by Ellen Datlow
(They all can, and most of ’em do.)
* * *
“I’ve a right to think,” says an Alice, and she does, of course, they all do, but to get here at all means a girl is eating and drinking suspicious things and breaking into other people’s gardens, and listening to foolish people and taking bad advice, and taking orders from the first fellow she runs across.
By the time a girl makes it to the doorstep, they’ve been angry enough to push past the footman after nearly drowning in their own tears and giving away the last things they have, but they’ve been stupid enough to get this lost.
The Duchess pulls Alice closer, feels like the mushroom on the corpse. “What a clear way you have of putting things,” she says.
* * *
She was a little girl once—she’s almost sure. It’s awfully hard to tell with the Hatter’s parties making sure no one ever has a birthday, and time has a way of moving past her so quickly that she might have been a hundred all this time and never known. Years just vanish.
How she hates the Mary Anns! How she hates the Alices!
“I must go,” the Duchess says to every new one, “you may nurse it a bit, if you like,” and then she has to run up the stairs and slam the bedroom door behind her and press her hands against her mouth until the urge to scream has faded.
It’s impossible to warn them. You have to see what they do. A Mary Ann stays in the kitchen and takes the baby downwind of the pepper and listens to it screaming until she cries and still she never moves; an Alice runs away with it and realizes that little boys turn into pigs if you’re not paying close attention. She doesn’t know what happens to the pigs. One of them’s probably Mayor by now, and the Mary Anns will never meet him; Mary Anns are meant for the house.
But Alices are meant for fighting—Alices get out, the Duchess reminds herself over and over, sneezing pepper out of her nose. The Queen promises it’s true.
* * *
Imagine being Queen, she thinks, swinging her flamingo as hard as she dares. It’s an awful hard swing—she’s held that wriggling piglet still for a long time, it makes you tough—and the hedgehog lets out a little moan as it sails across the lawn, scattering cards in its wake. Red paint drips onto the lawn, in the panic.
Game play is paused briefly so several cards can be executed.
The Queen orders it, her voice filling like a sail, and watches over it all. She has the arms of a baker and the face of a butcher and stands a good foot taller than anyone else in Wonderland. (When she gets a good swing, the hedgehog can fly as far as the eye sees, and strike the doors at the edge of the garden, past which there’s no world left at all.) And in all of Wonderland, only the Queen plants her fists on her hips and stares right at the executions all the way through.
It might be because she’s so tall, and never has to see the look on the Ten of Spades as the axe comes down. When you’re a Queen and so much taller, you only see the bowed heads, and that must feel awful nice. The Duchess watches three Hearts fold to the ground. A girl gets quite tired of being such a tiny little thing.
Someday an Alice will break the whole deck, the Duchess thinks; they’re all so angry, those girls, and one of them will have to be angry enough, someday. She’ll call for the Queen’s head and someone will give it, and the Cheshire will crown her, and then it will be her turn to nibble on cakes and cordials until she’s taller than the rest, and to swing flamingos until her arms are heavy, and to look across the garden slopes and see the edges of the world surrounded by girls lurching to get in, and scream and scream and scream for the axe.
The cards beg for mercy every time; they cry so hard the paint runs off the roses at their feet. The Queen signals the Ten of Spades. The Duchess makes fists, feels the sinew of her arms, the strain of her collar.
“You could spare them,” she says, once, when her courage is up. “They’ll only be back. Might as well leave it be and let their heads alone.”
The Queen pulls back for the swing, says, “I could.” The hedgehog goes flying.
* * *
The night she spends in her house, waiting for Alice, is short. She’s counted. It’s three dreams long, and very quiet. It’s the same night every time, which she knows because somewhere deep in the rattle of her mind is the idea of snow up to her knees, and there are no seasons here. There isn’t even rain. Far away, they tell her, there’s a chessboard, and so many brooks and streams you can’t count them all, but Wonderland’s all saltwater, even the tea.
The night is so still she can hear the cards as they paint the roses red. She can hear the ticking of the White Rabbit’s watch as he sleeps longer than what’s good for him. The soup is simmering; it will be ready for more pepper in the morning.
When the wind picks up at last, just before sunrise, it’s in her favor—the air is fresh, and the pepper and the paint blow past her and away, and for a moment the path outside the door looks open, as if it actually leads anywhere. It doesn’t—she’s tried a thousand thousand times, and that path spans all of Wonderland and brings you right back to the kitchen door. Better just to look through the keyhole and dream.
The pig snores in his dreams. The Duchess’s hair pains her. Out past the garden, an Alice is saying, “It might end, you know, in going out like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?”
THE FLAME AFTER THE CANDLE
Catherynne M. Valente
“She tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing.”
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
A Melancholy Maiden
Olive was beginning to get very tired of going down to Wales with her mother on holiday every year and having nothing to do. It is a difficult trick to be tired of anything much when you are only fourteen and three-quarters years old, but Olive was just the sort of girl who could manage it. She would admit, if significantly pressed, that once or twice a summer it did not rain or drizzle or mist or thunder moodily, but never for long enough to do anyone a bit of good, and anyway, what is the use of having rain at all if the sun does not follow after? And now, Father Dear had left them for that pale, rabbity little heiress in London who they were only allowed to refer to as the Other One, and some damp, sheepy madness had taken hold of Darling Mother. She meant for them all to live here somehow, herself and Olive and Little George, mixing, presumably, among the scintillating society of shire horses and show-quality cucumbers.
Olive could have complained for England—it was her chief occupation in those drowsy silver afternoons and sopping woollen mornings. It was dreadful here. Even the potatoes and the ponies were depressed. There was only one pub and you weren’t allowed to dance in it. Her school friends got to go to Rome and Madrid and Mykonos on their holidays. If this place ever hosted so much as a knitting circle, the whole population would suffer simultaneous apoplexies from the scandal of it. She couldn’t even pronounce the name of the village in which Darling Mother had insisted on shipwrecking them. Pronouncing the name of the house was right out, and a more cramped and dreary paleo-lithic hut Olive had never dreamed of. It had never been planned nor built so much as piled up and given up on several times, leaving nothing anyone could properly call a house, but rather, a sort of rubbish bin full of bits of other houses lying on top of each other. Somebody had clearly once thought there was nothing so splendid in the world as Victorian moulding and crammed it in anywhere it would fit, and rather a lot of places it wouldn’t, including three hacked-off marble capitals meant to crown pillars in a grand bank or a Hungarian cathedral, which instead had to make themselves content with being mortared to the parlour wall without a single column to spare between them. The faucets leaked. The electricity could best be described as “whimsical.” The staircase groaned like it meant to give birth every time Olive so much as thought about mounting an upstairs expedition.
Worst of all, there were only twenty-one books in the library, and the land
lord never changed them out because he was a perfectly slovenly old duffer who never could get all the buttons on his waistcoat closed at the same time. If they got fresh linens every fortnight, they ought to get fresh books, as well. It was only logic. Anything else was unhygienic.
Lingering in the Golden Gleam
He sees her first in the corner of Butler Library at Columbia University. It is late afternoon and it is 1932 and it is so hot the books blaze like a great knobbled furnace. He just rounds the corner and there she stands among the nonfiction stacks, adrift between The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and The Golden Bough. She is wearing a long, unfashionably conservative blue dress and smart black boots. Her still-thick white hair huddles in a knot beneath a brown velvet hat. The skin beneath is pale and wrinkled as a crumpled page. He is also wearing blue, which he takes as a good omen. They match. They should match. Her dress is expensive, well-preserved, the sort of dress only brought out for occasions. Her hat is not. It is very shabby, with shabby silk violets clinging pessimistically to its shabby rolled brim. The soft, comforting sounds of idle chairs squeaking across polished floors and idle coughs squeaking out of polished lungs punctuate the long sentence of his silence, waiting behind her, waiting for her regard, waiting for her to notice him, as though he has not had his fill of being noticed in this life.
But suddenly he has not had his fill of it. He longs for her to turn around. He wills it to happen now. All right, then now. No matter. NOW. He is desperate for her to see him, desperate as thirst. She will know him at a glance, of course, as he knows her. They will talk. They will talk wonderfully, magically, their words spangled and glittering, sodden with meaning, a conversation worthy of being recorded in perfect handwriting, printed lovingly in leather and vellum, preserved like that blue dress, down to the last quotation mark. Unless she is not as he wants her to be. She might be awful, awful and bitter and angry and stupid and a dreadful bore. Anyone worthy, anyone special or sensitive in the least, would know by now that he was standing here like a bloody fool, would have turned around minutes ago, would feel the shape of him behind her like a shadow. Shouldn’t she glow? Shouldn’t she burn with the light of who she is? But of course, he does not. He never has. He scolds himself for his own expectations.
It does not happen the way he wants it to. Nothing ever does anymore. He clears his throat like a stage.
Now, Peter!
“Mrs Hargreaves,” whispers the youngish man in the blue tie, “pardon the intrusion. My name is Peter. Peter Llewelyn Davies.”
She turns her back on the books and meets his eyes with a cool, sharp expression. She’s rather shorter than he imagined. But her eyes are far, far bluer than his dreams, bluer than her dress, his tie, the June sky outside the tall library windows. She holds out her hand. He takes it.
“You must call me Alice, Mr Davies. Everyone does, whether I invite them to or not.”
I Am Not Myself, You See
Olive dutifully kept up her soliloquy of despair during business hours, with short breaks for lunch and tea. But she didn’t mean more than an eighth of it on any given day. It was all a kind of avant-garde improvisational theatre staged for the benefit of Darling Mother.
The unhygienically unchanging books were a real problem, but she knew very well that the village of Eglwysbach was pronounced egg-low-is-bach, which always made her imagine the German composer running around a chicken pen in a powdered wig and speckled wings, crowing for his lost babies. The house went by the name of Ffos Anoddun. As that was nearly too Welsh to bear, Olive assumed it was something to do with fairies or a hillock or a puddle or all three together, and fondly referred to it as Fuss Antonym, which sounded reasonably similar, and comforted her, for to her mind, the opposite of a big fuss was a small contentment. Olive loathed all her school friends and most other people, and couldn’t have given a toss where they went on holiday, even if they’d ever think to confide that sort of thing in her direction. She felt rather affectionate toward the quiet, as it meant hardly anyone came round insisting on being other people at them. Olive liked knitting, and shire horses, and electricity was rather a lot of bother, when you thought about it. It was 1948. People had gotten along well enough without lightbulbs for nearly the whole history of everything.
And she especially loved the three capitals on Fuss Antonym’s parlour wall. She would sit beneath them of an afternoon in the big musty mustard-coloured wingback chair with silk horseradish-green cord whipping and whirling all over it and imagine the poor odd stone wolf and wild hare and raven heads in their curling pale ferns were holding the whole world up, and herself the only person ever to have guessed the truth.
It was safe, you see, to complain around Olive’s sole remaining parent. It was the expected thing. Darling Mother was a complainer in good standing herself. Misery was, she always said, the natural resting state of the young. It was only the old who could not bear unhappiness. Only the old who buckled beneath the hundred million pound weight of it all. As long as Olive kept up her whitewater torrent of disinterest and disaffection and discontent, Darling Mother judged her a Normal Girl, and therefore safe to abandon, never once asking what she was really thinking, or feeling, or wanting, or doing with her time, which suited Olive like a good coat. Little George never complained a bit, even when a sheep ate all his paintbrushes, and Darling Mother practically murdered him with concern and attention.
But she did guess at the shape of her child’s actual innards, occasionally. When some change in the weather troubled the meagre seams of maternal ore that ran deep within the mine of Darling Mother’s heart, she did grope after some connection. She changed the books once. She left a Welsh dictionary on Olive’s bedside table. And once, when she returned from one of her hungry scourings of antique dealers and auctions for more gloomy Victorian rubbish to weigh down the house, she paid a couple of the local boys to drag something silver and heavy and covered with a stained canvas into the parlour. She waved her thin, elegant hand and they left it leaning against the sooty mantel.
“I snatched it up just for you, Daughter Mine. I know you love all this sort of crusty ancient knick-knackery deep down, don’t let’s pretend otherwise. It’s a looking glass. I found it down in Llandudno at an estate sale. Give the old dear a good seeing-to, won’t you?”
Child of Pure Unclouded Brow
“Alice, then,” he says.
The New York sun lights up his untidy brown hair, turns it into a golden cap, the opposite of Perseus, the opposite of himself.
The old woman touches her hat self-consciously. “Alice then; Alice now. Alice always, I’m afraid.”
“And I’m Peter.”
He is repeating himself, and feels foolish. But repetition is a very respectable literary device. As old as dirt and debt and Homer. She will forgive him. Probably.
“Aren’t you just?” laughs Alice. “Well, let’s have a look at you. One head, two shoulders, a couple of knees, rumpled suit, and half a day’s beard. Honestly, Peter, how could you come calling on me without a fetching green cap and pointed shoes? I think I deserve at least that, don’t you?”
Peter looks stricken. His throat goes dry and in all his days he has never wanted whiskey so badly as in this awful moment, and in all his days he has wanted whiskey very badly and often indeed. She did know him, then.
“Oh, I am sorry. I am sorry, Peter, that was unkind. Oh, I am a dreadful beast! It’s what comes of not mixing in company apart from cats and cups, you know. Don’t look quite so much like you’ve just been shot, dear, it doesn’t become. People have done it to me so many times, you see. I couldn’t pass up a chance to do it to somebody else, just the once! And who else in all this sorry world could I do it to but you? Allow an old woman her indulgences.”
“It’s quite all right. I’m used to it.”
Alice Pleasance Liddell-Hargreaves squares her shoulders, bracing as if for a solid punch to the chest. “You may pay me back, if you like.”
“Please, Mrs Har—Alice
. I’ve quite forgotten.”
“No, no, it was rotten of me. I won’t accept your forgiveness, not one bit, until you’ve done me a fair turn.”
“If you insist on making it up to me, I should much prefer you allow me to take you to dinner tonight,” Peter demurs. He dries his palms on his tweed. “I know a place nearby that’s serving wine again already.”
The sunlight streaming through the library windows thins and goes silvery with clouds, darkening Alice’s eyes. “And what do you imagine that will accomplish? That Peter and Alice, the Peter and the Alice, should share plates of oysters and glasses of champagne, quote each other’s famous namesake novels with tremendous wit and pathos, philosophize about innocence, and achieve a kind of graceful catharsis whilst we malign the rather tawdry men who wrote us down for posterity?”
“Just that,” Peter said with a smile that looked like a memory of itself. He held out his arm. “To talk of many things. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax—”
Alice clutches her heart in mock agony and staggers. “Oh, there’s a clever lad! A palpable hit, Davies. I’ll be wincing for days. Now we’re quite even.”
Peter sighs. This would be all, then. A library, a few sharp words, then nothing, a meal alone with his shadows.
“I think I shall allow you to drag this dreadful beast to a respectable supper, so long as it’s not too far, and you pay for us both. I can’t bear much of a stroll, nor much expense, these days.”
She puts her thin, bony hand on Peter’s elbow. When she leans against him, she seems to weigh no more than a pixie.
Every Single Thing’s Crooked
Olive sat in the parlour of the house she called Fuss Antonym with her knees tucked up under her chin, staring at the looking glass. It was raining, because it was Wales and it was winter, and the raindrops against the old lead windows sounded like millions of tiny crystal drums beaten by millions of tiny crystal soldiers. The marble wolf and raven and hare on the misplaced capitals stared down at her in turn. Olive had spent the better part of the morning on her hands and knees with a tube of silver polish and a bottle of vinegar, coaxing the muck of ages out of the great heavy mirror. It was quite a lovely design, once you got down past the geologic layers of black tarnish and dust. The glass was still good, except for a little spiderweb of cracks in the lower right corner that no one but actual spiders would ever notice. The silver frame bloomed with curling oak leaves and pert little acorns and shy half-open violets, a perfect specimen of the typical Victorian habit of taking anything wild and pretty and nailing it down, casting it in metal, freezing it forever. Olive thought the violets probably had little polleny agates or pearls in their centres at some point. The prongs were still there, bent out of shape, empty. She touched them with her fingers. Those prongs were quite the loneliest and saddest thing she’d ever seen, somehow. They looked like her mother. They looked like her.
