Unbirthday

by Liz Braswell

  She clapped her hands all the way closed.

  She waited a moment.

  Then she opened them, slowly, and this time the cookware was silent and looked thoroughly chastised.

  “Thank you,” Alice said, a little shortly. Somewhat hangdog, they made their way back to the rack and hung themselves up in the proper position. “I have no issue at all with you socializing—it’s your behavior while you did so that was unseemly.”

  “Quite right, too,” the Dodo said. “Keeping an orderly house is the first tenet of civilization. Oh, I found these, hiding in the stockpot.”

  Huddling in the palm of his wing was a family of mice with ribbons for tails and buttons for eyes and pocket-handkerchief corners for ears. They were calico and shivering miserably.

  “Are you fleeing the Heart soldiers?” Alice asked, trying not to squeal with delight. One of the smaller ones, probably a baby of some sort, held up a wee doll and shook it defiantly. The toy was no bigger than the nail of Alice’s smallest finger and had what looked like poppy seeds sewn on for eyes. “Oh dear, she’s going after toys as small as that?”

  The mice nodded fiercely. One of the other children began to cry—presumably because her toy had already been lost to the Queen of Hearts. Reluctantly, her brother held out the doll for her to touch for comfort.

  “This is madness,” Alice swore.

  “We’re all mad here,” the Dodo said a little sadly, obviously thinking of the Hatter.

  “You know,” Alice said gently to the crying mousekin, “I used to hide my doll—her name was Sophia—in the stockpot. We played hide-and-go-seek, and it was terribly hard pretending not to know where she was. I would try to make myself forget—because Mathilda wouldn’t hide her. Ever. She was never up for any sort of game, except for charades with family and friends. What a wet blanket she is.”

  “That’s unusual!” the Dodo said, intrigued. “I would have thought in a boring world like yours she would have been a girl, like you.”

  Alice decided to ignore that. It wasn’t likely the Dodo would ever meet Mathilda, so she would never really have to explain it all anyway.

  “Come with us, little mice,” she offered, trying again. “The Queen of Clubs has promised to help as long as we try to rebel against the Queen of Hearts ourselves. If she sees the entire country is aligned against the bad queen, she will come with troops and save us all.”

  The parent mice shook their heads and drew their children close.

  “Well, please think about it. Here: not a bribe, just a parting gift.” She pulled out one of her biscuits and broke it in half, handing over a piece. The adult mice grabbed it with tiny claws like pins.

  As they turned away into the pantry, Alice frowned, thinking.

  “Dodo, how are all these creatures escaping the Queen of Hearts making their way here? Wouldn’t they have to go through Snakes and Ladders first and win it?”

  “There are many different ways into the Unlikely.” The Dodo shrugged. “But most are tiny.”

  “Succinct, and yet meaningless,” Alice observed. “Oh, look—what a surprise. A mome rath in the pantry.”

  A bright pink-and-green one, its head tuft a darker pink. It stood out amongst the quietly murmuring pots of jam and old biscuits like a bright chintz-print curtain in the middle of an ancient wood. It did not belong there at all; for even the Wonderland version of her house had colors duller than the rest of the imaginary world.

  This creature showed no hesitation at all and immediately threw itself into Alice’s arms. It was a little shocking, and very furry, and exceptionally soft. She hugged it back, trying to ignore its rather oversized eyes.

  “It’s not a monster—it’s just a terrified little thing,” she told herself.

  “There, there,” she whispered aloud. Should she offer it a biscuit? Did it even have a mouth? Was it rude to offer a biscuit to something that didn’t have a mouth? “I didn’t only play pretend things in the pantry. I always ran there when I was—when I was sad, or scared. Or felt bad.”

  Her head swam for a moment with déjà vu. She suddenly felt that she was comforting a much younger Alice, and not a ridiculous little Wonderland creature. The room didn’t spin, exactly, but she felt light-headed, like things were shifting behind her eyes, her brain resettling itself for a different reality.

  “Dodo,” she said quietly, putting a hand to her head. “We are still in Wonderland, are we not?”

  “We are where we’ve been,” the Dodo said kindly. “I’ve always been here. Still am.”

  “I’m not really home, at a different time, am I?” she asked, looking around. For when she didn’t look too close, the bizarre differences weren’t readily apparent, and the movement of normally inanimate objects out the corner of her eyes seemed more like the beginning of dizziness or a fainting spell. “I’m not in the past when I was a little girl—or in the future, when I’m wandering about the rooms, old and mad?”

  “You might be old—I don’t know how folks age where you’re from—but you’re certainly mad,” the Dodo said soothingly.

  “You don’t think it’s queer that in each place where I’ve had a memory of hiding—either an object or myself—we find another refugee of the Queen of Hearts?” She knelt down to look the Dodo dead in the eye. “Specifically in each place I remember, and nowhere else? As if…as if they either knew somehow it’s where I hid and felt safe, or…they’re all in my mind to begin with?”

  The Dodo just blinked at her, and for a frosty moment all she saw were blank avian eyes.

  “Dodo, please tell me! Are there mome raths in my head?” Alice pleaded. “Do I carry my Nonsense around with me everywhere? Even back in Angleland? Is that what the Cheshire meant? What does it all mean?”

  “It means that, with all these good fellows we’re finding, we have a great head start on telling everyone about the Great Hearts Uprising!” the Dodo said, patting the little mome rath on its head in a fond but ultimately patronizing manner.

  “But, but…” Alice fretted. “This is very perplexing. I feel like I’m on the edge of a great precipice, or a sudden expansion of my range of knowledge. Where do I go when I am in Wonderland? Or is it just my mind, while my body stays at home—possibly asleep? Does any of it come back with me? Literally? Do the little mome raths and calico mice sneak a ride in my…mind house here? How is it I forget facts and figures and memories from the world I come from while here, and while I’m over there, Wonderland seems to drift away entirely? For when I’m over there, I almost entirely forget the importance of what is going on here.”

  “That,” the Dodo said, “is tragic. That’s like paying a painter with a squib instead of a penny.”

  Alice regarded him steadily. Here she was having an attack of existentialism and all she got was Nonsense.

  The Dodo shrugged. “I’m a politician. Talk to a philosopher about these issues—you can usually find them scavenging in the garbage bins. Talk to me about caucus races. But I shan’t have any constituents at all if the Queen of Hearts takes their toys and murders them.”

  What world do I really belong to? was a question that flitted through the forefront of Alice’s mind for only a tenth of the tick of a second hand on a fancy grandfather clock. It was actually irrelevant. Both worlds needed saving.

  “I’ve forgotten what’s really important. It’s not what’s going on my head at all—it’s real things happening to real people, in Wonderland and Angleland,” she said, chastising herself. “I’ve entirely lost my perspective.”

  Suddenly she blinked.

  “Perspective!” she cried aloud.

  “No one is answering to that name,” the Dodo said, looking around.

  “No, listen!” she said excitedly.

  “I have mine and you have yours

  It’s needed in a painting

  But in the end none agree on

  the meaning of the thing.

  “The answer is perspective! It’s a riddle my friend told me. I forget
his name.”

  “And yet you remember the riddle,” the Dodo observed.

  “Why, that’s true, isn’t it?” Alice said slowly. “How can I remember that so clearly?”

  “You must remember to tell it to the Cheshire when you see him again. He loves riddles. More than the Hatter, actually. Now, I think you were going to show me your room?”

  “Quite right,” Alice said distractedly. She felt the way she did sometimes when a conversation with someone had not gone quite the way it should, and even though she played and replayed the dialogue in her head later she couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong, but still felt bad about it. She needed a good sulk or quiet sit by the window, possibly with a kitten.

  Who had told her the riddle? He had said it was important. That he depended upon it, or something of the sort.

  The weight of this and two worlds fell heavily upon her and her shoulders. So many people depended on her now!

  But as she put one hand on the banister, suddenly she felt exactly the opposite.

  Not knowing quite how it had begun, Alice found herself slowly floating up the stairs, drifting with purpose, one finger keeping her anchored to the railing.

  “Of course,” she said in wonder, as if she had only just rediscovered this method of taking the stairs—how could she have ever forgotten? “I must remember to do this when I get home—what a much better way for moving between floors! I’m surprised no one else has started the trend already.”

  The souvenir etchings of foreign places that hung on the wall animated themselves most pleasingly as she passed them by: a little sailboat in Venice made its way past Saint Mark’s; crows circled the onion domes of St. Petersburg while banners snapped in the soundless wind. A salmon leapt and sparkled—in a sepia sort of way—out of a very detailed waterfall.

  “I never noticed that before,” she observed.

  “Lovely, just lovely,” the Dodo said, floating behind her. He had on a pair of reading glasses this time, but they balanced on his beak awkwardly, their arms extending the wrong way, out away from his face.

  At the top of the stairs was a broom dog who apparently couldn’t remain in hiding while there were messes to clean up. His long, whiskery beard and moustache, like those of a very healthy Scottie, made a sort of brush; sweeping his head back and forth allowed him to tidy together a neat little pile of dust (and if he missed something, the other brush, the tiny one at the end of his tail, jotted forward and finished it). Alice had seen one very much like this on her first trip to Wonderland, but that dog had been brown, and this was more ash colored.

  Some of his whiskers were bent and broken, but otherwise he seemed all right.

  “Hallo there, good boy,” Alice said, putting out her hand. Like most Wonderland creatures he was diffident at best; a shaggy ear rose up, leaving his bristles to sway back and forth below, but then he continued sweeping up. “I wish we had you round back home. Then Mrs. Anderbee could have a rest and put her feet up now and then. Perhaps have a cup of tea while you did the parlor. I wonder who you are in Angleland.”

  As they approached the doorway to her own room, she saw that the shadows inside were slightly off. And though the house was a mishmash of memories and history, Alice immediately grew tense. Something was wrong in there. There was something extra. Something alive.

  Waiting for her.

  Alice took a deep breath and put her hand on what would have been the Dodo’s shoulder had he been a human. He bobbed his head but said nothing.

  She stepped over the threshold, the heel of her shoe making rather more noise on the wooden floor than she would have liked.

  She expected cards to attack, she expected the executioner dog, she expected many things…

  …but not the quivering lump just beyond the bed, which looked as though someone were doing a poor job of crouching down and hiding behind it.

  “Ahem,” Alice said, clearing her throat.

  The lump rose and grew hesitantly, taking on the form of a rather…large…

  Top hat…

  “Hatter!” Alice cried.

  The hat rose more, appearing to grow. A face appeared under it: cautious, framed by crazy hair, and finished with a gaping wide mouth that revealed two large buckteeth. His one good eye blinked slowly. In place of the tiny top hat over his injured eye was half a pair of cinder goggles. The mica lens was dark, hiding whatever lay beneath.

  “Hatter!” Alice cried again and threw herself over the bed in a most unladylike move. She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed.

  “Alice…?” the Hatter said slowly and unsurely, a ghost of a smile beginning to form on his wide mouth.

  “What what, Hatter old fellow,” the Dodo said. “Good to see you’re up and about.”

  The Hatter came out of his crouch—he had been hunkering down to protect a number of small beasts. Amongst them was a cat the size of an egg, several mome raths, a teakettle with legs, and what was probably a dragon fly: a tiny lizard with outsized eyes and leathery wings, smoking a bit from its tail and mouth.

  “Nearly wasn’t. Up and about.” The Hatter looked down at himself and patted his own shoulders and chest. “Nearly grabbed by those nasty cards. They knocked what remaining Nonsense I had right out me. I’m afraid they might have gotten the others…. I haven’t seen the Gryphon or Bill, though he is very small.”

  “Bill is fine. He escaped with help from the Rabbit’s housekeeper,” the Dodo told him.

  “But…the Dormouse?” Alice asked hesitantly.

  In answer to this the Hatter took off his hat. There on his bald pate slept the silly little thing, both his front paws in plaster and paper. The Hatter put his hat back on, as gentle as a mother.

  “Oh, Hatter, I’m so relieved. What a terrible time it is,” Alice sighed.

  “He’s a right ready misbegotten toethrower these days, pardon my language,” the Hatter muttered. “I shan’t be sending him a present at Christmas, I can tell you that.”

  “But what are you doing here? In my bedroom?”

  “Where else would I be?” the Hatter asked curiously. “Safe as houses in your house. Safest in your room.”

  And if Alice didn’t think too much about it, there was a certain sense to it.

  “Of course,” she said softly, squeezing his shoulder. “Of course you’re here, in my—sanctum sanctorum. You always have been. You always will be. You’re the Nonsense in my head that mustn’t be ignored. You’re the piece of me that maddens everyone, my sister the most.”

  The Hatter gave her a tired smile and said nothing—which might have been the wisest thing he ever said.

  “Hatter, I’ve been to see the Queen of Clubs—”

  “Why?” he asked, surprised.

  “So we can form an alliance with her and defeat the Queen of Hearts.”

  “But they are always at War anyway,” the Hatter said. “And they’re both queens. Why would she help us? And what’s to stop her from taking all the toys herself, and taking over Hearts if she invades?”

  “Do you have a better idea?” How quickly her feelings had gone from relief at seeing him alive to frustration! “I’m not Mary Ann, and I don’t have any better ideas.”

  “Does the Queen have all the toys yet? Or is she still gathering them?” the Dodo asked quickly, trying to change the subject.

  “Funny you should ask that. We saw cartloads of toys being loaded up and hauled off on our way here. Apparently soldiers are going to every house and confiscating toys—and then burning the houses.”

  “It sounds like maybe she hasn’t enough yet. So if she ends Time now, she may not be able to win,” Alice said thoughtfully.

  “Aha! That is what she is doing? Trying to be the one with the most toys in the end?” the Hatter said, nodding in realization. “She already has lots. Scads. Mountains. But knowing her, she will probably make twice as certain that she has enough, and then send the White Rabbit to stop the Great Clock.”

  “That’s very tactical of her,”
the Dodo said. “I always do that with my halves. When two and two is four, I always say eight, just to be twice as certain.”

  Alice ignored him. “Hatter, that was surprisingly logical and concise. Well done.”

  But he began to shiver. “I told you they knocked the Nonsense out of me. I’m not myself—no, don’t follow up on that one, Dodo. It doesn’t look good for me.”

  And to be sure, he did look a bit pale and wan around the edges. Hungry. Tall. Alice was fairly certain that neither sense nor nonsense was a necessity to living healthily in the real world, not in a meat-and-potatoes sort of way—but who knew here? Maybe it was bad for the soul to be lacking in it, and the flesh soon followed.

  “Alice…” he began softly. “Why did you leave us? When we needed you most?”

  “I didn’t want to, Hatter!” Alice cried. “I wanted to stay and help you—I didn’t know what to do! I was terrified but prepared to fight until the end. I had no idea at all that I would be whisked away back to my home. If I made it happen somehow, I am dreadfully sorry.

  “The first time I left Wonderland I was so, so sad and missing home, and then I was attacked by the Queen of Hearts, and I woke up elsewhere, and I was glad to be home. For a while, anyway,” she admitted. “But this time I had no desire to go home at all! Maybe home just yanked me back, somehow, sensing I was in danger.”

  “Hatter, old fellow,” the Dodo said gently, “this stupid girl came into the Rabbit’s own house to rescue me. Surrounded by cards and guards. She is not wanting in will or bravery.”

  “No, of course not,” the Hatter said quickly, but his good eye never left her two blue ones, as if making sure she was still there. “Forgive me. I had supposed that with Mary Ann gone, you would naturally disappear as well.”

  “I am not Mary Ann,” Alice growled, almost stomping her foot. “And she didn’t disappear—she was murdered. Please do not confuse the two. What happened to her was the direct result of an order by the Queen. Do not just chalk it up to the random happenings of Wonderland. And I came back and was nearly killed by a herd of rabid toves and almost lost a game of Snakes and Ladders while trying to get to the Queen of Clubs—which is the best way I thought of to save everyone. I realize my methods are more real-worldy than Wonderland’s, but that’s all I have to work with!”