Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast Read online

  “My money’s on you,” the White Queen whispered in Alice’s ear. “I think you will take the Jabberwock in the first round.”

  “Take him where?” asked Alice.

  “For a fall,” the Red Queen answered. Then, shoving a wad of money at the White Queen, she said, “I’ll give you three to one against.”

  “Done,” said the White Queen, and they walked off arm-in-arm toward the spectator stands, trailing bits of paper money on the ground.

  “But what can I fight the Jabberwock with?” Alice called after them.

  “You are a tough child,” the White Queen said over her shoulder. “You figure it out.”

  With that she and the Red Queen climbed onto the table and into the stands, where they sat in the front row and began cheering, the White Queen for Alice, the Red Queen for the beast.

  “But I’m not tough at all,” Alice wailed. “I’ve never fought anything before. Not even Albert.” She had only told on him, and had watched with satisfaction when her mother and his father punished him. Or at least that had seemed satisfactory at first. But when his three older sisters had all persisted in calling “Tattletale twit, your tongue will split” after her for months, it hadn’t felt very satisfactory at all.

  “I am only,” she wept out loud, “a tattletale, not a knight.”

  “It’s not night now!” shouted the Hatter.

  “Day! It’s day! A frabjous day!” the Hare sang out.

  The Beamish Boy giggled and twirled the propeller on the top of his cap.

  Puffing five interlocking rings into the air above the crowd, the Caterpillar waved his arms gaily.

  And the Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, burst out of the tulgey wood, alternately roaring and burbling. It was a horrendous sound and for a moment Alice could not move at all.

  “One, two!” shouted the crowd. “Through and through.”

  The Jabberwock lifted his tail and slammed it down in rhythm to the chanting. Every time his tail hit the ground, the earth shook. Alice could feel each tremor move up from her feet, through her body, till it seemed as if the top of her head would burst open with the force of the blow. She turned to run.

  “She ain’t got no vorpal blade,” cried the Duchess, waving a fist. “How’s she gonna fight without her bloomin’ blade?”

  At her side, the pig squealed: “Orpal-vay ade-blay.”

  The Beamish Boy giggled once more.

  Right! Alice thought. I haven’t a vorpal blade. Or anything else, for that matter.

  For his part, the Jabberwock seemed delighted that she was weaponless, and he stood up on his hind legs, claws out, to slash a right and then a left in Alice’s direction.

  All Alice could do was duck and ran, duck and ran again. The crowd cheered and a great deal more money changed hands. The Red Queen stuffed dollars, pounds, lira, and kroner under her crown as fast as she could manage. On the other hand, the Dormouse looked into his teapot and wept.

  "Oh, Alice,” came a cry from the stands, “be tough, child. Be strong.” It was the White Queen’s voice. “You do not need a blade. You just need courage.”

  Courage, Alice thought, would come much easier with a blade. But she didn’t say that aloud. Her tongue felt as if it had been glued by fear to the roof of her mouth. And her feet, by the Queen’s call, to the ground.

  And still the Jabberwock advanced, but slowly, as if he were not eager to finish her off all at once.

  He is playing with me, Alice thought, rather like my cat, Dinah. It was not a pleasant thought. She had rescued many a mouse from Dinah’s claws and very few of them had lived for more than a minute or two after. She tried to ran again but couldn’t.

  Suddenly she’d quite enough of Wonderland.

  But Wonderland was not quite done with Alice.

  The Jabberwock advanced. His eyes lit up like skyrockets and his tongue flicked in and out.

  “Oh, Mother,” Alice whispered. “I am sorry for all the times I was naughty. Really I am.” She could scarcely catch her breath, and she promised herself that she would try and die nobly, though she really didn’t want to die at all. Because if she died in Wonderland, who would explain it to her family?

  The Jabberwock moved closer. He slobbered a bit over his pointed teeth. Then he slipped on a pound note, staggered like Unde Martin after a party, and his big yellow eyes rolled up in his head. “Ouf,” he said.

  “Ouf?” Alice whispered. “Ouf?”

  It had all been so horrible and frightening, and now, suddenly, it was rather silly. She stared at the Jabberwock and for the first time noticed a little tag on the underside of his left leg. MADE IN BRIGHTON, it said.

  Why, he’s nothing but an overlarge wind-up toy, she thought. And the very minute she thought that, she began to laugh.

  And laugh.

  And laugh, until she had to bend over to hold her stomach and tears leaked out of her eyes. She could fed the bubbles of laughter still rising inside, getting up her nose like sparkling soda. She could not stop herself.

  ‘Here, now!” shouted the Beamish Boy, “no laughing! It ain’t fair.”

  The Cheshire Cat lost his own grin. “Fight first, laughter after,” he advised. "Or maybe flight first. Or fright first.”

  The Red Queen sneaked out of the stands and was almost off the table, dutching her crown full of money, when the Dormouse stuck out a foot.

  "No going off with that moolah, Queenie,” the Dormouse said, taking the crown from her and putting it on top of the teapot.

  Still laughing but no longer on the edge of hysteria, Alice looked up at the Jabberwock, who had become frozen in place. Not only was he stiff, but he had turned an odd shade of gray and looked rather like a poorly built garden statue that had been out too long in the wind and rain. She leaned toward him.

  “Boo!” she said, grinning.

  Little cracks ran across the Jabberwock’s face and down the front of his long belly.

  “Double boo!” Alice said.

  Another crack ran right around the Jabberwock’s tail, and it broke off with a sound like a tree branch breaking.

  “Triple...” Alice began, but stopped when someone put a hand on her arm. She turned. It was the White Queen.

  “You have won, my dear,” the White Queen said, placing the Red Queen’s crown—minus all the money—on Alice’s head. “A true queen is merciful.”

  Alice nodded, then thought a moment. “But where was the courage in that? All I did was laugh.”

  “Laughter in the face of certain death? It is the very definition of the Hero,” said the White Queen. “The Jabberwock knew it and therefore could no longer move against you. You would have known it yourself much sooner, had that beastly Albert not been such a tattletale.”

  “But I was the tattletale,” Alice said, hardly daring to breathe.

  “Who do you think told Albert’s sisters?” asked the White Queen. She patted a few errant strands of hair in place and simultaneously tucked several stray dollars back under her crown.

  Alice digested this information for a minute, but something about the conversation was still bothering her. Then she had it. “How do you know about Albert?” she asked.

  “I’m late!” the White Queen cried suddenly, and dashed off down the road, looking from behind like a large white rabbit.

  Alice should have been surprised, but nothing ever really surprised her anymore in Wonderland.

  Except...

  except...

  herself.

  Courage, she thought.

  Laughter, she thought.

  Maybe I’ll try them both out ON Albert.

  And so thinking, she felt herself suddenly rising, first slowly, then faster and faster still, up the rabbit-hole, all the way back home.

  Mama Gone

  MAMA DIED four nights ago, giving birth my baby sister, Ann. Bubba cried and cried, “Mama gone,” in his little-boy voice, but I never let out a single tear.

  There was blood red as any sunset all over the bed fr
om that birthing, and when Papa saw it he rubbed his head against the cabin wall over and over and over and made little animal sounds. Sukev washed Mama down and placed the baby on her breast for a moment. “Remember,” she whispered.

  “Mama gone,” Bubba wailed again.

  But I never cried.

  By all rights we should have buried her with garlic in her mouth and her hands and feet cut off, what with her being vampire kin and all. But Papa absolutely refused.

  “Your Mama couldn’t stand garlic,” he said when the sounds had stopped rushing out of his mouth and his eyes had cleared. “It made her come all over with rashes. She had the sweetest mouth and hands.”

  And that was that Not a one of us could make him change his mind, not even Granddad Stokes or Pop Wilber or any other of the men who come to pay their last respects. And as Papa is a preacher, and a brimstone man, they let it be. The onliest thing he would allow was for us to tie red ribbons ’round her ankles and wrists, a kind of sign like a line of blood. Everybody hoped that would do.

  But on the next day she rose from out her grave and commenced to prey upon the good folk of Taunton.

  Of course she came to our house first, that being the dearest place she knew. I saw her outside my window, gray as a gravestone, her dark eyes like the holes in a shroud. When she stared in she didn’t know me, though I had always been her favorite.

  “Mama, be gone,” I said, and waved my little cross at her, the one she had given me the very day I’d been born. “Avaunt.” The old Bible word sat heavy in my mouth.

  She put her hand up on the window frame, and as I watched, the gray fingers turned splotchy pink from all the garlic I had rubbed into the wood.

  Black tears dropped from her black eyes, then. But I never cried.

  She tried each window in turn, and not a person awake in the house but me. But I had done my work well and the garlic held her out. She even tried the door, but it was no use. By the time she left, I was so sleepy I dropped down right by the door. Papa found me there at cockcrow. He never did ask what I was doing, and if he guessed, he never said.

  Little Joshua Greenough was found dead in his crib. The doctor took two days to come over the mountains to pronounce it. By then the garlic around his little bed—to keep him from walking, too—had mixed with death smells. Everybody knew. Even the doctor, and him a city man. It hurt Joshua’s mama and papa sore to do the cutting. But it had to be done.

  The men came to our house that very noon to talk about what had to be. Papa kept shaking his head all through their talking. But even his being preacher didn’t stop them. Once a vampire walks these mountain hollers, there’s nary a house or barn that’s safe. Nighttime is lost time. And no one can afford to lose much stock.

  So they made their sharp sticks out of green wood, the curling shavings littering our cabin floor. Bubba played in them, not understanding. Sukey was busy with the baby, nursing it with a bottle and a sugar teat. It was my job to sweep up the wood curls. They felt slick on one side, bumpy on the other. Like my heart.

  Papa said, “I was the one let her turn into a night walker. It’s my business to stake her out.”

  No one argued. Specially not the Greenoughs, their eyes still red from weeping.

  “Just take my children,” Papa said. “And if anything goes wrong, cut off my hands and feet and bury me at Mill’s Cross, under the stone. There’s garlic hanging in the pantry. Mandy Jane will string me some.”

  So Sukey took the baby and Bubba off to the Greenoughs’ house, that seeming the right thing to do, and I stayed the rest of the afternoon with Papa, stringing garlic and pressing more into the windows. But the strand over the door he took down.

  “I have to let her in somewhere,” he said. “And this is where I’ll make my stand.” He touched me on the cheek, the first time ever. Papa never has been much for show.

  "Now you run along to the Greenoughs’, Mandy Jane,” he said. “And remember how much your mama loved you. This isn’t her, child. Mama’s gone. Something else has come to take her place. I should have remembered that the Good Book says, ‘The living know that they shall die; but the dead know not anything.’ ”

  I wanted to ask him how the vampire knew to come first to our house, then; but I was silent, for Papa had been asleep and hadn’t seen her.

  I left without giving him a daughter’s kiss, for his mind was well set on the night’s doing. But I didn’t go down the lane to the Greenoughs’ at all. Wearing my triple strand of garlic, with my cross about my neck, I went to the burying ground, to Mama’s grave.

  It looked so raw against the greening hillside. The dirt was red day, but all it looked like to me was blood. There was no cross on it yet, no stone. That would come in a year. Just a humping, a heaping of red dirt over her coffin, the plain pinewood box hastily made.

  I lay face down in that dirt, my arms opened wide. “Oh, Mama,” I said, “the Good Book says you are not dead but sleepeth. Sleep quietly, Mama, sleep well.” And I sang to her the lullaby she had always sung to me and then to Bubba and would have sung to Baby Ann had she lived to hold her.

  Blacks and bays,

  Dapples and grays,

  All the pretty little horses.

  And as I sang I remembered Papa thundering at prayer meeting once, "Behold, a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death.” The rest of the song just stuck in my throat then, so I turned over on the grave and stared up at the setting sun.

  It had been a long and wearying day, and I fell asleep right there in the burying ground. Any other time fear might have overcome sleep. But I just dosed my eyes and slept.

  When I woke, it was dead night. The moon was full and sitting between the horns of two hills. There was a sprinkling of stars overhead. And Mama began to move the ground beneath me, trying to rise.

  The garlic strands must have worried her, for she did not come out of the earth all at once. It was the scrabbling of her long nails at my back that woke me. I leaped off that grave and was wide awake.

  Standing aside the grave, I watched as first her long gray arms reached out of the earth. Then her head emerged with its hair that was once so gold now gray and streaked with black, and its shroud eyes. And then her body in its winding sheet, stained with dirt and torn from walking to and fro upon the land. Then her bare feet with blackened nails, though alive Mama used to paint those nails, her one vanity and Papa allowed it seeing she was so pretty and otherwise not vain.

  She turned toward me as a hummingbird toward a flower, and she raised her face up and it was gray and bony. Her mouth peeled back from her teeth and I saw that they were pointed and her tongue was barbed.

  “Mama gone,” I whispered in Bubba’s voice, but so low I could hardly hear it myself.

  She stepped toward me off that grave, lurching down the hump of dirt. But when she got dose, the garlic strands and the cross stayed her.

  “Mama.”

  She turned her head back and forth. It was dear she could not see with those black shroud eyes. She only sensed me there, something warm, something alive, something with blood running like satisfying streams through blue veins.

  "Mama,” I said again. “Try and remember.”

  That searching awful face turned toward me again, and the pointy teeth were bared once more. Her hands reached out to grab me, then pulled back.

  “Remember how Bubba always sucks his thumb with that funny little noise you always said was like a little chuck in its hole. And how Sukey hums through her nose when she’s baking bread. And how I listened to your belly to hear the baby. And how Papa always starts each meal with the blessing on things that grow fresh in the field.”

  The gray face turned for a moment toward the hills, and I wasn’t even sure she could hear me. But I had to keep trying.

  “And remember when we picked the blueberries and Bubba fell down the hill, tumbling head-end over. And we laughed until we heard him, and he was saying the same six things over and over till long past bed.”


  The gray face turned back toward me and I thought I saw a bit of light in the eyes. But it was just reflected moonlight.

  “And the day Papa came home with the new ewe lamb and we fed her on a sugar teat. You stayed up all the night and I slept in the straw by your side.”

  It was as if stars were twinkling in those dead eyes. I couldn’t stop staring, but I didn’t dare stop talking, either.

  “And remember the day the bluebird stunned itself on the kitchen window and you held it in your hands. You wanned it to life, you said. To life, Mama.”

  Those stars began to run down the gray cheeks.

  "There’s living, Mama, and there’s dead. You’ve given so much life. Don’t be bringing death to these hills now.” I could see that the stars were gone from the sky over her head; the moon was setting.

  “Papa loved you too much to cut your hands and feet. You gotta return that love, Mama. You gotta."

  Veins of red ran along the hills, outlining the rocks. As the sun began to rise, I took off one strand of garlic. Then the second. Then the last. I opened my arms. “Have you come back, Mama, or are you gone?”

  The gray woman leaned over and clasped me tight in her arms. Her head bent down toward mine, her mouth on my forehead, my neck, the outline of my little gold cross burning across her lips.

  She whispered, “Here and gone, child, here and gone,” in a voice like wind in the coppice, like the shaking of willow leaves. I felt her kiss on my cheek, a brand.

  Then the sun came between the hills and hit her full in the face, burning her as red as earth. She smiled at me and then there were only dust motes in the air, dancing. When I looked down at my feet, the grave dirt was hardly disturbed but Mama’s gold wedding band gleamed atop it.

  I knelt down and picked it up, and unhooked the chain holding my cross. I slid the ring onto the chain, and the two nestled together right in the hollow of my throat. I sang:

  Blacks and bays,