her.”
Those words, “take advantage,” seemed ugly somehow, like they, too, hid a door that swung both ways, one which led into a room she would not like to see. The girl allowed her eyes to close. She would be safe here, until the door opened. Until she could go home.
She would be safe.
* * *
The next morning, the little girl who was not a little girl woke to the smell of pancakes and frying eggs. She rose, untangling the sleeves of her borrowed shift, and moved toward the bedroom door. It held no terrors for her now. Either the other side would be farmhouse and farmwife and kitchen filled with breakfast, or it would be the route home. There was no in-between, not once logic had come to the table. Why, in a world ruled by logic, tadpoles would always grow into frogs, and never once into dragons, or Jabberwocks, or clerical assistants!
It must be very dull, living in a logical world. The desire not to be in one any longer was nearly stronger than the urge toward pancakes as she opened the door and stepped out into a very ordinary, logical room.
Tears sprang to her eyes, burning hot and altogether unfamiliar. She blinked them away hard, moving toward the promising smell of breakfast. Her stomach rumbled. It might not be cod and cream, but it would do. It would do.
Agnes was standing in the farmhouse kitchen, next to the farmhouse stove, and she was smiling, and the little girl who was not a little girl adored and feared her all at the same time. “Good morning, sleepyhead,” she said. “Can you set the table?”
A riddle! That was a fine start to a morning. “A table’s proper setting is in the kitchen,” she said slowly, “and it looks to weigh more than I do. So no, I cannot set the table, for it is already settled, but I can sit, and having done, will have sat, and I a cat, which means to take a chair is to set the table.” She beamed, confident in the quality of her answer.
Agnes blinked. “I mean for you to lay out the dishes and the cutlery, dear, so we can eat,” she said. “Move smartly now; Wesley’s leaving for the fields soon, and he needs his breakfast.”
Feeling chastened, the girl began placing plates and forks in their proper spots. She knew how to set a table by logical rules: the Red Queen insisted on everything being just so when she was hosting a banquet, and it was impossible to throw things into proper disarray without knowing what array was.
Agnes turned away from the stove and blinked again, this time in amazement. The nameless child had set the table as perfectly and precisely as if she expected the Queen herself to come to breakfast. “Well,” she said. “Someone taught you manners. Are you sure you don’t remember your name?”
“I am a Cheshire cat,” said the little girl.
“Kitty it is, then,” said Agnes, and then the door opened—doors, damned doors—and Wesley appeared, and breakfast unfolded around the three of them like a flower opening in the sun, leaving farmwife and farmer well content, and a little girl who was still not a little girl, but who now bore a little girl’s name, staring in dizzy confusion at the wall.
The pancakes smelled delicious. She took a bite, despite her confusion, and then she was eating in great gulps and swallows, while Agnes and Wesley smiled over her head, suddenly content with their world.
Doors swing both ways.
* * *
The rabbit hole, which had been a door, was still in the same place, nestled snug among the roots of an old oak tree. Kitty heaved a sigh of relief. It had been a week since her arrival at the farm, a week of increasing chores and questions sh
aped like riddles, but which somehow seemed to have a right and a wrong answer, as if each one were a door, to be opened by only one key. Seven days. That was how long it had taken for her to get an afternoon to herself, to convince Agnes she wasn’t running away, merely going for a walk.
The hole seemed very small. Kitty knelt and peered into it. “Hello?” she called. “Little girl, little girl, where have you been? I seem to have found your life. I don’t want it.”
But that wasn’t right, now, was it? Agnes and Wesley had no children of their own, only three little crosses in a thicket well behind the farmhouse, each marked with a name and two dates, terribly close together. Logic was such a cruel Queen to serve. The little girl who was a little girl, who had opened a door and consigned Kitty to this place, had come from a different farmhouse, a different life. Somewhere, another Agnes, another Wesley, waited for their daughter to come home.
The first thread of doubt wove its way through Kitty’s heart. If she left now, if she walked out, walked away, found a door, Agnes would cry, wouldn’t she? Surely she would, yes, surely she would weep and weep, thinking her foundling snatched up by bandits or devoured by a Bandersnatch. Wesley wouldn’t cry, but he would attack the fields like they had wronged him, tilling rocks from the soil until his hands bled.
This wasn’t her life. She didn’t want it. But with every day that passed, it held on a little harder, holding her in place, holding her down.
“Come back,” she called into the hole. “Come back and let me leave.”
No doors opened; no little girls appeared. Kitty stood, shoulders slumped, and began the long, narratively static trek back across the fields to the farm, where Agnes would be waiting for her to come and set the table for dinner. It was getting late. She didn’t want them to worry.
