by Ellen Datlow
Then she opened a packet of pretzels and they ate those.
“What’s for dessert?” the turtle said.
“I’ll make a cake at home.”
“Ooh! An Alice Cake! Make it now!”
“You never know with other people’s ovens. I have to be sure the cake rises.” She added flour to her take-home bag. “I’ve got a houseful of hungry mouths to feed.”
The turtle weaved its head from side to side. “Now who’s telling stories! You don’t have a soul at home! Not one person!”
“I do!” she said. She fitted the last box of cocoa into a bag and she was done.
The pot on the stove screamed and she turned around to attend to it. The soup was cooking well. Her uncle and her parents would enjoy this. She’d feed them and feed them and feed them until they couldn’t move, then she’d feed them Alice Cake covered with whipped cream until they screamed for mercy.
Alice found a cardboard box under the sink. There were remnants of something at the base, vegetable waste rather than animal, and she said, “If you hop in I’ll take you out of here.”
“To Wonderland? Where the worms are?”
“And beyond,” she said.
The look on its face was so tragically grateful she had to laugh.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go look at the worm farm.” She piled the worst of the vegetables into the box, then nestled the turtle on top before carrying it outside. That strange light still bathed the backyard and she saw now there were pathways ornately laid, set with tiny pebbles looking like cake decorations, albeit ones that would break your teeth.
The vegetable garden was overgrown and gone to seed, with the tastiest stalks like zucchini eaten to the ground by snails and other pests.
They walked around the lemon tree that had a sign saying “Number Ones Welcome Here” with the picture of a man pissing.
Next to the lemon tree was a gnarled rose bush hanging over a small headstone the size of her thumb.
“Will you look at that?” the mock turtle said. “He gave her a proper burial. Maybe he deserves the same after all, even if he did near starve me to death.”
The headstone said “Beryl, neck broke by her husband.”
Alice read it aloud to the mock turtle.
“He didn’t, did he? Why’d he write that?” The mock turtle looked away, his shoulders shaking with sobs.
“Oh, poor turtle,” Alice said.
“He couldn’t handle the truth, that man. Wouldn’t come near me in the end. Weak! I’m only telling it as I see it. When you’ve suffered like I have you realise the truth is the only way. Not my fault he was a lonely old man with no friends and never did.”
This was true; the old man had no one to collect his belongings.
“You know the tender feel of fingers around your throat, dear. I know you do.”
She put down the cardboard box. The turtle peered over the top as she tipped over the worm farm, adding the vegetable waste to the mound of dirt and worms.
The mock turtle stared mournfully at worms writhing in the hot sun.
“Go on,” Alice said.
“I’m not sure I deserve them. Do I? I’m not sure I do.”
“They’re only worms.”
She felt better tipping the worms out, whether or not they’d be eaten. She hated the idea of them being trapped in the worm farm, slowly starving to death.
A clucking alerted her to the arrival of the chickens, round with feathers, but, she thought, probably starving.
They came quickly for the worms but quicker still was the mock turtle. Up on its back legs he took them one by one, using its strong jaw and teeth to tear off their heads.
“Off with their heads, just like that?” Alice said. He’d done it so easily. She wondered if a grown man would die as easily, if your grip was strong enough.
“There’ll be eggs in there,” the mock turtle said.
“In the hen house? I’ll check,” Alice said.
“In there, too.” He pointed at one of the decapitated chickens. “Unlaid eggs. You could make us an unlaid egg cake. Slice her down the middle, that’ll do it.”
Leaving the turtle to gorge on worms (“I’ll eat the chicken once it’s cooked,” he said. “Roast a chicken fresh as that and you’ll be dreaming of that meat the rest of your life.”) she went back inside for a sharp knife, some freezer bags, and the egg carton she’d seen under the sink. She turned the soup down while she was there, then back Outside to slice open the chickens. She did find eggs inside. Bloodied and a bit soft. She placed them carefully in the egg cartons and cut the chickens into manageable pieces, leaving the guts behind for the neighbourhood cats, who’d appeared like magic to devour.
* * *
She packed the car, unlocking the house’s front door from the inside. The handle was sticky and there was a dollop of jam on the carpet. It wasn’t blood. She felt momentarily sad then, but it was a good way for the owner to die; jam toast in hand, collecting the mail from your own letterbox.
She was waiting for her uncle to die, to own a home. Self-made man, rich man, generous man, looking after his family that way. When he died she’d make her parents move out, though. They’d never done anything for her. Her uncle would leave his business to her and she’d throw her parents out of the house and she’d be set.
* * *
The chicken bones were clean, so she fished them out of the boiling water and placed them on a tea towel to dry.
“Not for me, I hope,” the mock turtle said after she’d collected him from Outside. “Not keen on bones myself.”
“For my uncle’s wine. He likes a nice glass of wine. He says it puts bone in his bone if you know what I mean.”
“And you’d know what that looks like. Ay? You’ve known for a long time.”
“Should have left you Outside,” she said, and placed a cake tin over the turtle to keep him quiet for a bit. “You’re too ugly for me to look at for now,” she said. She set about wiping the benches and other surfaces.
Eventually the tapping on the tin annoyed her enough so she set him free. “We can’t all be beautiful like you are,” he said. “Take a look in the mirror. Glowing, you are. Glorious.”
She picked up the turtle and took it to the mirror at the end of the hall. “I wouldn’t say I’m glorious,” she said, but she was lovely, she knew it.
“A little compliment makes it all better, doesn’t it?”
She hated him for being right about that.
If she lived here she’d get rid of the mirror. It was flawed, covered with bumps and welts. Scabs. When she touched it, it felt smooth, but underneath and in the shadows she could see a different self. One who’d broken her arm three times. One whose first boyfriend when she was fourteen knew she wasn’t a virgin but she wasn’t saying how. And she could see back home as if she could step into the mirror and be there in a flash. Her uncle there with his mouth open, his jaw dropped, mocking her.
In the kitchen, the soup pot screamed.
Her uncle and her parents would enjoy the meal. She’d feed them and feed them and feed them until they couldn’t move. Feed them soup and cake and milk. Feed them and feed them and feed them.
The mirror uncle leaned forward as if to poke her in the solar plexus and she’d be out of breath for minutes. “Can’t speak? That’s a pleasant change! Too busy flapping your gums to make your poor uncle happy.” He wore loose pyjamas with a drawstring because he could flop himself out at a moment’s notice.
“You’ve got nothing to be sad about,” she imagined her uncle said to her in the mirror.
“You’ve got nothing to be sad about,” she said to the mock turtle.
“I have, you know. I’ve been cursed with empathy to the nth degree. What you’re feeling, I’m feeling. I can read your mind. I know what’s hiding there. I know what he did.”
“Don’t believe what you see in the mirror,” Alice said.
She picked up the turtle and carried him back to the filth
y tank. “We’d better clean this tank up,” she said, but she wouldn’t bother.
“Don’t put me back!” he said. “We don’t need to take the tank with us. You can carry me in a backpack, or you can put me on your car seat. I won’t budge an inch, or if I do, I’ll budge so slowly you won’t see me move.”
She placed him upside down on his shell in the sludge in the base of the tank and he started to cry. “Carry the tank, then. We’ll clean it out when we get home. Ay? We won’t talk about the past anymore, not unless you want to. Oh, the lovely times we had,” speaking through his tears. “Oh, such a good childhood you had, luckiest girl ever!” he told her. “I’ll bite your uncle’s cock off and we can watch him bleed to death. We can!”
It was too late, though. She couldn’t trust him to leave her in Wonderland.
“You’re not coming with me,” Alice said. She stood, hands on hips, listening to his great gulping sobs. Then she carried the tank up the backyard and put it down behind the shed, where no one would see it. Right in the hot sun.
“Not this,” he wept. “I’ll turn to soup.”
“Yes, you will,” Alice said. Already she was back in the beautiful oblivion of Wonderland where, if she wished very hard, there would be jam tarts for supper.
THE QUEEN OF HATS
Ysabeau S. Wilce
I. Into the Trunk
The poor tamale girl, her tamale pail empty, but no coins tucked safely in her sash. Just before Northern crossroads, she’d been set upon by stealie boys. They’d slid down the sand dune screaming like sirens, knocked her over, stomped her hat, and rolled her until the coins fell from her sash into their graspy paws. Then they’d disappeared into the dune grass, their victory shrieks swallowed up by the gusting fog.
So now she sprawls in the sand, grit in her teeth, grit stuck to her wet cheeks, grit grating her bare knees, ribs burning, thinking of home. “Oh, what shall I do? If I go home with sash and pail empty, Papi will spit on me, and whip me with my own sash. My sibs will hiss like snakes and give me the ole stink eye. And Mami will make me sleep in the woodpile. I shall get splinters!”
The little tamale girl wiggles her tongue against her teeth, feels no wobbles, spits a mouthful of sandy blood. A cold wind is blowing in off the water, and the ground is wet and hard. Fog, and dank, and darkness, and maybe the stealie boys are not the only ones out tonight, hoping for a victim. Grimacing, the little tamale girl sits up, thinking to herself: “Oh, I should go home, and take my whipping, for surely that is better than lying in the sand all night and being preyed upon by coyotes or fleas. Fike those stealie boys, and—oh, no, do I hear a voice? Someone is coming! Perhaps it is the stealie boys returning, or perhaps it’s Springheel Jack, or even the Man in Pink Bloomers come to drag me to Hell…”
Scrambling to her feet, the little tamale girl snatches up her pail and hightails it into the scrub. She should crawl deep into hiding, but if she’s unseen, she’ll also be unseeing, and curiosity has got the little tamale girl in its claws. She flattens herself into a pancake and peers through the ice plant to see a dark shape trundling down the road, muttering to itself.
“… oh why did she have to pick this wasteland so far out of town, and with all this blowing sand? Where am I going to find actors out here? There are crossroads in the city good enough, but this was the only crossroad to suit, blast her!”
“Well,” thinks the little tamale girl, “I have never seen such a large rabbit before, and why is he carrying such a heavy trunk? Surely he knows there are no hotels out here, nor either boarding houses or stage stops along this road, neither? And why is he putting the trunk down in the middle of the crossroads? Doesn’t he know when the Presidio horse car comes in the morning the trunk shall be smashed to bits, or run over by the milk cows being driven to the Shiner dairy.… Should I warn him? See something, say something, my mami always says? But also mind your own business. What ever shall I do?”
Having deposited the trunk into the middle of the intersection of the Presidio Plank Road and the Northern Cut, the Rabbit fishes a large pocket watch from his weskit and, after consulting it, unlocks the trunk. Its sides hinge open like a butterfly’s wings, but away from the little tamale girl’s view. She can only see the back of the trunk, which is speckled with transfer stickers: Ticonderoga, Arkham, Cibola, Porkopolis, Belegost, Goblin Town, Eboracum, Sunnydale, London.
“Queer and queerer,” thinks the little tamale girl, as she creeps forward for a closer look. “Porkopolis and Ticonderoga I have heard of. But London? That sounds like a made-up place to me. I do think I should warn him; clearly he is a visitor to the City, and does not realize how busy this crossroad can be during the day. Sometimes it gets two or three carts an hour! Hey, sieur! Hey sieur!”
The rabbit doesn’t answer, and when the little tamale girl peeks around the side of the trunk, he is not there. But the inside of the trunk is a wonderland. One side is like a little closet, stuffed with hangers of glorious costumes gleaming with gold aiguillettes, silver soutache, and glittering galloon. The opposite side, all drawers, each filled with marvels. The first contains maquillage: pots of rouge, fat black eye pencils, trays of fluttering eyelashes, palettes of shimmering eye colors: sangyn, gris, ebon, celadon, octorine. The next drawer contains neat rows of gloves: satin, velvet, dogskin, crocodile leather. After that it’s hair pieces: curly, straight, braided, puffed, fringed. Then whiskers, some long and flowing, some small and militaristic, some like bristle brushes, others soft and fuzzy.
The little tamale girl reaches for the wig-box on the bottom, so rapt in the spangles and sparkles she doesn’t notice the skeletal hand slowly emerging from the tangle of garments behind her. It grabs the back of her pinafore and yanks.
“Oh, dear,” thinks the little tamale girl as she plummets downward, “I seem to have fallen into the trunk. And nothing good can come to girls who fall into trunks, mami would say. But then I never heard of a girl who fell into a trunk; perhaps I am the first and shall buck the trend. Really it can’t be much different than falling into a hole, though I suppose a trunk is less likely to have a lion in the bottom of it, or six feet of water, or be a portal to Hell. I wish—ooo, marmalade—” The little tamale girl grabs the jar of marmalade off the shelf as she plummets by it and, after wrenching the top off, shovels the sweet stuff into her mouth quickly as she can. She’s famished, and the fall might end before she has time to finish. But she’s still falling when the jar is empty, so she tosses it away, heedless of who it might land upon.
Down down down the little tamale girl goes. The drawers and shelves are done, and now it is ropes, and pulleys, and a canvas backdrop painted like a hallway full of closed doors. Another backdrop showing a two-dimensional courtroom, and one painted like the seaside, with frozen waves and glittery sand. Still, down down down she falls, past huge arc lights, lenses covered with colored paper, swaths of red velvet curtain, and a clutter of props: a plaster mushroom, pots of roses, giant papier-mâché oyster shells and an enormous soup tureen.
She thinks: “This fall is going on for quite some time. Perhaps I can twist like a cat and land on my feet. I certainly have the time to try.” So she tries to twist and turn herself, but all she does is upend her pinafore, and blow air up her nose, tangle her hair, and lose her hat. “Well, that did not work, so perhaps I shall have to make my own cushion—” She’s passing more racks of costumes now, so she snatches at the hangers as she plummets by, and soon her arms are heaped with kirtles and basques, garibaldi shirts and pelerines, manteaus and polonaises, sack-cloth and sables.
“Now I am ready for this fall to be over,” the little tamale girl says to herself. “It was charming at first, but now it’s just tedious, I wonder how far I shall fall, out of the bottom of the trunk, and through the sand, and the rocks beneath, and right into the arms of the giant squid sitting in the center of the earth and that, I suppose, will be that. At least no more woodpile—”
II. The Wardrobe
And then the fall
is over, and the little tamale girl has landed not on the costumes, but under them, so she is smothered in ribbands, bows, velvet, fustian, taffety, lace, calico, brocade, sarcenet, grosgrain, cypress, and all other manner of textiles. This is a considerable weight to struggle out from under, and doing so takes her some time.
“But it’s better than drowning in six feet of water, or being eaten by a lion,” the little tamale girl says when she finally emerges. Despite the thud, she has not suffered at all in the landing, in fact, the aches left over from the stealie boys’ thumping have disappeared and she feels wonderful. She’s standing in a long hallway lined with doors, each inset with a small gold plaque that says, respectively: Wardrobe, Dressing Room, Wig Room, Prop Room, Wings, Proscenium, Orchestra Pit, Office, Stage Door, Snack-bar, Canteen.
But the doors are all tiny, only as tall as the tamale girl’s knobby scabby knees. “Perhaps if I hold my breath long enough, I shall shrink down,” the little tamale girl thinks, but before she can do so, a furious voice assails her.
“You, what are you doing! What a mess you’ve made—pick up those costumes extemporaneously!” A rotund figure wobbles toward the little tamale girl, waving a long pair of scissors in one glove and flapping a measuring tape in the other. “Immediately, independently, absolutely, intravenously, right now!”
The little tamale girl laughs. “Why, you are nothing more than a dress dummy!”
“Dummy! I am the wardrobe mistress of this troupe, capiche, comprende, don’t you know?” the wardrobe mistress says indignantly. Her eyes are made of buttons, and her mouth picked out in straight pins. Her lack of hair is hidden by a blowsy lace cap that looks like an exploded cabbage.
“I cry your pardon, madam,” the little tamale girl says, dipping into a curtsy, “but I wonder how you can talk through that mouthful of pins!”
“Better pins that are useful than those nasty bits of bones you call teeth!” says the wardrobe mistress. “Now, look what you have done to this gorgeous frock—” She has picked the garment in question out of the heap at the little tamale girl’s feet. “It’s the Leading Lady’s favorite dress—designed by Schiaparelli; she wore it in the role of Rosalind, for which she won a BAFTA. You’ve got some of the duck feathers off—quick, take it to the wardrobe and get those feathers back on before she notices, and has your head chopped, chapped, chipped!”
