Unbirthday

by Liz Braswell

  Suddenly, from all around the crowd, children came running: the children from the Square, wearing bright capes and flower crowns and holding bouquets. They threaded in and around everyone in the audience, giving people flowers and tossing handful of candies in the air.

  “FOREIGNERS! GET THEM!” the Gilbert clown screamed.

  “LOCK UP THE CHILDREN! LOCK THEM UP!” the Quagley clown cried. The two ran into each other, fell down, and then ran after the children. Poorly.

  The audience ate it up. Everyone was laughing.

  The real Gilbert was fuming.

  He cleared his throat.

  “A joke’s a joke, but these are serious times, my people—”

  “NOOOOOOO! MY ENGLAND! MY PRECIOUS ENGLAND!”

  This was Aunt Vivian herself, powdered white like a ghost, with ugly red rouge and a black beauty mark (and mask). She was wrapped in layers and layers of old-fashioned dresses, three corsets at least, all black, and trailed a black lace train. She walked on shoes with almost stilt-tall heels and towered above the crowd like a theater monster.

  “BETTER TO DIE A WIDOW THAN LIVE A WOMAN!” she cried, then swooned into the arms of a sturdy-looking young fellow at the edge of the crowd. His friends whistled and jeered. At first he looked uncertain, but then he got into the spirit of it—and gave her a kiss.

  “OOOH, YOU CHEEKY YOUNG MAN,” Aunt Viv said, hitting him lightly with her fan.

  “KICK THEM OUT! KICK THEM ALL OUT!”

  This was a clown policeman with a club made from a giant piece of bread. He pretended to check everyone’s identifications. “PAPERS! BIRTH CERTIFICATES! CHRISTENING RECORDS! NEWSPAPER ARTICLES!”

  Gilbert and Quagley—the real ones—were now shouting at each other, arguing with very heated-looking faces. They couldn’t be heard at all above the din. Coney looked sort of wilted beside them.

  “Ready for our grand entrance?” Katz asked.

  “Of course!” Alice answered.

  And because they were wearing masks and no one could see or know, they kissed.

  For the second scandalous time.

  Then they joined the throngs of other clowns coming out of hiding, dancing with the audience, playing horns, throwing flower confetti into the air, and generally sowing Nonsense.

  “Because, of course, the real world needs some Nonsense, sometimes,” Alice had said to Katz at the Samovar, when originally revealing her plan. “Not all the time and not never. Just enough to remind us when real things get too ridiculous to be borne. And sometimes we have to create that Nonsense ourselves.”

  “What the real world needs is an Alice,” Katz had said back to her. “And Wonderland, too.”

  That was the first time he had kissed her.

  Willard came in at the very end of the performance, riding on the shoulders of one of the stronger clowns. He wore nothing too silly beyond a giant red, white, and blue hat he had designed himself. He waved and threw candy and shook hands and kissed babies—both real and clown doll.

  And afterward there was punch for all.

  Dear reader, I suppose you have questions. You, unlike the Dodo and the Hatter and the Dormouse, are not content with things just being as they are—you must know the future, the outcomes, the reasons. So I shall give you three answers, and three only, for that is the magic number in fairy stories.

  Question Number Three:

  Was Willard elected mayor, thereby saving the town of Kexford and all its inhabitants forever—or, perhaps, condemning them to life in a humorless town where each worked according to his ability and was given according to his need, forever?

  Answer:

  No, he was not.

  However, his bid for the position (and takeover of Ramsbottom’s rally) brought to light some of the less palatable beliefs of the other party.

  So it was Mallory Griffle Frundus (Frundus—For Us!) who was elected. And he did a very good job of making over the town sewer system.

  (Even Willard grudgingly approved of his negotiations with the factory owners to get fair wages for their employees in return for some rezoning by the city.)

  Once elected, Frundus was asked what he thought about the unruly immigrant children in the Square, and was taken there by certain prejudiced members of the community to observe their foul and disgraceful behavior. He watched the children for a moment, frowned, and then declared:

  “You’re playing marbles all wrong! Let me show you how we did it when I was a lad.”

  Question Number Two:

  Did Alice and Katz marry and live happily ever after?

  Answer:

  Yes.

  It was difficult—very difficult—at first; neither set of parents approved of the arrangement. But love and gritted teeth won out.

  (Also grandchildren. Grandchildren have a way of smoothing out the worst, most cranky old people.)

  Katz became a full partner in the law firm; Alice became even more Alice, exhibiting her photographs and touring Europe with him and occasionally Aunt Vivian, who introduced her to such strangely familiar venues as the Cabaret Voltaire. You will not have heard of Alice when reading about the early Dadaist movement, but you can rest assured she was there and played an integral part in their formative years.

  Question Number One:

  Did Alice ever make it back to Wonderland?

  Answer:

  Why, dear reader, I think you already know the answer to that.

  One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it:—it was the black kitten’s fault entirely. For the white kitten had been having its face washed by the old cat for the last quarter of an hour (and bearing it pretty well, considering); so you see that it couldn’t have had any hand in the mischief.

  Alice was sitting curled up in a corner of the great arm-chair, her large, round belly finally comfortable now that its tiny occupant had settled for a bit. The kitten had been having a grand game of romps with the ball of worsted Alice had been knitting into a tiny sweater, rolling the ball up and down till it had all come undone again; and there it was, spread over the hearth-rug, all knots and tangles, with the kitten running after its own tail in the middle.

  ‘Oh, you wicked little thing!’ cried Alice, catching up the kitten, and giving it a little kiss to make it understand that it was in disgrace. ‘Really, Dinah ought to have taught you better manners! Now, if you’ll only attend, Kitty, and leave my knitting alone, I’ll tell you all about Looking-glass House. Everything there is reversed, and the candy runs away from your hand. It’s positively delightful.

  ‘Oh, how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House again! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through—’ She was standing up, leaning on the chimney-piece while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist….

  Liz Braswell spent her childhood reading fairy tales, dreaming, and going on adventures in the woods with her cat. After majoring in Egyptology at Brown University (and yes, she can write your name in hieroglyphs) she promptly spent the next ten years producing video games. Finally Liz caved in to fate and wrote Rx under the name Tracy Lynn, followed by Snow (in Once Again) and the series The Nine Lives of Chloe King—under her real name now, because by then the assassins hunting her were all dead. She is also the author of Stuffed, and several other Twisted Tales, including A Whole New World, Once Upon a Dream, As Old as Time, Part of Your World, and Straight On Till Morning. She lives in Brooklyn with a husband, two children, a cat, a part-time dog, three fish, and four coffee trees—one of which has already produced a rather tolerable espresso. You can email her at me@lizbraswell.com, tweet @LizBraswell, or instagram @lizbraswell.