Unbirthday

by Liz Braswell

  Alice threw herself forward to grab him but missed and once again tumbled against the hard stone steps, scraping her palms and her shins this time. With a shriek of frustration she pushed herself to her feet and practically crawled up the steps before rightfully regaining her footing.

  Despite all her flailing about, she was right behind the Rabbit. By the time the two reached the top, he was once again within grabbing distance.

  Without a thought for the danger of the unfenced catwalk and the height they were at, Alice lunged forward and clawed at him.

  One finger got a bit of waistcoat; the luckier left hand got what felt like a neck-fold and a little bit of flesh.

  But the rabbit thumped and kicked and his hair shed into her fingers; he slipped like a jacket out of her grasp with great clouds of white bunny fur.

  He leapt straight up and caught himself on the hour hand of the clock. His weight and momentum were enough to pull it down to thirteen.

  The world began to shake.

  Alice pulled the knob on her watch….

  It was something to have the entire world stopped and frozen and to be able to scream as much as she wanted. No one heard and everyone waited for her to be done.

  Finally Alice wiped her forehead with her wrist—careful not to nudge the watch. She glared at the dumb rabbit dangling from the hour hand and for just a moment had a vision of him strung up with a brace of other conies over the shoulder of a hunter returning home from a good day’s work.

  Immediately she felt sorry for that; the White Rabbit was an intelligent being who deserved neither being filled with shot nor being eaten.

  Although he had decided to end the entire world, killing everyone in it, and of his own volition! Not even on the Queen of Hearts’ orders; he was a would-be mass murderer!

  She slowly wound the second hand of her watch widdershins, watching everything carefully in reverse as she was pulled back toward the start: the beginning of the race, the boulder, the bog, the stairs, her falling….

  Then she took a moment to breathe and think.

  She walked out to the boulder—the air only thickened a little at that distance—and, breaking back multiple nails and scraping her fingertips raw, managed to pull it out of place and turn it on its small side, revealing a hole in the ground. This she covered with grass and rushes.

  She dusted off her hands, pleased with her work.

  “He’s so intent on the clock tower he won’t have noticed things in the landscape shifting. He’ll just be barreling forward and pop—if he doesn’t bonk headfirst right into the stone he’ll definitely get stuck in the hole, even for a moment.”

  She smiled, stretched, and got herself ready.

  “Three…two…one…go!”

  She hit the knob.

  Time restarted.

  The stone did catch him off guard.

  He almost leapt right into it. At the last minute he tried to change direction but fell back into the hole.

  “Ha!” Alice cried. “I have you now!”

  Like a child’s toy—or Bill, pushed out of a chimney—the White Rabbit shot straight back up out of the hole, powered only by the fire of his hind legs. He hung in the air for a moment like a confused balloon and then dropped back down, touching a single left claw onto the top of the upright stone.

  He used that to push himself off again, and continued toward the tower.

  “Damn!” Alice cried.

  She chased.

  He ran.

  He bounded up the stone steps.

  She tripped.

  Not quite as badly this time—she didn’t even scrape her hands. Merely reddened them.

  He leapt for the clock’s hands.

  “I did it for—” he shouted.

  Alice pulled the knob on her watch. Time stopped.

  Time restarted.

  Time restarted.

  Time restarted.

  Alice added a gash to her forehead, a slightly turned ankle, an abrasion all up her left calf, several puncture wounds to her arms, and embedded grit in her cheek. She lost a boot.

  She also lost her bodice trying to rig up a net to ensnare him.

  She screamed and kicked and threw stones at the Rabbit. They slowed down as they approached his frozen form and dropped equally slowly to the ground, far out of harm’s way.

  She stood in her undershirt and corset, covered in mud and sweat and blood, her hair down around her, looking like a witch from Macbeth.

  She lay back on the grass of the Plain of Time for a while, watching the strange moons and sun and chewing on a stalk of timegrass.

  “It’s just another stupid Wonderland riddle,” she mused. “I can’t capture the rabbit. I never could. Not before, not now. That’s apparently just not allowed. Alice never gets the White Rabbit.

  “So what can I do? Just let the world end? Someone told me that time was on my side—I have figured out that part at least, with the watch. But if I can’t get the Rabbit, who can? How can I stop him? How can I stop him from getting to the clock and ending the world? What do I have that is unique in solving this? How does perspective solve this?”

  She regarded the tower, the strange thing out of a child’s dream or nightmare. It seemed so harmless with its rosy cheeks and rolling eyes. Even the ancient stone steps could be seen as part of the block tower an imaginative child had built while muttering to herself about Time and rabbits and Snakes and Ladders and games of War and piles of toys and suns and moons and stopping the end of the world. Being a hero. So many different games of childhood all mixed together in the mad mind of a lonely child. All of them old and familiar.

  Alice blinked.

  “Perspective. I don’t have the right one!

  “You’re given a rabbit and a tower and a countdown and think you’ve got to stop the rabbit. But you’re playing the wrong game, Alice,” she said, beginning to grin. “Forget the rabbit! The tower is the object of this game! Just GET THERE FIRST!”

  She smiled, rose, and kicked off her other boot. She stretched, and got herself ready, crouching down the way she had seen serious runners do.

  “Last one there’s a rotten egg,” she told the frozen rabbit over her shoulder.

  “Three…two…one…go!”

  She hit the button.

  Time restarted.

  Alice didn’t look left, right, or behind her. She didn’t even bother to imagine the surprised look on the White Rabbit’s bewhiskered face as she suddenly appeared out of nowhere in front of him, running to the same goal. She ignored him.

  She pumped her arms and dug her toes into the soft ground. It was really quite delightful, feeling the two connect with a primal joy she hadn’t experienced since she was a young girl at the beach. The earth was pushing her off with each stride, helping her spring along to the finish. Her long golden hair streamed out behind her, shedding the dried mud and blood.

  For a brief moment something white appeared below and to the right of her, perilously near her feet. It was the Rabbit, pushing faster and harder than ever. He was so close she could have wasted a second and kicked him—out of her way, out of the race.

  She didn’t.

  She concentrated on running and pulled ahead.

  She worried for one ecstatic moment as she cleared the bog that she was actually losing precious moments in the air as she hung there below the absurd celestial orbs.

  But she landed and went on regardless.

  The steps.

  She was there first. She just had to not—

  —fall.

  Without thinking she lengthened her legs and leapt. She didn’t worry about landing.

  And so she touched down seven steps up, and the falling-forward momentum at the end of her jump only propelled her farther along.

  Around and around she ran, two, three steps at a time, leaning into the tower and letting her own weight keep her safe.

  Alice could hear the tiny stony thuds below her of a rabbit’s hind feet pounding the grey stone.

>   She broke out onto the catwalk below the clock’s face with a scream of triumph. She swung around to face the White Rabbit, who tried with one last, valiant bound to leap over her and land on the hour hand. Alice punched straight up above her and knocked him into the clock’s nose, where the two iron hands were attached.

  The Rabbit fell in a crumpled heap at her feet.

  “HA!” Alice cried, kneeling down and seizing him. “I WIN! The Queen of Hearts loses! The world is safe from your terrible mistress—and your own terrible, terrible acts of villainy!”

  The Rabbit was shuddering and shaking. Alice turned him to face her, to make him look her in the eye—and saw that he was sobbing.

  “The Queen can’t hurt you,” she said hesitantly, confused. “Any more than I and my friends will, I mean. She has lost. The world is saved and she will be punished. You will be, too—but in a fair trial.”

  “Win…?” the White Rabbit moaned. “I never wanted her to win. I don’t care about winning. I wanted to end it all.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Alice asked, unsure she heard him properly. Adrenaline and triumph were still raging in her ears and making it hard to understand.

  “End it…. End her raids, tortures, executions, imprisonments, looting, burning…End it all. End the pain. End her reign. End the world where my Mary Ann was killed.”

  “You?” she eventually asked, trying to understand. “Wanted to destroy the world? You? Not the Queen of Hearts? Coming here to speed up the clock wasn’t all a plan of her invention?”

  “She wanted to have all the toys when the world ended, whenever it was due,” the Rabbit said, pointing miserably at the clock. Tears rolled down the fur on his face, eventually sinking in and matting it down. Without thinking Alice pulled out what remained of her last handkerchief and tried to hand it to him. He didn’t even see it. The little, respectable, ridiculous White Rabbit no longer cared about such picayune niceties. For some reason this was more shocking than anything he had said. Alice did her best to wipe away the majority of tears herself as he lay prone in her lap.

  “Once she was sure she had the most toys she probably would have advanced Time so no one would have a chance to beat her, and win. I don’t care. I just want this world to be over, to restart with Mary Ann alive again. Even if I didn’t know her, even if we never met again. She would be alive. And safe. And no one would be in pain or in prison anymore. Everyone would come back. And maybe even the Queen of Hearts would be reborn as someone better. Who knows?”

  Alice’s head was whirring.

  “This clock doesn’t end the world? It…restarts it?” she asked.

  “It does both, you dim thing. Ends one game and starts the next. Don’t you know how games on a timer work? You really are such a dull girl compared to my Mary Ann. Sometimes. But sometimes you outwit the Rabbit…” he mused.

  Alice put a hand to her temple, exhausted and confused by this revelation, unmindful of the dried sweat and bits of dirt that flaked off as she did so.

  “THREEE CHEERS FOR QUEEN ALICE!”

  Alice leaned over—dangerously—and peeped at the plain below.

  There was a small but growing crowd of bedraggled and excited Wonderland creatures, clapping and shouting and leaping up and down and capering about.

  “She’s saved the world!”

  “She beat the Queen of Hearts!”

  “She wins!”

  “I didn’t…” Alice began, standing up to address them better. The rabbit was still in her arms, prone, apparently unconcerned with whatever happened next.

  Suddenly there was a curious weight on Alice’s head.

  Cradling the Rabbit with her left hand, she reached up cautiously with her right and found exactly what she expected there: a giant crown, probably golden, heavy and ornate and, from the glints she saw reflected in the clockface, very, very, sparkly. A cape somehow slipped over her shoulders and Alice hoped very sorely that the soft fur at the edges wasn’t ermine. She had seen several ermines on this adventure.

  The crowd below her was very large now: she could pick out, like shapes in the clouds, the people from the various places she had been: there was a contingent from Ornithsi-ville, mostly dignified but with one enthusiastic cider seller. The Queen of Clubs stood at the head of a fantastic procession, riding her buzzywhump. She smiled broadly at Alice, apparently not at all displeased at her coronation. There was the horse at the head of a train, toasting her with a cup of foul train tea.

  Alice’s heart leapt when she saw the Hatter, Gryphon, Dodo, and some of the others waving madly at the very base of tower, telling anyone who would listen how they knew her personally. She waved back, which was now hard with a rabbit in one hand and a scepter in the other.

  “Bother!” she swore.

  Carefully, being sure not to trip on her cape, she made a long, slow descent from the catwalk. At the base of the steps was a ceremonial float that had been prepared in her honor, complete with a high chair that looked a bit like the clock tower for her to sit in and wave from. It was so rickety she felt far more dizzy and unsafe atop it than she had at the top of the clock tower itself.

  The Queen of Hearts was in a cage on a wagon, pouting furiously. At first Alice found it hard to be angry with such a ridiculous creature…and then she thought of Mary Ann, and the March Hare, and the Hatter’s eye, and all the insanely horrible things the Queen had perpetrated against the good people of Wonderland.

  “You are a vile creature,” Alice told her coldly. “Without a bit of Nonsense in you. You are directed, cruel, and hateful. You don’t deserve to live—more than that, you don’t deserve to live in Wonderland.”

  The Queen of Hearts’ eyes bulged wider than seemed possible. Of all the things she had expected from Alice, this was very obviously the furthest from it—and worse than anything she could have imagined.

  Suddenly two bright, ball-shaped boys popped up between the cage and Alice’s float. From their mouths came a grating, wheedly apology sound. Alice’s ears nearly crumpled with horror.

  “We are sorry, Alice, Alice.”

  There was Tweedledee.

  “Alice, we are very sorry.”

  That was Tweedledum, and he raised his eyebrows at his brother to show how much more sorry he was.

  “She took all our toys—”

  “But said we should have new ones—”

  “Once the world was over,” they finished together.

  Alice looked at them levelly.

  Was it worth pointing out the ridiculousness of what they said?

  “Can we sing a song for you?” Tweedledee asked.

  “It’s a very good one,” Tweedledum added eagerly.

  They opened their mouths—

  “Nope,” Alice said, spotting some people in the crowd below she would much rather spend time with. She slipped down the chair and ran over to them, still cradling the White Rabbit. The Hatter regarded the creature with a raised eyebrow.

  “I think he is punishing himself enough,” Alice admitted. “He wanted to end the world to stop all the terrible things that were going on—and because he didn’t want to live without Mary Ann.”

  “Hmm,” the Hatter said thoughtfully.

  “But now we’re all safe, and the Queen is behind bars, and we can all live happily ever after,” Alice said with a grin. Mice and gnats were replacing her outfit—discreetly—with a golden gown, and she didn’t even mind.

  “Yup! At least for another hour or so,” the Gryphon agreed happily.

  “Yes, at least for—What? What do you mean?”

  “The clock,” the Hatter said, pointing at it. “This day’s almost over. World’s about to end.”

  “Well, we must stop it!” Alice jumped up, putting the catatonic rabbit back on the wagon. “Let’s go and move the hands back…!”

  The Hatter looked at her as if she were Mad. “You can’t stop the end of the world. Silly girl. Maybe you stole my Nonsense,” he added suspiciously.

  “But! But! T
hat’s terrible! All of this was for nothing!” Alice shouted, feeling panic take over her body, arms and legs.

  “Not true at all,” said the Cheshire Cat, rubbing against her legs. “You beat the Queen of Hearts. You prevented her from winning. You caught the White Rabbit. You won, you became queen, you stopped all the pain and misery in this world.”

  “But you only have an hour left!” she shrieked.

  “All games end, Alice,” the cat said softly. “All dreams get woken from, eventually.”

  “The same game forever would be boring,” the Dodo put in. “Even for me.”

  “Yes, definitely time for something new,” the Hatter agreed.

  “But I don’t want you to…” What? Die? Disappear? Restart? “I don’t want to say goodbye.”

  “Then don’t,” the Gryphon said, shrugging. A forked tongue came out and licked her tears. It was warm and wet like a dog’s; not entirely unpleasant.

  “But what do we do?” Alice asked plaintively.

  “That’s up to you now,” the Hatter said simply. “You are Queen.”

  Alice looked around her. All the creatures of Wonderland she had met and saved, she had avoided and fought with, she had sung songs with and run from, all the cards and bandersnatches and mome raths and borogroves and paper people and dragon flies, the animals and birds and insects and people, they all looked at her expectantly.

  (The Knave looked at her curiously, toasting her with his cider.)

  “I…” She thought hard.

  What else was there to do?

  “I…declare teatime and Nonsense until the End of Time!”

  An ear-deafening roar the likes of which even Wonderland had never heard before went up from the Plain of Time. Everyone danced and shouted and cavorted and jumped and flew. There was cheering and a ticker-tape parade, the pops of some sort of cannon or gun or perhaps champagne, and a walrus band that marched through blowing their tusks. Tea was served all around, from large and small kettles into endless souvenir coronation cups. Trays and trays of EAT ME cookies were distributed. It would not be too much to say it was the largest, happiest, most raucous party anywhere at any Time.