Mad Hatters and March Hares

by Ellen Datlow

  * * *

  The cat, it is said, was not domesticated: the cat domesticated itself, out of laziness and hunger and pragmatism. Cats had to be somewhere, so why shouldn’t they be where there was food, and milk, and warm places to sleep? Why shouldn’t they be where there were people to pet them and tell them they were good, yes, they were the very best cats the world had ever known? It was dry inside. It was comfortable inside. So the cats came inside of their own accord, swearing all the while that they were not domesticated at all: that they were still wild things deep down, under the stripes, under the skin.

  For the first few months, Kitty walked to the hole every Saturday without fail, turning ritual into riddle and back again. Why was a sentence like a Saturday? Because it had to be survived to carry any weight at all. She didn’t really notice when Agnes brought her shoes that failed to pinch her growing feet, nor understand the importance when Wesley taught her to weed the gardens, picking out the bad, leaving the good behind.

  One day, Agnes slipped and called her “Katherine,” and when she asked what a Katherine was, Agnes replied that it was a Kitty, only more so.

  “Like a cat is a kitten, only more so?” asked Kitty, who still looked for riddles everywhere, could not stop looking for riddles everywhere, any more than she could stop herself looking for doors.

  “Exactly that,” Agnes replied, relieved. Their foundling girl was an odd one, prone to whimsy, prone to idleness, but oh, she was a sweet child, and she was a lovely child, and she must have been a gift, to pay for what they’d lost. Nothing could replace her given children. Kitty—now Katherine, a good Christian name for a good girl—came close enough to ease the aching.

  “Very well, then,” said Katherine, and went about her business, not seeming to understand that she had been belled, and most decisively so. A cat without a proper name may still think itself a stray. A cat with a name, and a bed to go back to, and a bowl to lick clean, well …

  Domestication comes in small steps, little kindnesses, simple things. Katherine went about her chores, not seeming to notice that they were her chores now, and not merely what she was asked to do to pay for her supper. Agnes watched, and smiled, and felt the ice around her heart give way.

  * * *

  Summer yielded to fall. The crops came on in the field, and the leaves changed colors on the trees, and Katherine ran through them, laughing, as they tumbled down, down, down, falling from what they knew into something new, something different. She dove into leaf piles, seeking the doors she was sure must linger at their bottoms, and when she did not find a tunnel, or a hole, or any other such entrance, she laughed again, and kept running. The world was finally abandoning its logical lines! Anything could happen again, and she would be gone soon, yes, yes, she would be going home!

  She ran out of the yard at the sound of Agnes’s voice, and stopped to see the farmwife standing side-by-side with the farmer, a bundle of books in her hands. Suddenly, logic seemed closer than ever, and dreadfully dangerous.

  “What is this?” she asked—the greatest riddle of them all.

  “There’s not much work on the farm during the winter,” said Wesley. “We think it’s time to get you some proper learning.”

  “Learning?”

  “School.”

  Katherine recoiled in horror. “I’m no fish, to school in silver seas! I’m a cat, and I already know everything there is to know about being as I am.”

  “You’ll need your numbers and your letters.”

  “I can count my stripes, and spell the name of everything I care to claim!”

  Wesley heaved a heavy sigh. He was, in many ways, less forgiving than his wife of Katherine’s strangeness, and this had been his idea. Some good thoughts in that airy mind might bring her feet to the ground, and keep them there where they belonged. “You don’t have any stripes, Kitty. You’re a person, and people need to go to school. Classes start tomorrow. You’ll go, and you’ll learn, and you’ll come back here and tell us what they’ve taught you.”

  Katherine frowned, trying to work her way through this puzzle. She could run away, of course, run back to the hole and camp in front of it, waiting for it to let her through—but it was cold outside, and it had been raining recently, and she was still, above all else, a cat. She had no desire to be cold or uncomfortable, just because she was waiting.

  “Is this a quest?” she asked finally. She knew about quests. Some of them involved vorpal swords and terrible beasts. Others involved waiting for ages outside of hidden caves, until the moment to pounce arrived.

  Quests could open doors. Completing them could change the world.

  “Yes,” said Agnes, relieved. “It’s like a quest.”

  And so Katherine went to school.

  The schoolhouse was small and plain, nestled on the outskirts of the village, where the shrieking of the children on the playground wouldn’t bother anyone. So many children! Katherine had never seen so many human children, had never imagined there could be so many, had always thought them to be something of an endangered species. They wandered in from time to time, tumbling through mirrors or the like, and they did terribly dangerous things with terrible enthusiasm, and then they left, and were never seen again. Between that and the three crosses behind the farmhouse, human children seemed impossibly fragile, the sort of riddles that could only be told once before they fell apart. But now …

  Dozens of children, maybe even as many as hundreds, all running and screaming and kicking balls back and forth between them. Katherine hung back, properly shy in the face of so much chaos, until Agnes urged her forward, saying, “I’ll be here when the bell rings. I’ll see you then.”

  “Don’t go,” said Katherine.

  Something softened in Agnes’s eyes. She leaned forward and kissed the crown of Katherine’s head, quick as anything, before she whispered, “I do love you,” and fled, back down the road, back toward the farmhouse, back toward home.

  * * *

  The hours passed like honey with Katherine gone. The house seemed too quiet, the yard too empty. When Agnes walked back down the road to the school, she half expected the teacher to come out and ask what she was doing there, when she had no children left in her home to go to class.

  Instead, she was greeted with an indignant armful of little girl, complaining wildly about how the alphabet wasn’t supposed to have an order—you needed letters, yes, absolutely you needed letters, otherwise how could you write acrostics? But they needed to be free to visit their friends for tea and conversation, not locked into an ABC of unnecessary orderliness—and how the youngest children had been given naps while the older children hadn’t. Be consistent in all things or be consistent in nothing, that was her motto.

  Agnes laughed all the way home, as much with relief as with delight, and the dinner table that night rang with tales of school, all the mischief to be made there, all the tricks to play, all the riddles yet to be written.

  “I think we get to keep her,” she whispered to Wesley after bedtime, with their heads on their pillows and the covers pulled to their shoulders.

  “She’s not a stray cat,” he replied.

  Agnes smiled. “But that’s exactly what she is.”

  That was the first time—that was the last time—she saw Katherine for what she was. She saw the girl with eyes of kindness. She saw the girl with eyes of love. She never saw the girl in stripes and whiskers.

  Perhaps that was a blessing.

  * * *

  The meat of a riddle is in the beginning and the end: in the why and the what, not in the linguistic tricks the riddler will play to try to stretch as much distance as possible between the two. The goal of a riddle is to trip you up, you see, to take the logical and turn it into the nonsensical. So here, then, is the what: a Cheshire cat—Cheshire kitten, by the way humanity would mark such things, but a cat in her own mind, for she walked alone, stalked alone, talked to wandering children alone, and did not suckle at her mother’s breast, nor cower at her father
’s tail—fell through a door, and into a world where the rules were wrong. Where what she thought was chaos became order, and vice-versa.

  Doors swing both ways. In the cat’s home, in her nonsense world of unordered alphabets and conversational flowers, a human girl found the rules just as wrong as the feline one did; found the sky to be too bright, the roses to be too argumentative. That girl found her door home quickly, for she was following what she knew to be true, and while logic is not stronger than nonsense, nonsense is often more patient. It knows its day will come again, and so it yields before the insistence that this is that and that is this, that water must be wet and fire must be dry. Nonsense knows that logic crumbles. Nonsense does not require it to stay.

  Logic, though …

  Logic likes to consider itself inviolate, as much as it likes to consider itself anything at all: anthropomorphism is a form of nonsense, if only a very mild one, and to flirt with personification is to flirt with disaster. Still, when Katherine attempted to nonsense her way through her trials, she was confronted again and again with reason, with reliability, with the Rs upon which a logical world is built. Most of all, she was confronted with time, with Saturdays like sentences and sentences like Saturdays, stacking each upon the other in bulwarks of months, in castles of years.

  One day she looked around and realized she wasn’t a little girl anymore, even in outward appearance, even if she’d never been a little girl in the first place, for the face in her mirror belonged to a woman grown, and the body in her plain cotton dress was a woman’s as well, long of leg and full of breast and strange in ways a cat’s body would never have been strange. Agnes no longer saw to the chickens or planted the garden; that was her job now, and had been for several years. Wesley still worked the fields, but there was less acreage planted with every season.

  She went to them now, these people who had become her parents, and she asked them the most important riddle of all: “What can I do?”

  They told her.

  She started walking out with James from school a week later. He was a farmer’s second son, and he never looked to inherit if he stayed in his family home. But her family home, ah—there was something there.

  The wedding was held in the spring. It was not a church wedding. Katherine had never quite cottoned to church. Instead, it was held outside, in view of an old tree that had once held a rabbit’s hole among its roots, a rabbit’s hole that had been a door, when the circumstances were right. Katherine watched it closely all through the ceremony, thinking it would be a small, mean trick if the door were to open now, in view of everyone she knew, when she was unprepared to run.

  The door did not open. The wedding continued its set, logical course, and James moved to the farm with his new wife and her parents, and the days passed, one after another, Saturday sentences forming paragraphs, pages, volumes.

  The first child came some ten months after the wedding. There was pain, and blood, and a remarkable amount of screaming. Agnes knew some of what it was to play the midwife, and both James and Wesley were adept at boiling water and looking stoic. Katherine shrieked like a Bandersnatch the whole time, her hands snarled in the sheets, cursing every name she could think of, and a few she hadn’t considered in years. Birthing wasn’t supposed to be like this. Birthing wasn’t supposed to hurt.

  Then she heard her daughter cry, and the pain didn’t fade, but it transformed, becoming something terrible and strange. They set the girl at her breast, still slick with blood and mucus, bald and ugly and terribly hers, and it made no sense, no sense at all, and it made all the sense in the world. A mother was a kind of door, she realized: a mother was the door through which tomorrow passed.

  “Babies are where nonsense and logic collide,” she said, and she closed her eyes, and went away for a while, into a clean dark place where nothing, not love nor fear nor pain, could touch her.

  They named their daughter Edith, after one of the crosses behind the house, and Katherine was disappointed, in her own way, when she walked outside a week later and saw the cross was still there. In a proper world, a narrative world, rather than a causative one, the cross would have disappeared as soon as someone else held the name. Agnes’s pain would have been symbolically lessened, and the grave wouldn’t have been needed anymore.

  There were parts of this adventure that were terribly trying, and she was trying terribly hard.

  Two more babies after that, James Jr. in a year and Margaret two years later, and the house was filled to bursting, until it seemed that it was never quiet, nor still. Katherine thought of those as her favorite years. The babies were young, youth stacked on youth, and they were never calm, leaving her fighting an uphill battle against nappies and bottles and bedtimes, but Agnes was there to help, and Wesley worked the fields with James, who kindly never said a word about how slow his father-in-law was becoming.

  Time passed. The babies became children, and she sent them off to school as she had been, kissing them fiercely, whispering, “They’ll tell you lies, but learn your letters,” before she pushed them down the road. They came back with heads full of questions, and she fed them riddles like candy, encouraging them to run, to question, to dream as brightly as they could. They were her kittens, even if they stayed kittens far longer than she expected—and perhaps that was something humans did better than cats, because oh, she loved them so, and oh, they knew her so much better than she had known her own parents, striped and scarce and silent as they had been.

  Time passed. Wesley was the first to go, falling in the fields at the height of summer, dead before he hit the ground, and it made no sense at all, for it served no story, answered no riddle: it simply was, implacable and pointless as a stone. Agnes followed a week after, heartbroken and unable to see the way to go on, and two more crosses joined the three behind the house, newer, the names easier to read.

  Katherine stood before them for an entire day and night, silent, dry-eyed, and did not cry until the people who had become her family failed to come back and tell her it had all been a silly, stupid game.

  Time passed.

  * * *

  Edith was visiting with her children and her husband, a sour-faced, complicated man who did sums for a living and doted on his bright, perplexing wife like she had hung the moon. He did not get along with his mother-in-law, and had been locked in the living room with James since their arrival, going over the farm’s accounts. Katherine found herself, for the first time in years, in the position of caring for children who were still more nonsense than logic.

  It was refreshing, in its own way. It couldn’t take the bend from her spine or the ache from her joints, but it put some sparkle back into her eye, reminding her of what life had been when everything had been for a reason, when a sentence had been like a Saturday and a Saturday had been like nothing at all.

  “Tell us a story, Grandma,” said the youngest—Agnes, her name was, and wasn’t that a kindness? One by one, they stripped the crosses away.

  “Well,” said Katherine. “A long, long time ago, in a place that was nothing like this one, and everything like itself, a young cat was looking for an adventure when she saw a door where a door shouldn’t have been.”

  “Like that one, Grandma?” asked Agnes, all in innocence.

  She was pointing.

  Katherine felt her tired old heart stutter in her chest, like a pocket watch going out of true.

  Slowly she stood and slowly she turned, following her granddaughter’s finger to the trees behind the house. The branches threw a wicker pattern on the ground, laced and interlaced, like fingers clasping tight. There, in the place where they came together, was something that could have been a stepping stone or could have been a door. There was even a toadstool where the doorknob ought to have been, ready to be turned.

  Her shawl fell away, landing in a tangle of yarn at her feet, and she was running, oh, she was running like the kitten she had been when she tumbled from one kind of story into another, when she had fallen from nonsense
into sense to balance out a little girl who had done the same, dared the same, in the opposite direction. She was running faster than she thought possible, reaching for the stripes waiting on the other side of an impossible door.

  * * *

  The screams drew Edith out of the house. She fairly flew down the steps, convinced she was going to find her mother—who was getting on in years, even if she never seemed to want to admit it—lying face down in the yard.

  Instead, she found four children. Three of them were shrieking and confused. The fourth, little Agnes, was standing in front of a web of shadows, staring at a shattered toadstool.

  “Mother?” called Edith. “Mother?”

  There was no reply. She turned to her children.

  “Where’s your grandmother?” she demanded.

  Peter, Jason, Abigail, none of them gave any answer.

  “I think she went home,” Agnes said. Then, in a speculative tone, she asked, “Do you think I could go and visit?”

  * * *

  When is a sentence like a Saturday?

  When it’s something that can’t be avoided; when it’s something that’s over far too soon.

  WORRITY, WORRITY

  Andy Duncan

  My dear Dodgson.

  I think that when the jump occurs in the Railway scene you might very well make Alice lay hold of the Goat’s beard as being the object nearest to her hand—instead of the old lady’s hair. The jerk would naturally throw them together.

  Don’t think me brutal, but I am bound to say that the ‘wasp’ chapter doesn’t interest me in the least, & I can’t see my way to a picture. If you want to shorten the book, I can’t help thinking—with all submission—that there is your opportunity.

  In an agony of haste

  Yours sincerely

  J. Tenniel.

  Portsdown Road.

  June 8, 1870

  Sir John—for since his elevation by Her late Majesty, he routinely thought of himself thus, to his mingled pride and shame—had attended many a dreadful testimonial dinner in his long career, but surely the worst was this one, his own.