Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction: Curiouser and Curiouser

  Tough Alice

  Mama Gone

  Harlyn's Fairy

  Phoenix Farm

  Sea Dragon of Fife

  Wilding

  The Baby-Sitter

  Bolundeers

  The Bridge's Complaint

  Brandon and the Aliens

  Winter's King

  Lost Girls

  Afterword: Running in Place:

  Diane Duane’s thrilling wizardry series

  Copyright © 1997 by Jane Yolen

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted on line at www.harcourt.com/contaa or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  First Magic Carpet Books edition 2001

  First published 1997

  Magic Carpet Books is a trademark of Harcourt, Inc., registered in the United States of America and/or other jurisdictions.

  “Curious er and Curiouser" copyright © by 1997 Jane Yolen; first publication. "Tough Alice" copyright © 1997 by Jane Yolen; first publication. "Mama Gone" copyright © 1991 by Jane Yolen; originally published in Vampires (HarperCollins), edited by Jane Yolen and Martin H. Greenburg. "Harlyn's Fairy” copyright © 1993 by Jane Yolen; originally published in A Wizards Dozen (Jane Yolen Books/Harcourt), edited by Michael Stearns. "Phoenix Farm" copyright © 1996 by Jane Yolen; originally published in Bruce Coville's Book of Magic (Apple/Scholastic). edited by Bruce Coville. "Sea Dragon of Fife" copyright © 1996 by Jane Yolen; originally published in Bruce Coville's Book of Monsters II (Apple/Scholastic), edited by Bruce Coville. "Wilding" copyright © 1995 by Jane Yolen; originally published in A Starfarer's Dozen (Jane Yolen Books/Harcourt), edited by Michael Steams. "The Baby-Sitter" copyright © 1989 by Jane Yolen; originally published in Things That Go Bump In The Night (HarperCollins), edited by Jane Yolen and Martin H. Greenburg. "Bolundeers" copyright © 1996 by Jane Yolen; originally published in A Nightmare's Dozen (Jane Yolen Books/Harcourt), edited by Michael Steams. “The Bridge’s Complaint" copyright © 1997 by Jane Yolen; first publication. "Brandon and the Aliens" copyright © 1996 by Jane Yolen; originally published in Bruce Coville's Book of Aliens II (Apple/Scholastic), edited by Bruce Coville. "Winter’s King" copyright © 1992 by Jane Yolen, originally published in After the King: Stories in Honor of J. R. R. Tolkien (Tor), edited by Martin H. Greenberg, "lost Girls" copyright © 1997 by Jane Yolen; first publication. “Running in Place" copyright © 1997 by Jane Yolen; first publication.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Yolen, Jane.

  Twelve impossible things before breakfast: stories/by Jane Yolen.

  p. cm.

  Contents; Tough Alice—Mama gone—Harlyn’s fairy—Phoenix farm—Sea dragon of Fife—Wilding—The baby-sitter—Bolundeers—The bridge’s complaint—Brandon and the aliens—Winter’s king—Lost girls.

  1. Children’s stories. American. [ 1. Short stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.Y78Tw 1997

  [Fic]—dc21 97-667

  ISBN 978-0-15-201524-4

  ISBN 978-0-15-216444-7 pb

  Text set in Joanna

  Designed by Judythe Sieck

  DOC 15 14 13 12 11 10 9

  4500319921

  Printed in the United States of America

  To my fellow traveler in Wonderland,

  my wonderful husband, David Stemple

  Introduction: Curiouser and Curiouser

  Why short stories?

  I love the compression of the short story. It is as if I can hold the entire thing—theme, plot, character—in the palm of my hand. Novels are messy, untidy propositions. Bits and pieces always seem to get away from both the writer and the reader, no matter how careful we are. But short stories have a containment that nevertheless suggests infinity. A good short story throws long shadows. Like Coyote, the Native American trickster god, the short story throws a shadow that is not black and white but full of color.

  This book is a collection of twelve of my fantasy stories for young readers that have never been collected under one roof, so to speak. Three of the stories are absolutely brand-new—so new, in fact, that the price tags are still on them and they are in their original wrapping.

  That’s a metaphor, of course. But so is this entire collection, I suspect.

  Fantasy stories are like that: You say, "This takes place in nineteenth-century Scotland” or “Appalachia in the 1930s” or “Hatfield, Massachusetts, in the seventies,” or “Wonderland.” You fill the tale with creatures or people that never existed, or you take a spin on stories that are well known and loved. And all the while you talk about the fantastic, you are actually writing about the real world and real emotions, the right-here and the right-now. It is a kind of literary displacement, a way of looking at what worries both writer and reader by glancing out of the corner of one’s eye.

  Someone once called unicorns “animals that never were and always are.” And that’s what fantasy is, too.

  I tided this volume Twelve Impassible Things Before Breakfast after something the White Queen says in Through the Looking-Glass:

  "I can’t believe that!” said Alice.

  "Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: Draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”

  Alice laughed. “There’s no use dying,” she said: "one can’t believe impossible things.”

  "I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast...”

  The reading of fantasy and the writing of it take that kind of practice, too. It all comes easier the younger one is. As a child I had imaginary playmates, spoke to my dolls and heard them answer, played Knights of the Round Table on a pile of rocks in New York’s Central Park. I could easily believe six impossible things before breakfast. But somewhere around seventh grade, the one imaginary game I still played—with a friend from ballet school, in which we pretended we were members of the New York City Ballet company, she the prima ballerina and I the choreographer—was played in secret. I was down to one impossible thing, not before breakfast but after school and on Saturdays only.

  That secret sharing and the books of fantasy and fairy tales I read were all that was left of my White Queening. But I would not give it up entirely. The worlds of the fantastic, with their mind-stretching, metaphoric, shadow-throwing ways, were still incredibly important to me. I got to learn more about myself and my world by that kind of role playing.

  And by reading.

  When I grew up to be a writer, I found that my favorite things to write were short fantasies. Impossible things.

  And I do my best writing—no surprise here—before breakfast!

  Of course, six stories wouldn’t have been enough for a book, so it became twelve. Part of the fun of putting this collection together was getting to reread Lewis Carroll. He said an awful lot of wonderful things in those books about writing without actually meaning to. (Or maybe he did!)

  "Tit, tut, child!” said the Duchess. “Everything�
�s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

  and

  "Don’t grunt,” said Alice; "that’s not at all a proper way of expressing yourself.”

  and

  "Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.”

  and

  “It’s ridiculous to leave all the conversation to the pudding!”

  and

  “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

  "The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”

  I have tried to be the master in these stories. I am sure they have morals somewhere. I took good care of the sense.

  The rest is up to the readers—you, dear puddings.

  Jane Yolen

  Tough Alice

  THE PIG FELL DOWN the rabbit-hole, turning snout over tail and squealing as it went. By the third level it had begun to change. Wonderland was like that, one minute pig, the next pork loin.

  It passed Alice on the fourth level, for contrary to the law of physics, she was falling much more slowly than the pig. Being quite hungry, she reached out for it. But no sooner had she set her teeth into its well-done flesh than it changed back into a live pig. Its squeals startled her and she dropped it, which made her use a word her mother had never even heard, much less understood. Wonderland’s denizens had done much for Alice’s education, not all of it good.

  “I promise I’ll be a vegetarian if only I land safely,” Alice said, crossing her fingers as she fell. At that very moment she hit bottom, landing awkwardly on top of the pig.

  “Od-say off-ay!” the pig swore, swatting at her with his hard trotter. Luckily he missed and ran right off toward a copse of trees, calling for his mum.

  “The same to you,” Alice shouted after him. She didn’t know what he’d said but guessed it was in Pig Latin. “You shouldn’t complain, you know. After all, you’re still whole!” Then she added softly, “And I can’t complain, either. If you’d been a pork loin, I wouldn’t have had such a soft landing.” She had found over the years of regular visits that it was always best to praise Wonderland aloud for its bounty, however bizarre that bounty might be. You didn’t want to have Wonderland mad at you. There were things like ... the Jabberwock, for instance.

  The very moment she thought the word, she heard the beast roar behind her. That was another problem with Wonderland. Think about something, and it appeared. Or don’t think about something, Alice reminded herself, and it still might appear. The Jabberwock was her own personal Wonderland demon. It always arrived sometime during her visit, and someone—her chosen champion—had to fight it, which often signaled an end to her time there.

  “Not so soon,” Alice wailed in the general direction of the roar. “I haven’t had much of a visit yet!” The Jabberwock sounded dose, so Alice sighed and raced after the pig into the woods.

  The woods had a filter of green and yellow leaves overhead, as lacy as one of her mother’s parasols. It really would have been quite lovely if Alice hadn’t been in such a hurry. But it was best not to linger anywhere in Wonderland before the Jabberwock was dispatched. Tarrying simply invited disaster.

  She passed the Caterpillar’s toadstool. It was as big as her uncle Martin, and as tall and pasty white, but it was empty. A sign by the stalk said GONE FISHING. Alice wondered idly if the Caterpillar fished with worms, then shook her head. Worms would be too much like using his own family for bait. Though she had some relatives for whom that might not be a bad idea. Her cousin Albert, for example, who liked to stick frogs down the back of her dress.

  Behind her the Jabberwock roared again.

  "Bother!” said Alice, and began to zigzag through the trees.

  “Haste...” came a voice from above her, “makes wastrels.”

  Alice stopped and looked up. The Cheshire Cat’s grin hung like a demented quarter moon between two limbs of an elm tree.

  “Haste,” continued the grin, “is a terrible thing to waste.”

  “That’s really not quite right...” Alice began, but the grin went on without pausing:

  “Haste is waste control. Haste is wasted on the young. Haste is...”

  “You are in a loop,” said Alice, and not waiting to hear another roar from the Jabberwock, ran on. Sunlight pleated down through the trees, wider and wider. Ahead a clearing beckoned. Alice could not help being drawn toward it.

  In the center of the clearing a tea party was going on. Hatter to Dormouse to Hare, the conversation was thrown around the long oak table like some erratic ball in a game without rules. The Hatter was saying that teapots made bad pets and the Dormouse that teapots were big pests and the Hare that teapots held big tempests.

  Alice knew that if she stopped for tea—chamomile would be nice, with a couple of wholemeal bisquits—the Jabberwock would...

  ROAR!

  ...would be on her in a Wonderland moment. And she hadn’t yet found a champion for the fight. So she raced past the tea table, waving her hand.

  The tea-party trio did not even stop arguing long enough to call out her name. Alice knew from long experience that Wonderland friends were hardly the kind to send postcards or to remember your birthday, but she had thought they might at least wave back. After all the times she had poured for them, and brought them cakes from the Duchess’s pantry! The last trip to Wonderland, she’d even come down the rabbit-hole with her pockets stuffed full of fruit scones because the Dormouse had never tried them with currants. He had spent the entire party after that making jokes about currant affairs, and the Hare had been laughing the whole time. “Hare-sterically,” according to the Hatter. We’d had a simply wonderful tune, Alice thought. It made her a bit cranky that the three ignored her now, but she didn’t stop to yell at them or complain. The Jabberwock’s roars were too dose for that.

  Directly across the clearing was a path. On some of her visits the path was there; on others it was twenty feet to the left or right. She raced toward it, hoping the White Knight would be waiting. He was the best of her champions, no matter that he was a bit old and feeble. At least he was always trying. Quite trying, she thought suddenly.

  She’d even settle for the Tweedle twins, though they fought one another as much as they fought the Jabberwock. Dee and Dum were their names, but—she thought a bit acidly—perhaps Dumb and Dumber more accurately described them.

  And then there was the Beamish Boy. She didn’t much like him at all, though he was the acknowledged Wonderland Ace. Renowned in song and story for beating the Jabberwock, he was too much of a bully for Alice’s tastes. And he always insisted on taking the Jabberwock’s head off with him. Even for Wonderland, that was a messy business.

  Of course, this time, with the beast having gotten such an early start, Alice thought miserably, she might need them all. She had hoped for more time before the monster arrived on the scene. Wonderland was usually so much more fun than a vacation at Bath or Baden-Baden, the one being her mother’s favorite holiday spot, the other her grandmother’s.

  But when she got to the path, it was empty. There was no sign of the White Knight or the Tweedles or even the Beamish Boy, who—now that she thought of it—reminded her awfully of Cousin Albert.

  And suddenly the Jabberwock’s roars were dose enough to shake the trees. Green and gold leaves fell around her like rain.

  Alice bit her lip. Wonderland might be only a make-believe place, a dreamscape, or a dream escape. But even in a made-up land, there were real dangers. She’d been hurt twice just falling down the rabbit-hole: a twisted ankle one time, a scratched knee another. And once she had pricked her finger on a thorn in the talking flower garden hard enough to draw blood. How the roses had laughed at that!

  However, the Jabberwock presented a different kind of danger altogether. He was a horrible creature, nightmarish, with enormous shark-toothed jaws, daws like gaffing hooks, and a tail that could swat her like a fly. There was no doubt in her mind that the Jabberwock could ac
tually kill her if he wished, even in this imaginary land. He had killed off two of her champions on other visits—a Jack of Clubs and the Dodo—and had to be dispatched by the Beamish Boy. She’d never seen either of the champions again.

  The thought alone frightened her, and that was when she started to cry.

  "No crying allowed,” said a harsh, familiar voice.

  "No crying aloud,” said a quieter voice, but one equally familiar.

  Alice looked up. The Red and White Queens were standing in front of her, the White Queen offering a handkerchief that was slightly tattered and not at all dean. “Here, blow!”

  Alice took the handkerchief and blew, a sound not unlike the Jabberwock’s roar, only softer and infinitely less threatening. “Oh,” she said, “thank goodness you are here. You two can save me.”

  "Not us,” said the Red Queen.

  "Never us,” added the White.

  “But then why else have you come?” Alice asked. “I am always saved on this path ... wherever this path is at the time.”

  “The path is past,” said the Red Queen. “We are only present, not truly here.” As she spoke the dirt path dissolved, first to pebbles, then to grass.

  “And you are your own future,” added the White Queen.

  Alice suddenly found herself standing in the meadow once again, but this time the Hare, the Hatter, and the Dormouse were sitting in stands set atop the table. Next to them were the Caterpillar, his fishing pole over his shoulder; the Cheshire Cat, grinning madly; the White Knight; the Tweedle Twins; the Beamish Boy, in a bright red beanie; the Duchess and her pig baby; and a host of other Wonderlanders. They were exchanging money right and left.