Unbirthday Read online

  “If you don’t mind my asking, Hatter,” Alice asked, knowing she shouldn’t. But she was always a curious girl. “Whatever happened to your eye?”

  He looked over at her, and she was startled by the moment of lucidity in his good eye.

  “Jubjub birds,” he said bleakly. “She threw me to a nest of them she kept hungry just for such a purpose. Wanted to know where Mary Ann was. I never told. I wasn’t the one who betrayed her.”

  “Oh, how very brave of you,” Alice breathed. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Bravery is for kings and wingless pigs. I’m just a Mad Hatter. Well, I was, once upon a time.”

  Everyone lapsed into silence again. The umbrella twirled and the landscape rolled by, a little too slowly for Alice’s liking.

  “I haven’t heard any poetry yet,” Alice eventually ventured. “There is always ever so much poetry in Wonderland. Has the Queen of Hearts done away with that, too?”

  “Poetry! I say! Poetry!” the Dodo said, pounding one wing into the other. “Just what we need a spot of. Dormouse, wake up. Dormouse! Some nice refreshing poetry! Come, come!”

  Dismissing without wages the usual sleepy stages between unconsciousness and consciousness, the Dormouse immediately stood up, straight-backed, in full recital mode.

  A dog and a cat and a droll wombat

  Ran off to the Similung Sea

  The sun shone fair in the immutable blue

  ’Twas as daylicious as a day could be.

  “I spy a fish!” said the critical cat (who liked

  trout fried in salt pudding).

  “We haven’t a pole!” the little dog barked

  as the ’bat was sticking a foot in.

  A flunder leapt up and glared at the three

  “Our kind is not for your pleasure!

  Go back to the sands of old Angler-land

  On the beach you’ll find great

  …numbers of shells and something really sparkly and nice to take home and put in a cabinet, maybe.”

  And with that the Dormouse fell straight forward onto the handle of the umbrella and began snoring.

  “Oh,” Alice said, trying to work out what she had just heard. “That didn’t end properly.”

  “I beg to differ. It ended most properly,” the Dodo said, flicking a bit of lint off his cuff. “They left the fish alone and found some lovely thing like a pearl or an oscilloscope to bring back to Mother.”

  “But, but—oughtn’t it have ended, ‘On the beach you’ll find great heaps of treasure’? That makes sense, and moreover rhymes with pleasure, the way the other stanzas have the second and fourth lines rhyming.”

  “You asked for poetry,” the Dodo pointed out. “I certainly didn’t ask for a poetical lesson. Next time recite something yourself. Actually, this is the next time, because you’re next. Up, girl, recite.”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t,” Alice said quickly. “Everything I ever try to say here comes out all wrong.”

  “Try something really easy,” the Hatter said casually—but there might have been a twinkle in his eye. “Your national anthem, for instance.”

  “Oh! Of course! I know ‘God Save the Queen’ back and forth,” Alice said. “My sister and her silly man friend sing it all the time, even before they go to one of their ridiculous rallies.”

  “Only forth, please,” the Dodo said hurriedly. “I don’t think we have time for back as well.”

  “I can’t stand in the umbrella without tipping it,” she said, shuffling her feet. “I hope no one is offended.” Then she cleared her throat and sang the familiar tune:

  “My country, ’tis of thee

  Sweet land of liberty

  Of thee I sing….

  “No, wait, that’s not right,” she said, frowning. “It doesn’t even mention the Queen.”

  “I rather like it,” the Hatter said. “That’s what we need right now, anyway. Liberty. And no more queens. Ever.”

  Somehow the trees had fallen away without her noticing; the cozy forest had been replaced by what seemed like endless silver water that rippled and waved randomly. Alice dipped a finger in and tasted a drop; it was indeed salty, perhaps even saltier than the North Sea. And much, much warmer. Body temperature, one might even say. They had come to the Sea of Tears.

  “Does this leave us off in the hallway with the keyhole?” she asked.

  “Only in March. Everyone out!” the Hatter ordered.

  The Dodo scooped up the Dormouse and stepped forward; the umbrella, now somehow washing up onto a tiled floor, was much more stable, and he disembarked with great aplomb. Alice followed and the Hatter came last, pushing his umbrella back out into the water.

  “Aren’t you taking it?” Alice asked.

  “No, it has filled out its term of service. Time for it to be free.” He took off his (large) hat and waved goodbye. The umbrella handle uncurled and waved eerily back. Then it sort of pointed itself and dove underwater like a sea serpent, its cloth and spine splitting into two rear fins.

  The black-and-white tiled floor they now trod on continued on an uphill slant away from the water, occasionally making sharp slanted turns into still wave shapes—it took Alice a moment to realize they were dunes. The squares changed size as required to fill in properly, but never curved or altered their straight lines and angles; the resulting mosaic was dizzying and impossible to focus on. Beyond this they came to a well-grazed monochrome sward, and beyond that a lovely little English village.

  At first glance, any rate, it appeared to be a lovely little English village: there were houses, a main street, a horse fountain, people hurrying about at market. All the colors were right; all the movements seemed normal.

  But the houses were built one on top of another. Literally. A large family house painted bright yellow with an airy porch and slate shingles was balanced on the roof of a lovely flag- and river-stone one-room cabin, and squarely on top of that was a narrow three-floor brick town house. A green witch’s delight with round towers and intricately decorated eaves supported a solid farmhouse, perfectly symmetrical with three windows on the upper floor and a door between two windows on the bottom. The chimneys had to stick out sideways, of course, because this abode had what appeared to be a seaside shack—complete with a bathing machine—atop.

  The fountain or horse trough in the market square didn’t seem to be working and was moreover too high for horses. A stone pillar held up a wide concave disk filled with water. When someone wanted a drink, he or she perched on the rim and bent over, taking delicate sips.

  And therein lay the biggest surprise (or perhaps not so much, considering it was Wonderland). The people of this village had somewhat avian tendencies. Most sported beaks. Many had feathers, though the women often kept theirs under caps or oiled up into fancy designs and curlicues that looked like hats at first. Wings were used like hands and unshod feet had claws.

  “What the blazes is going on here?” the Hatter asked, blinking at the sight.

  Alice looked at him in surprise: surely he couldn’t have found anything particularly unusual in the scene? This was his native land, and strange was normal, the odd the everyday to Wonderlandians.

  So she looked at everything again, trying to imagine she was a local.

  Then she saw it.

  The inhabitants moved as if haunted. They slunk in the way birds shouldn’t, hunkering down so their wing bones made it look as though they were hunchbacked. Their heads turned quickly this way and that, birds’ eyes taking in the view in quick and feral glances.

  Everywhere signs had been hastily amended with splatters of paint: the symbol of a rabbit added to a sweets shop, a butcher, a tailor. Sometimes it was a red heart, but mostly a rabbit. Sometimes the rabbit was red, but mostly he was white.

  In the market around the birdbath was a large, ugly, and hastily made statue that looked like it had been hammered together from spare bits of wood. Like a giant shrine, its base was covered in offerings of all sorts of food. But Alice couldn’t figure
out what the statue was at first; boards stuck out of it willy-nilly.

  Then, as she was cocking her head and stepping back, it suddenly came to her all at once:

  It was a rabbit.

  “Hatter,” she said, nervous but unsure why.

  “No I don’t like it no no no,” the Hatter said, sort of agreeing, but it was clear he was finally a little Mad and of absolutely no help at all. He even seemed to have shrunk a little. The Dodo was busy washing his wounds in the bath, and of course the Dormouse was asleep. So Alice screwed up her courage and approached one of the lories hurrying by with a market basket on her arm. It was not, as Alice would have guessed, filled with seed. Instead there was a mound of luscious-smelling soft hay and three beautifully washed carrots.

  “Pardon me—oh my.”

  It wasn’t the giant hooked orange beak or gorgeous yellow-and-blue chignon the matronly woman had that shocked Alice; it was her hastily tied headkerchief. The two long ends were starched and twisted up a bit to look like rabbit ears.

  “What is going on here? Why all the rabbits?”

  “There is only the one rabbit!” the woman angrily hissed and whistled. “If he comes by we’re ready. We like rabbits here. All bless the Rabbit and keep him and his mistress safe. And out of our business.”

  “We’re a good town, we are,” a budgie in a morning coat and bowler insisted as he walked by. There was a bit of white fluff sewn on his rear for a little tail. “Absolutely loyal. We gave up immediately, we did.”

  “To whom? The Queen of Hearts?”

  “Never! To the Rabbit’s men. He’s to be trusted, of course. If he says that’s what the Queen wants, that’s what we’ll do,” the lory said with a determined air and a sniff. “You tell ’im that if you sees ’im. Whatever he says goes with us here. Mayhap he’ll put in a good word to the Queen. Maybe she’ll skip us on her next raid.”

  “But of course, whomever the Rabbit follows, we’re right with him,” the budgie added quickly.

  Alice knew there was a song about this sort of thing but couldn’t quite remember it just then.

  (In fact, she was thinking of “The Vicar of Bray,” but when she tried to remember the lyrics about the man who changed sides for whoever was in power, all she could come up with was “Whatsoever,” sings the train, “Still I’ll be quicker in May, Sir!”)

  “Alice, I don’t like it here,” the Hatter said forlornly. “Let us move on.”

  “Look right there,” the lory said, pointing proudly at a rapidly growing pile of produce, offerings, at the feet of the rabbit statue. “A pile o’ lettuce. That’s from me. Much as it pleases him.”

  “And peases for him?” the Dodo asked interestedly.

  “It appeases him,” the budgie agreed sagely.

  “Wait, that’s not right,” Alice said, but she wasn’t really paying attention any longer.

  For as strange as it was to see a town of birds be suddenly taken over by a fawning loyalty to rabbits, something stranger still managed to catch her eye. A shawled figure was adding her—his?—own offering to the pile of rabbit treats; he or she was entirely covered with robes and capes and cloaks and hunched over even more than the others. He gripped the edge of the cloth tightly with claws that weren’t wingy at all.

  Alice rushed over and grabbed the shawl and yanked it away.

  “Aha!” she cried.

  (Wondering—vaguely, in the back of her head—when she had decided it was all right to act like a seven-year-old ruffian again.)

  Spinning out of the linsey-woolsey fabric wasn’t a bird, although he did indeed have some birdlike attributes: a beak and wings certainly allowed him to hide out amongst the townsbirds, but his ears and tail and lion hindquarters had to stay firmly under cloth to pass. He let out a fearsome yelp, exposing teeth within his beak—again, certainly not birdlike at all. Then he curled his arms together quickly as if protecting something.

  “Oh,” the Hatter said, as if nothing untoward had happened. “Hello, Gryphon.”

  “A gryphon!” Alice cried out. “I’ve always thought you were imaginary and fantastic beasts!”

  “Well, there’s a fine how’d’ye’do,” the Gryphon said a little wryly, looking left and right and trying to protect whatever it was on his arms. “I don’t suppose there’s any use in telling you that as of this moment you are the only little girl in Wonderland, and just as imaginary and fantastic?”

  “She’s not little anymore,” the Dodo pointed out, still preening.

  “But what about Mary Ann?” Alice asked.

  “Hush!! Hush!” the Gryphon said desperately, putting one clawed paw awkwardly over her mouth while keeping the other one curled around something protectively. “Do you want to get us all killed?”

  “What’s that you’ve got there?” Alice asked (somewhat muffled), unable to contain her curiosity and reaching for his paw. She pulled back with a cry when something horrific and tentacle-y extended and retracted itself. Whatever it was snaked quickly up the Gryphon’s arm and under the voluminous cuff of his coat, reappearing as a lump at the nape of his neck.

  After a moment the capped head of a timid green thing with golden eyes peeped out.

  “Oh!” Alice cried in relief. It wasn’t, as she had feared, the horrid thing from the maze at all. “Bill! Poor old Bill the gardener!”

  But rather than being equally excited by this reunion, the little lizard fainted dead away, mumbling something about her being “even bigger this time.”

  “I don’t understand this at all,” Alice said, frowning. “I’m the same size as these townsbirds, who ought to be small, like real birds, oughtn’t they? But I’m normal-girl-sized compared to Bill. Are we all small, or are the townsbirds large, or has something happened to Bill?”

  “Leave it to an Alice to be talking about the general size of things when we’re all about to be killed,” the Gryphon said mournfully. “Silly, fantastic creatures, these little girls.”

  “Actually, we’re on our way to join with M-A right now,” the Hatter said with meaning.

  “Come join us,” the Dodo whispered. “We’ll travel to the Grunderound together.”

  “She’ll never fit in there. She’s far too big!” the Gryphon squawked in a whisper.

  “Now which fantastic imaginary beast is wasting time talking about my size?” Alice demanded, hands on hips. “Oooh—look at that.”

  A shop had opened and folded out one of its horizontally shuttered windows, locking it so it formed a shelf. On top of this, a baker set out pies to cool—caramel black thistle and ginger worm—along with tiny square seedcakes that smelled amazing. Not that Alice had ever smelled a seedcake before or known beforehand what a good-smelling one smelled like; perhaps time in the bird town was changing her. EAT ME was spelled out in pine nuts upon the top of each cake.

  “Let me just try one of these. Perhaps I shall shut up like a telescope,” she said, taking one and nibbling at it. The baker’s wingy hand slapped ineffectually at her, but there were no other ramifications. The cake was nutty and buttery with a distinct hint of grasshopper.

  All five of them waited to see what would happen: the Dodo, the Hatter, the Dormouse, and even the Gryphon and Bill, holding their collective breaths.

  Nothing.

  Alice gulped down the rest of the cake, barely chewing—which seemed a waste, it was so delicious.

  Still nothing.

  “Perhaps you really have forgotten how,” the Dodo said.

  “I can’t imagine that’s so,” Alice said. “I remember exactly what it felt like….”

  “Remembering isn’t the same as knowing,” the Gryphon said accusingly. “You’ve been schooled terribly if you think that’s so.”

  “That’s it!” the Hatter cried. “You’ve filled your head with all the wrong things since you left. You pushed all the good things out. You need to unlearn them. Unremember them.”

  “You with your uns,” Alice said fondly. “Like Unbirthdays. But everything I have learne
d is necessary, in my world…. And anyway, I couldn’t unlearn it all if I tried.”

  “But you haven’t even tried. What’s nine times ten? Forget it!” the Hatter shouted.

  “What is the capital of Cumbria? Forget it!” the Dodo shouted.

  “What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen sparrow? FORGET IT,” shouted the Gryphon, apparently also forgetting that he was hiding from anyone or anything.

  “I beg your pardon,” said a passing sparrow, unladen except for a small briefcase.

  The four travelers (Bill was still passed out) began to sing:

  “Forget the cheese and forget the fife

  Forget the flies a-buzzing

  Forget the one about the pair o’

  brick-red Bristol cousins

  Forget your name and forget your meat

  Forget the Earl of Plumbing

  Forget the time and forget the words

  And all commence with humming!”

  And of course they hummed the last stanza, whatever it was.

  “We shall take her to the Forest of Forgetting!” the Hatter cried. “Then she’ll forget all the silliness of the other world and start again with shrinking and growing and become a powerful weapon—and then we can get to the Grunderound and we’ll find Mary Ann and we’ll all have tea!”

  “I’m not sure I like the idea of forgetting everything,” Alice said uneasily. “Or being some sort of powerful weapon. But if it’s for the good of Wonderland, I suppose it’s worth a try.” She had been suspicious of the shrinking and growing the first time around as well but rapidly—well, grown used to it. Maybe this would be the same.

  And the Hatter was, at least, beginning to act like his old self. A little more logical than he ever was, but shouting nonsense and songs and poetry. His head did seem a trifle bit larger, too.

  “Let us go, then you and I—” he began, taking her gallantly by the hand.

  “No! No dramatic, subtextual, free verse poetry now—stop, we’re done with that. Rhymes only,” the Dodo said, dragging him away by his ear.

  As they walked out of the village and through the bright sunlight, Alice observed how strange it was for her companions to be staying with her. Generally in Wonderland she spent only a little while with each creature or person—or both—before everything changed and she moved on to the next thing. But they were a little marching band now, the Hatter even pumping his arms like a drum major. The Gryphon mostly walked upright beside him but sometimes dropped onto all fours and trotted like an absolutely enormous dog with wings. The Dodo chuckled to himself, and Bill had consented to ride on his beak, keeping one wary and distrustful eye on Alice. The Dormouse slept in someone’s pocket.