Mad Hatters and March Hares

by Ellen Datlow

  “I suppose I should scour the countryside for bunnies and mirrors,” Peter laughs despite himself.

  “I suppose I should,” Alice giggles, and for a moment she is that child on the cover of a million novels, the English Girl, rosy and devious and brilliant. The check appears as if by magic, and Peter pays it, as good as his word. Alice stands and the waiter brings their coats. “No, Peter, it’s best as it is. Whatever would I say to the White Queen now? Give me my bloody damned jam, you old cow? I gave up weeping for my lost kingdom years ago. I made my own, and if it crumbled, well, all kingdoms do. The world’s not so dreadful, my dear. It is dreadful, of course, but only most of the time. Sometimes it rather outdoes itself. Gives us a scene so improbable no one would dare to put it in a book, for who would believe in such a chance meeting between two such people, such a splendid supper, such an unlikely moment in the great pool of moments in which we all swim?” She kisses his cheek. She holds her lips against him for a long time. When she pulls away, there is a thimble in his hand. “Oh, goodness,” Alice says with a shine in her blue eyes. “What a lot of rubbish old ladies have in their bags!”

  They walk arm in arm out into the New York street. People shove and holler by. The lights spangle and reflect in the hot concrete. The air smells like rotting vegetables and steel and fresh baking rolls and summer pollen. Alice stops him on the curb before he can cross the road.

  “Peter, darling, listen to me. You must listen. You’ve got to answer the Caterpillar’s question—you’ve got to find an answer, or else you’ll never find your way. I never could, not until now, not until this very night, but you must. It’s the only question there is.”

  “I can’t, Alice. I want to.”

  Alice throws her arms round his neck. “I like you better, Peter. Ever so much better than him. Peter Pan was always such an awful shit, you know.”

  They start across the long rope of the street, but being English and unaccustomed to traffic, they do not see the streetcar hurtling toward them, painted white for the new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum. Peter hears the bell and leaps back, hauling Alice roughly along with him, barely missing being crushed against the headlamps. When he collects himself, he turns to ask if she’s all right, if he didn’t hurt her too much, if the shock has ruffled her so that they need another drink to steady them.

  There is no one beside him. His arm is empty.

  “Alice?” Peter calls into the darkness. But no answer comes.

  London Is the Capital of Paris, and Paris Is the Capital of Rome

  Olive stood on the stage of the Tumtum Club in the brash glare of the spotlight. She could barely make out all the glittering scales and claws and furs and shining eyeballs of the Looking Glass Creatures in the audience.

  “Go on,” hissed the marble raven. “I’m not doing this alone. You do your bit, then I’ll do mine. Mine’s better, obviously, so I’ll close.”

  “My bit? I haven’t got a bit! I didn’t even sing in the school concert!”

  “Do something! You’re sure to, if you stand there long enough!”

  Olive felt like her heart was dribbling out of her mouth. Everyone just kept looking at her. No one had ever looked at her for so long. Certainly not Father Dear or Darling Mother who ignored her benignly, not Little George who was more interested in painting the sheep, not the Other One, who seemed never to notice her until they collided in the hall. She could hardly bear it. What could she possibly do to impress these aliens out of her own bookshelf? In the book, Alice always had something clever to say, some bit of wordplay or a really swell pun. Olive could never be an Alice. She wasn’t quick enough. She wasn’t endearing enough. She wasn’t anyone enough.

  Really, she only had one choice. She’d only ever practiced one thing long enough to get really good at it.

  “It’s … ahem … it’s dreadful here,” Olive complained. Her voice shook. Everyone liked the pig screaming about its mother. Would they understand her talent? “Even the toadstools and the cocktails are depressed. There’s only one pub and you can’t even play darts here. Alice got to meet a Unicorn and dance with Dodos and learn something about herself on her holiday.” A great gasp ripped through the crowd. A tiger lily burst into tears. The White Queen looked like she might faint.

  “It’s not allowed!” the chess piece whispered. The cat grinned and began, slowly, to disappear.

  Olive pressed on. “But what do I get? The saddest country I’ve ever seen! If any of you so much as breathe wrong, the government passes out from the scandal of it. I can’t even pronounce half of the stuff the Jabberwock says! A more cramped and dreary place I’ve never dreamed of. It’s clear no one ever planned nor built Wonderland so much as piled it up and gave up on it several times. Somebody obviously thought there was nothing so splendid in the world as Victorian allegory and crammed it in anywhere it would fit, and rather a lot of places it wouldn’t. The martinis aren’t even close to dry. How do you even have electricity? And the local politics are appalling, I’ll tell you that for free. Stuff all Queens, I say! Except Elizabeth, she’s all right.”

  Olive bowed, then curtseyed, then settled on something halfway between. A smattering of uncertain applause started up, growing stronger as the Looking Glass Creatures recovered from their shock. The smattering became a thundering, became a roar.

  The raven hopped up into the spotlight to soak up a bit of adoration for himself. He coughed and shook his stone feathers. The audience quieted, leaned forward, eager, ready for more—so ready they did not hear the thumping outside, or the terrified squeak of the Dormouse in his teapot armour.

  “How,” said the marble corvid, “is a raven like a writing desk?”

  “It’s a raid!” a Dodo shrieked from the back of the Tumtum Club.

  The club fell apart into madness as playing cards flooded in from all sides, grabbing at the collars of egg and man alike, shouting orders, taking down names. Looking Glass Creatures bolted, down rabbit holes and up through the mossy rafters, behind the posters advertising THE CHESHIRE CIRCUS and MISS MARY ANN SINGS THE BLUES. Olive froze. She saw the turtle who’d sung so beautifully being dragged off by a pair of deuces. A Knave of Clubs swung his rifle into the scaly ankle of Edward, the poor Jabberwock, who roared in anguish. Tears shone on Olive’s cheeks in the footlights. But she couldn’t move. The sound of the raid slashed at her ears horribly.

  “We both devour humans, piece by piece,” the raven finished his riddle into the din, but no one heard him.

  Someone gripped Olive’s arm.

  “Come,” said the White Queen. “I’ll take you with a pleasure. Twopence a week, and always jam to-day.”

  “Come where?”

  “Where you were always going, where you have already been. Where we are already friends, where we have already fought long and hard together, where we have sat upon the field of battle in one another’s arms and looked out over a free Wonderland. Where everything is as it was before the war, before our world split in two, before the Other One, before anything hurt.”

  “Is that really what’s going to happen?”

  “No. It’s impossible. But I believe it anyway. It’s the only way I can bear to face breakfast.”

  Olive glanced offstage. There was a flash of light there, something reflecting in all the flotsam of the theatre. A pane of glass from some lonely window. And for a moment, Olive thought she could see, on the other side of the glass, Darling Mother in the parlour, asleep with Little George in her arms, a nearly empty bottle of gin on the end table and rain still pouring down outside. The shadows of the raindrops looked like black weeping on her mother’s face. Everything as it was. Before. Before anything hurt. Could such a thing ever be?

  She took the White Queen’s white hand. They ran together through the wings and out through two mossy hidden doors back beyond the reach of the footlights. The two of them burst into the glen, into a river of folk running away from the Tumtum Club and into the Looking Glass World, running slow, and thus, stream
ing along so fast they could never be caught.

  Olive looked back over her shoulder at the great skeleton covered in moss and flowers and briars and vines. She hadn’t seen it when she came in. The glow-worms had dazzled her. The whole world had dazzled her.

  “We loved her so,” the White Queen said, not in the least out of breath as they ran on and on into the wood. “She came back, and she ate a hundred mushrooms so she could grow big enough to protect us. I was there when she died, hardly bigger than a pearl in her hand. She was so old—I hardly remember ever being so old! Living backwards makes it terribly easy to forget. She smiled and said: oh my gracious! and closed her eyes. And of course the moment she did, the Red Queen called her pawns to arms—but for a moment, when she was huge and high and here, for one tiny minute in all the world, almost everyone was happy. We loved her so; we never wanted to be parted from her. We wanted her to be with us forever. And she is.”

  The giant’s skeleton was wearing a heavy iron crown, and the crown had two words lovingly etched all the way round it:

  QUEEN ALICE

  MOON, AND MEMORY, AND MUCHNESS

  Katherine Vaz

  I begin at three o’clock in the morning. There’s a glaze over tonight’s rind of the moon. Sometimes—this being a dense part of the East Village—I jump out of my skin at the sound of breaking glass, a quarrel; I almost cry out for Alicia. I assemble the adorable, tiny pots of lemon curd and mango jam and the comfits that my customers steal. I use a butter-cutter pastry tool on the best butter for the pumpkin scones. A New York Times food editor asked for my secret ingredient in the crystallized-ginger muffins, but I demurred, not because it is exotic but because it’s frightfully simple: I add coconut extract. My walk-in freezer is packed to its gills, but everything is precisely labeled. Grief can do this: There’s a ferocious desire to control and align the world, as if that stops or reverses the time. Mini-quiches, miniature tortilla molds for lentil salad. I fix roulade sandwiches with Russian dressing, turkey, and Cotswold cheddar. Does a person ever conquer an eating disorder? Everything screams, Eat Me, Drink Me. As a young wife and mother, I blew up two sizes, melted down three, over and over. Now I survive on toast and rose-hip infusions. Practically nothing. My Wonderland Tea Shop and its kitchen are downstairs, and I perch in small quarters above. After one day’s prep, service, and clean-up, it’s always time to start over again.

  What is the “bargaining” stage of grief? Since I’ve never figured that out, I fear I’m in the grip of its unknowable rules. If I hold my temper when a customer spills clotted cream on the floor, will Alicia reappear? If I smile as a woman changes her order from white tea to rooibos to the Zen Mix, will my child’s ghost appear? If I throw out the news clippings about the two young madmen who tormented and murdered Alicia, will I get un-stuck in Time? (Is that even something I want?) My ex-husband, Bill, lives with a new wife and son (already a schoolboy!) in Phoenix, and we chat on occasion; we have lunch (I watch him eat while I can’t finish my soup) when he returns for the parole hearings. I’m glad for him. He blamed me for Alicia, and I blame myself. At an arts and crafts emporium in Chelsea, while gathering holly and garlands for Christmas, I turned my back, and the earth swallowed her.

  Above the shop, my rented rooms are so minute it’s as if I live in the cutaway of a whelk shell. Painted on the face of the ticking tabletop clock is a girl on a swing, her Mary Janes frozen toward heaven. There’s never wine on hand, because I’d drink it and then there’d be no wine anyway. Occasionally I resort to pills for sleep and glide in Technicolor dreams where flowers are talking and flamingos are playing a game, with me as the croquet ball. I maintain, intact, the pint-sized tea table that Alicia loved arranging for Mr. Bun, her stuffed rabbit, and Mabel the mouse, and Jackie the toucan. At each setting are plastic wands filled with water, glitter, and tiny keys. Bill joined the little parties we threw for her animals, mint in sugar-water and vanilla wafers; he was a warm father and husband.

  I used to teach poetry at a small college on Staten Island, and those eager faces, even the ones ravaged by wild partying, blazed their hopeful innocence in my direction, nearly burning me alive. Bill was an accountant. We lived modestly, the three of us, in Murray Hill. After selling our apartment, he and I shared the profits after the two boys—rich, with a lawyer passionately loud about the burden of their privileges—were sentenced to only twelve years. Alicia died at age six. Eight years ago. It feels like yesterday.

  Of course Kumiko Mori is the first employee to show up, clear-eyed, cheerful, with a red streak feathering her jet-black hair and her signature thick belt accenting a cinched waist her boyfriend likely spans with his hands. “Morning, Mrs. Dias.”

  I’ve told her to call me Dorrie. Or Doreen. Old-school, she resists. I should return to my maiden name, Lewis—I’m a custard of Welsh, English, and Finnish—but then I wouldn’t have Alicia’s final name anymore. Bill Dias is of Brazilian and Irish stock.

  Kumiko picks up the sign-up sheet at the counter to see how many people want to try a tea ceremony. Chanoyu. Zero. Her grandfather is at the ready, should we enlist enough takers. Sweets served to balance tea’s bitterness. Everything spotless, arranged with flowers. Tranquility. The idea that the small things we think are meaningless have as much meaning as anything great or small. And therefore all meaning is equal. Who in searching for greatness in life can bear examining that?

  I joke about how many entertainments vie for our attention nowadays, and tea ceremonies of painstaking slowness are a tough sell.

  Kumiko grins and unwinds the eternity scarf from her neck. It’s autumn; our décor is purple and gilt. She hangs her scarf and coat on the hook in the kitchen as she takes the teapots from the shelf, and she says, “I need to tell you something, Mrs. Dias.”

  Why does my heart skip a beat? All the servers eventually leave, but I hate giving her up. Her beauty, grace, and hard work. The faint promise of a ceremony of tea.

  “Kumiko?”

  But then in barrels Jason, sleepy, mild, a decent waitperson, good with card tricks at the tables while the tea brews. He wants to be an actor. The older man he lives with might be cheating on him. He’s pleasant. Alex is less so, dragging himself in, a lean practitioner of the faint sneer, eager to convey that he’s primed for better things when he graduates from Columbia. His financial-world parents—he lives with them—encourage his refusal to abase himself with a mouse-filled, starter studio apartment. I should fire him, but he keeps his disdain subdued, and it’s hard to find help.

  Kumiko unlocks the front door, and hordes on their way to work pour in for cinnamon rolls and croissants to go, and the mothers-at-ease trundle in their squalling children, babies wrinkled as piglets. I feed off the tumult of children, though Alicia was quiet. Why didn’t she bellow and scream when those boys abducted her?

  A girl in a fairy princess outfit tugs my apron and says, “I like apricots!”

  I kneel to meet her eyes with mine, delighted. “Guess what? I made apricot tarts last night.” All true! I treasure these unexpected little connections as victories.

  The mother, a natural beauty in a ponytail, a child herself, says, “Wonderful.”

  Then laughs. Because wonderful and wonder belong in wonderland.

  I rarely remember that Alicia would be fourteen now. I live for these girls who come with their mothers, a special treat. They’re joyful in this make-believe realm I’ve made. Throwback to gracious times. Tea, gen-til-i-ty. Bite-sized salmon sandwiches. The pots warmed British-style, loose leaves if you have more time, an extra spoon for the pot. I’m not raking in a fortune, but I’ve kept my nose above water.

  Kumiko carries a tray of Earl Grey. More customers sweep in. Morning rush. The walls offer murals of white and red roses, white rabbits. Fish-footmen. A queen, a chorus of humans as playing cards. A caterpillar on a mushroom, hookah in mouth; the college kids flock near that one.

  I wave at Kumiko over the tables, the sea of speeding New Yorkers. She does a funny mock-d
ance of panic. Her red-and-white Wonderland apron is spotless. Crash! A child has dropped her fragile cup; an accident. Kumiko comforts her and sweeps it up. Alex checks his phone until he sees me glaring. Jason’s sleeves are already stained with jam.

  My child once found a songbird, egg-yolk yellow, with a head wound, during a walk with us in Central Park. She fed it with an eyedropper at home. Bill and I warned it wouldn’t make it. She insisted that it would, or at least it wouldn’t die alone. She was all of five, one year left to live. She named the birdie “Dodo.” I’ll never know why. Came the dawn that the bird flapped around her room, and Alicia opened the window and chanted, “Go now, go away. Fly! Go on,” though she was in tears.

  One night, as a prank, because Alicia was magical, she put crayons in Bill’s and my bed. Her reason was that we seemed so drained she was afraid we were dreaming in black-and-white.

  * * *

  When I ask Kumiko, as breakfast cedes to the lunch crowd—more sandwiches, more tiered stands with savory items on top and petit fours below—what she needed to tell me, she says, “Mrs. Dias, I got that internship at Bellevue.” Her smooth skin suddenly looks like satin balled up in a fist and then let go. “It’s full-time.”

  No surprise, really. She wants to be a psychiatrist, and she deserves any portal that opens. Her future is unfurling before her. But as she gently gives two-weeks’ notice, I drop into the chair behind the counter, because the purple room is spinning.

  “Hey,” she says. “Hey, Mrs. Dias. I’m so sorry.”

  I say I’m glad for her. And I am. I hiss at Alex to get off his phone and stop pretending he can’t see the guests at Table Five waving their arms as if they’re in a lifeboat. For a horrid moment, I imagine unlocking the drawer near the register, extracting my silver pistol, and scaring the dumb grin off his spoiled face.

  “I’ll come back with my grandpa if you get the sign-ups for a tea ceremony,” Kumiko whispers, an arm around my slumped shoulder. Jason glances my way as he passes with a lethally large serving of éclairs. What is wrong with me?