The Future Is Blue

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Large as Life and twice as natural

  Olive put her hand against the looking glass.

  She was balanced rather precariously on the mantel, one knee on either side of a portrait of Darling Mother as a young girl, before Father Dear, before the Other One, before Olive and Little George and Eglwysbach and the sheep and the paintbrushes and all of everything ever. A book of matches tumbled down onto the hearth as Olive tried, somehow, to grip the brickwork with her kneecaps.

  When she’d been cleaning it with vinegar, the mirror had felt cool and slick and perfect as dolphin-skin. Olive pressed her other hand against the glass. It wasn’t cool now. Or slick. It felt warm and alive and prickly, like a wriggling hedgehog thrilled to see its mate waddling through a wet paddock. The marble wolf’s head in the looking glass parlour still snarled. The one in Fuss Antonym’s parlour still did nothing of the kind.

  “Don’t be stupid, Olive,” she scolded herself. Darling Mother never did, anymore. Someone had to pick up the slack. “Really, you’re such an awful little fool. Nothing’s going to happen. Nothing’s ever going to happen to you. That’s just how it is and you know it. You’ve gone barking, that’s all, and pretty soon someone will come and take you away to a nice padded room by the sea where you can’t bother anyone.”

  The looking glass writhed under her hands. It spread and stretched and undulated like a great glass python just waking from a thousand years asleep. Slowly, the mirror turned to mist, and the mist stroked the bones of her wrists with fond fingers.

  “Mum!” Olive screamed—but the looking glass took her anyway, scream and all, and in half a moment she tumbled through to the other side into a cloud of green glow-worms, and a thumping, ancient forest, and the hot, thrilling blackness of a summer’s midnight.

  Each Shining Scale

  The salad course appears amid the wash of unbridgeable silence. Beets, radishes, hard cheeses as translucent as slivers of pearl, sour vinegars, peppercorns green and black. Peter sighs. The other diners around him simply will not stop their idiotic noises, the belligerent scraping of silver against china, the oceanic murmur of inane conversation, the animal slurping of their food. The oysters begin to turn on him. He feels a pale bile churning within.

  “He said not to grow up, not ever,” he whispers. “He made me promise. But I couldn’t help it. Not for a minute. Even while he was telling his tale, scribbling away at his own cleverness while my father rotted away in bed, I was growing up. Becoming not-Peter all the time while he told me to stop, stop at once, hold still, keep frozen like…like a side of lamb.”

  Alice rolls her eyes and bites through a red radish. She has a spot of mauve lipstick on her teeth. “Oh, how very dare those precious old men prattle on and on to us about childhood! The only folk who obsess over the golden glow of youth are ones who’ve forgotten how perfectly dreadful it is to be a child. Did you feel invincible and piratical and impish when your father died? I surely did not when Edith passed. You simply cannot stop things happening to you in this life. And do you know the funniest thing? An Oxford don, living in the walled garden of the university, with servants and a snug little house in which to write nonsense poems and puzzles and make inventions to your heart’s content—that’s more and more permanent a childhood than I ever had. He used to moan and mewl over me about the horror of corsets to come, the grimoire of marriage, the charnel house of childbirth, the dark curtains that would close over me upon some future birthday—well, for goodness sake! What would he know about any of that? He never married, he never had a child, he never so much as scrubbed his own underthings! How dare he tell me four years old was the best of life when I had so many years left to face?”

  “Eighteen months.”

  “Pardon?”

  “When Peter left for Neverland. He was eighteen months old. In a pram in Kensington Gardens. An eighteen-month-old child can barely speak, barely walk without falling. But that was the best I had ever been, in his eyes. The best I ever could be. And all those people went to see the play and clapped their hands and agreed he was right, and all the while I was twenty, twenty-five, thirty. Thirty. As old as Hook. Watching myself fly away. Watching from the back row while my bones screamed, all in quiet: That’s not what I was like, that’s not how any of it goes; Christ, James, I was never heartless, I wish I was, I wish I was!”

  Alice frowns into her beer. She rubs the glass with one fingertip.

  “It’s not children who are innocent and heartless,” she says—bitterly? Pityingly? Peter has never had the knack of reading people. Only books, and only on good days. “Only the mad,” she finishes, and goes after her beets with a vengeful stab.

  A Life Asunder

  The very first thing Olive did was look behind her. There was dear, familiar, batty old Fuss Antonym’s wall—but it was no longer dear or familiar at all, and quite a bit battier. Instead of storm-slashed whitewash, the house sported a shimmering blackwash, roofed with overturned tea-saucers, and crawling with a sort of luminous ivy peppered with great, blowy hibiscus flowers in a hundred comic-book colours. She had come through the middle window in a row of three. On the other side of the window, she could still see the parlour, the mustard-coloured chair, the painting of the shepherdess and the black sheep, the peeling moulding, the chilled grey afternoon peeking in past the curtains on the ordinary wall opposite. All right, yes, fine, Olive told herself, half-terrified, half-irritated. This sort of thing happens when you’ve gone mad. It’s nothing to get tizzy over. You’ve sniffed too much silver polish, that’s all. Might as well enjoy it! The other side of the looking glass was a window, and the other side of the house was a deep night, and a deep summer, and a deep forest, deep and hot and sticky and bright.

  Olive’s knees abandoned her. She tumbled down onto a new, savage, harlequin earth. She was going to have a tizzy, after all. For God’s sake, Olive! She plunged her knuckles into the alien ground. Even the soil sparkled. Hot mud squelched between her fingers, streaked with glittering grime like liquefied opals. An infinite jungley tangle spread out before her, and it simply refused to not be there, no matter how Olive tried to make it stop being there. A path tumbled down the hillocks and shallows, away into rose-jet shadows and emerald-coal mists. Delicate wood-mushrooms curled up everywhere like flowers in a busy garden: chartreuse chanterelles, fuchsia toadstools, azure puffballs.

  Something was moving down there, down the path, between the mushrooms and the ferns and the trees no prim Latin taxonomy could pin down. Something pale. Something rather loud. And, just possibly, not one something alone, but three somethings together. There is nothing for a tizzy like a something, and before she could tell herself sensibly to stay close to home, no matter how odd and unhomelike home had suddenly become, Olive was off down the path and through the garden of night fungus, chasing three hard, pale, loud voices through the dark.

  “You’re such an awful brat,” growled something just ahead. “I don’t know why we trouble ourselves with you at all.”

  “And deadly boring, to ice the cake,” sniffed something else. “Why even tell a riddle if you don’t have any earthly intention of answering it for anybody? It’s not sporting, that’s what.”

  “I think it’s jolly sporting,” crowed a third something. “For me.”

  “A raven isn’t like a writing desk. You can smirk all you like, but that’s the truth and I hate you. It just isn’t, in any sort of way that makes sense—” the second something spluttered.

  “The farthing you go for sense, the furthing you are from the pound,” the third something said loftily.

  “Do shut up,” snarled the first something.

  Olive rounded a bank of birch stumps and mauve moss wriggling in such a way that she absolutely did not want to look any closer—and yet she did, for that was a something, too. The moss wasn’t wriggling at all, rather, hundreds of silkworms wriggled while they feasted on it. Only these were actually silkworms—not ugly blind little scraps of beef suet, but creatures made up entir
ely of rich, embroidered silk brocade, fat as a rich lady, writhing greedily over the bank. Olive shuddered, and in her shuddering, nearly toppled over the somethings she’d been after.

  In a clearing in the wood stood three hacked-off marble capitals, the sort meant to crown pillars in a grand bank or Hungarian cathedral. Her capitals. The very ones that hung so stupidly and dearly on her parlour wall. Only these were hopping about on their own recognizance, as if they were really and truly the wolf, hare, and raven that had been carved into their fine stone blocks.

  The wolf’s head, surrounded by carved fern-heads and flowers, the very one that had snarled within the looking glass and snoozed without, looked Olive up and down. The hare wriggled her veiny marble nose. The raven fluffed his sculpted feathers.

  “Bloody tourists,” the wolf snipped.

  Seven Maids with Seven Mops

  Alice watches another couple without expression. The man cuts the woman’s meat for her. The woman stares into the distance while he saws away silently at her pork. A repeating face, turned away, a woman watching a woman watching nothing. Staring and sighing and gnawing, the great human trinity. Peter has a strange and horrible instinct to lean over the table, the salads, the beer, the scotch, the candles, the world, their whole useless strained, copyedited lives and kiss Alice. To make himself cheap, as Wendy did in that cruel first scene in the nursery. He has always kissed first in his life. Always tried to redeem that little viciousness in the other Peter, whose heart was an acorn and whose kiss was a jest. She is so much older than he, but Peter loves older women, since he was hardly yet a man. Guiltily, and to great sorrow, but who could ask more of the most famous motherless boy in all of history?

  He doesn’t do it. Of course he doesn’t. He, too, is of a certain era, and that era does not clear dining tables for the madness of love.

  “At least your man stayed to look after you,” Alice says finally, without turning her face back to his. “It’s a kindly vampire who tucks you in and puts out the milk by your bed once he’s drunk his fill of your life.”

  Her lips are red with beet-blood. He supposes his must be as well. Peter orders a second scotch.

  “Are you angry, Alice? Do you hate him? I can’t think whether I should feel better or worse if you hate him. I can’t think whether I hate mine or not. I can’t think whether he is mine. I am his, that’s for certain. His, forever. A shadow that’s slipped off and roams the streets hoping to be mistaken for a human being. For a while I was so flamingly angry I thought I’d char.”

  “Not angry…angry isn’t the word. Perhaps there isn’t a word. Charles came back to see me once, after that summer. I was a little older. Eleven or twelve. A little was enough. He looked at me like a stranger. Like any other young woman—a slight distaste, a tremor of existential threat, a very little current of fear. He could hardly meet my eye while I poured the tea. Like a robber returning to the scene of the crime.” She stopped watching the other woman and turned her blue eyes back to Peter. Their cold, triumphant light filled him up like a well. “He came to my window and saw that I’ d grown old and he wanted nothing more to do with me.”

  Alice’s right Foot, Esq.

  “You’re going to spoil it,” snapped the hare. “Oh, I know she’s going to spoil it, it always gets spoiled, just when we’re about to have it out at last.”

  “I won’t spoil anything, I promise,” Olive whispered, quite out of breath.

  “You can hardly help it,” sighed the wolf’s-head capital. “Any more than milk can help spoiling outside the icebox.”

  “Raven was finally about to tell us how he’s like a writing-desk when you came bollocking through! I’ve been waiting eons! There’s no sense to it, you know. We’ve said a hundred answers and none of them are at all good. But he won’t say, because he’s a stupid wart. I’d advise you to tread more quietly, young lady, if you don’t want to alert the authorities.”

  “What authorities? It’s only a forest inside a looking glass. The constable is hardly going to come arrest me on my way from Nowheresville to Noplace Downs.”

  “The Queens’ men,” the wolf whispered. His whiskers quivered in canine fear. “All ways here belong to them.”

  “Which Queen? Elizabeth? She’s all right.”

  “Either of them,” answered the hare with an anxious tremor in her quartzy whiskers. “Twos are wild tonight and they’re the worst of the lot.” The pale rabbit tilted onto her side just as a real, furry hare would if it were scratching its ear with a hind leg, only the capital hadn’t any hind legs, right or left, so she just hitched up on one corner and quivered there.

  “All right, I surrender,” cawed the raven’s head suddenly. “I’ll say it. But only because our Olive’s finally going places, and that deserves a present.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly!” Olive demurred, though she was quite delighted by the idea. “It’s quite enough to have properly met you three at last! And to think, it would never have happened if I hadn’t gone totally harebrained just then! It was all that silver polish, I expect.”

  The marble hare went very still. “I beg your pardon? What is the trouble with a hare’s brain, hm?”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean anything cruel by it,” Olive said hurriedly. “It’s only that I’m…well, I’m obviously not playing with a full deck of cards this evening.”

  “Only the Queen has a full deck at her command,” the marble wolf barked. “Who do you think you are?”

  “Nobody!”

  “Then we’ll be on our way!” The hare huffed. “There’s no point in talking to nobody, after all. People will say we’ve gone mad!”

  “Oh, please don’t go! I only meant…” She looked pleadingly at the marble raven, who offered no help. “I only meant that I went mad a few minutes ago, and as I’ve only just started, I’m bound to make a mash of it at first. I’ve no doubt I’ll improve! The most dreadful sorts of people go mad; it can’t be so terribly hard. But I only ever wanted to say that darling Mr. Raven hasn’t got to give me a present, it’s present enough to make your acquaintance!”

  “Would you prefer a future?” the hare asked, her pride still smarting. “It’s more splendid than the present, but you’ve got to wait three days for delivery.”

  “Of course, the past is particularly nice this time of year,” the wolf grinned.

  “No! All we’ve got is the present, and not a very pleasant one at that.” The raven snapped at a passing glow-worm. “Rather cheap, honestly. I’m only warning you so you won’t be disappointed.”

  “Oh, stop trying to impress her! You haven’t got the goods. Admit it!” The wolf howled from within his thicket of carved Corinthian leaves. “You just made up that bit of humbug because it sounded clever and shiny and it alliterated you never had the tawdriest idea of how to solve it. Confess! Perjury! Pretension! Petty thief of my intellectual energies! Hornswoggler! ”

  “I have got the goods, and the bads, and the amorals, too! But if I’m to give up my present, after all this time, we must have a proper party for it! You lot have abused me so long that just handing it over in the woods like a highwayman won’t do—no sir, no madam, no how nor hence nor hie-way! I will have a To-Do! I will have balloons and buttercream and brandy and bomb shelters! And one good trombone, at minimum!”

  The marble hare rocked from one side of its flat column-base to the other in sculptural excitement. “Shall we, shan’t we, shall we, shan’t we, shall we join the dance?”

  The three capitals leapt off down the forest path, bouncing and hopping like three drops of oil on a hot pan. Olive raced after them, ducking moonlit branches and drooping vines clotted with butterflies that seemed, somehow, to have tiny slices of bread for wings. But no matter how Olive ran, she seemed only to go slower, the wood around her only to close in thicker and deeper, darker and closer, until she could hardly move at all, and had lost sight entirely of the talking capitals. At last, she found herself standing quite still in a little glen, staring up at the starry sky and
the starry leaves and the starry massive skeleton sheathed in moss so thick it could keep out the cold of a thousand winters. Tiger lilies and violets and dahlias and peonies grew wild in the skeleton’s teeming green ribcage, its soft, blooming mouth, its sightless eye sockets. It lay sprawled on the forest floor propped up against a tree as vast as time, arms limp, legs bent at the knee. A galaxy of green and ultraviolet glow-worms ringed the giant’s dead green head like a crown, and the crown spelled out words in flickering, sparkling letters:

  THE TUMTUM CLUB

  No thought of Me Shall Find a Place

  A violinist, a cellist, and an oboist begin to set up their music stands in the corner of the Stork Club. They are nice young men, in nice new suits, with nice fresh haircuts and shaves. The violinist rubs his bow with resin as though he is sharpening a sword.

  “I always felt…Alice…I always felt I was two people. Two Peters. Myself, and him. The Other One. And the Other was always the better version. Younger, handsomer, jollier, bolder. Of course he was. I had to bumble through every day knocking things over and breaking my head open. But the Other One…he got to try over and over again until he got it right. Until he was perfect. Dreamed, planned, written, re-written, re-rewritten, edited, crossed-out, tidied up, nipped and cut and shaped and moved through the plot with a minimum of trouble. Nothing I could ever say could be as clever as the Other One’s quipping. How could it be? Everything I say is a dreadful cliché, because I am alive and human, and live humans are not made out of dust and God’s breath, no matter what anyone says. They’re made out of clichés. So there are two of me—what a unique observation for a muse to make! No, no, it isn’t, it can’t be, because I only said it once, I didn’t get to decide it was rubbish and go back, erase it, add a metaphor or a bit of meta-fiction or a dash of theatricality. So I just say it and it’s terrible, it’s nothing. But the Other One would be delighted with two Peters, you know. What adventures they would have together. Nothing for mischief like a twin.”