Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories

by Caroline M. Yoachim

  *

  Betty finished her chores and went back to her room to read. She was nearly done with Animal Farm, and she had just enough time to finish it before dinner. She reached for her book, then noticed that the room was messy—both beds were rumpled, three books had fallen off her shelf, and Janet’s pink hair ribbon was on the floor. Sister Mary Joseph was strict about keeping things tidy, and the room was definitely not as Betty had left it.

  She knocked three times on the closet door and opened it. Usually the closet smelled musty. Today it didn’t.

  Squelchy Saurus had gone somewhere.

  Betty picked up Janet’s pink ribbon and put away her fallen books. One of the covers was slimy, pointing again to Squelchy.

  Betty peered under the beds, careful not to let any portion of her body extend into the shadows beneath the mattresses. There was a blue hair ribbon under Janet’s bed which, by the rules of the treaty, was now lost forever.

  Under her own bed there were two books. One was the copy of Lolita that her step-daddy used to read to her, back before the police took him to jail and brought her here. She’d torn the cover off so that the nuns wouldn’t recognize it. The other book was The Velveteen Rabbit, which she was too old for now, but it was the only thing she had from her real dad. She remembered unwrapping it on her fifth birthday, a couple weeks before he left for Korea to fight in the war. Every time she looked at it, she felt silly for not reaching under the bed and grabbing it, but she couldn’t bring herself to break the treaty.

  Betty sat on her bed to think. There had been no sign of Poison Bitey-Snake under the beds, but it was daytime, so of course there wouldn’t be. Still, something felt wrong, and if the monsters were up to something she’d have to find out what it was.

  Squelchy sat at the back of the meeting, her tail looped over a sack of potatoes and her head resting on a basket of onions. Her slime dripped down onto both the onions and the potatoes, making it rather likely that they would go moldy, but there were a lot of monsters at the meeting, and the pantry was crowded. Bitey, unfortunately, was sitting on the shelf above her head. She’d hoped to save that spot for Pink Fluffy Flesheater, who she used to share a closet with.

  “All nine monsters living in the attic were killed in last night’s tragic shooting,” said Bob the Blob. “Crushmonster saw the whole thing. Theresa convinced a grownup to drag each monster out from under the bed, and—with a gun made from his thumb and the first two fingers of his hand—he executed them without mercy. Our brave comrades on the third floor stayed true to the treaty until the end, remaining completely invisible even during the massacre. The children violated the Treaty of the Bathroom Alcove, and the terms are clear. We are free to do as we please.”

  “Yesss!” Bitey shouted, his voice blending with the cheers of other monsters.

  Squelchy said nothing. It seemed unfair to take revenge on the children who were still here. It was only one adopted girl who had disobeyed the treaty. Squelchy tried to remember the girl. She had been timid. Not the sort to cause trouble, and not the heroic type either.

  “Strange,” Squelchy muttered, “that such a quiet child would cause so much trouble for the others.”

  Bitey, having heard her, dangled his head down from the shelf to whisper in her ear, “Someone might have given her the idea. Pity about the third-floor monsters, leaving all that nice space underneath the bedsss.”

  Bitey had never gotten along with the third-floor monsters, but Squelchy never imagined that he would arrange to have them killed. She wondered if anyone would believe her if she told them what he’d done. Probably not. She had a reputation for not being very smart.

  The meeting continued all afternoon. They decided to take the children just before dawn, while they slept in their beds. According to Stabby Gnome, the children thought all of the monsters were gone, so they wouldn’t expect an attack. They could drag the little girls out of their room through the secret passageway in the back of the cupboard, and feast on tender flesh and lightly roasted bones.

  Squelchy went back to her closet. She had no interest in eating the children, though she did enjoy nibbling on their hair and fingernail clippings, and stray socks and mittens were nice to gnaw on if they’d been recently worn and smelled of child.

  She decided to pretend that the old rules still applied. She hunkered down in her closet, back behind the laundry hamper where no one would see her, and curled up for a nap.

  As the oldest girl in the orphanage, Betty usually didn’t pay much attention to the third-floor girls. She taught them the rules when they arrived, then left them alone. They stared at her when she sat down at their table at dinner.

  “Hi, Betty,” one of the girls said. Her name was Elise or Erica or something. Eliza. That was it. Eliza had been adopted but then “returned” for reasons that were not entirely clear. Rumor was she bit her adoptive older brother, and if that was true, the boy must have had it coming because the nuns didn’t punish her when she came back.

  “Hi, Eliza,” Betty said. “I need to know what’s going on with the monsters.”

  Anna smiled. She was four years old and had dimples that pretty much guaranteed she’d be adopted. “I can tell you! Teesa’s new daddy came to the attic yesterday and he got all the monsters and he shooted them—Bang! Bang!”

  Anna and the other kids made shooting gestures. Betty had tried shooting at Bitey-Snake like that once, angling her hand to point under the bed before squeezing her thumb as the trigger, but it hadn’t worked. Only adults could kill monsters.

  Catherine, the new girl, was practically bouncing out of her seat. “Now we don’t have to do all those silly monster rules anymore!”

  Poor dumb third-floor kids. They didn’t realize the danger they were in. It didn’t matter if you got an adult to get rid of the monsters you knew about, there were always more. The treaty was the only thing that kept them safe. Now everyone was in danger of being eaten.

  “Theresa’s new daddy didn’t get all the monsters,” Betty informed the little girls. The monsters from her room had escaped, and she suspected that all the monsters on the main floor had also been spared. That meant at least a dozen closets worth of monsters, and several of the older girls’ beds.

  There was no way to get rid of all the monsters, even if they asked the nuns for help. No, she’d have to come up with some way to reinstate the treaty, and for that she’d need something to negotiate with. Prisoners, she decided. They’d need to set traps. She told the other girls her plan. “Get ready for bed, but after Sister Mary Gabriel checks on you, sneak down to the second floor. Come in pairs, and be as quiet as you can.”

  It was a Monday, and after the children went to bed the nuns watched I Love Lucy on the black-and-white TV the Anglethorn family had donated to the orphanage when they brought Eliza back. Their hearing was terrible, so they turned the volume up loud. They’d never notice that the girls were out of bed.

  “I’ll take care of the rest,” Betty said.

  Day turned into night, and Squelchy Saurus huddled in the back of her closet. She hadn’t heard Betty or Janet come in and go to bed, which was odd. Odder still, there were voices coming from the big common room across the hall. Children’s voices.

  She strained to hear what the voices in the other room were saying, but slime from her head dripped into her ears, so her hearing wasn’t very good. She crept out of the closet and across the room. Suddenly Betty and Janet and several other girls came down the staircase from the third floor.

  “The beds are ready,” Betty told the younger girls. “Now we wait for the monsters to make their move.”

  So they waited, the children in the common room, and Squelchy—paralyzed by fear of discovery—just inside the doorway of Betty’s room. She chastised herself for being such a pitiful monster. The children should be afraid of her, not the other way around!

  Finally, at four o’clock in the morning, the floor above the common room creaked under the weight of a herd of monsters. Led b
y Betty, the girls poured out of the common room. Thankfully, they hurried past Squelchy without stopping. Squelchy expected them to go upstairs, but instead they went down.

  She listened for any sign of the children, and when she didn’t hear anything, she crept downstairs. The girls had found the end of the secret passageway—a fireplace in the front sitting room—and they’d covered it with the fireplace grate. They were now pushing furniture up against the grate. The nuns would be furious—the children weren’t technically allowed in that room at all.

  Squelchy shuddered at the thought of furious nuns, but they were nowhere to be seen. Satisfied that the children were busy blocking the passageway, Squelchy went to the third floor, oozing so much from the effort that her feet made a squelching noise as she climbed.

  On one side of the stairwell was the little girls’ bedroom, a long narrow room with a window on the far end. The white cupboard with the secret passageway was in the corner, doors wide open. There were two rows of beds, and each one had the enticing odor of a small child. The bleached-white sheets were rumpled, as though recently slept in.

  Squelchy knew this was a trap—the beds had not been used tonight, and the children were blocking off the secret passageway. She hovered in the doorway. Under the bed nearest the door, Stabby Gnome clutched a pair of red rubber boots, coated in mud. Not something that would appeal to Squelchy, but Stabby Gnome was fond of boots, and having once been a garden gnome he often spoke wistfully of dirt.

  The next bed was covered in colorful candy wrappers. Pink Fluffy Flesheater, lacking any childflesh to eat, was perched atop the headboard, chewing enthusiastically on a mouthful of toffees.

  Several of the other beds were carefully arranged to attract monsters. Here a bed with a ragged stuffed animal, there a bed piled high with freshly washed towels. Then she saw it. Her bed. Betty knew her so well. The bed was littered with hair brushes, strands of hair woven all through the tines. She drooled big globs of drool that mixed with her general sliminess before dripping to the floor.

  If she was quicker, she could grab the hairbrushes and come back out. If she was cleverer, she could think of some plan to get the brushes without getting trapped. But she wasn’t clever or quick or strong, so she backed away from the large bedroom. She heard the children coming up the stairs, so instead of going to Betty’s room, she went to the only other room on the third floor—the bathroom.

  The children slammed the bedroom door shut. One of the older girls must have stolen the keys from Sister Mary Magdalene, because after the slam Squelchy heard jingling keys and the click of the bolt. Squelchy backed into the bathroom alcove, the worn white towels soaking up her slime.

  She heard the children celebrating their victory. She was wondering what she should do next when she heard footsteps in the bathroom.

  “I’m coming in, Squelchy,” Betty called, “I know you’re in there.”

  Betty left the other girls in charge of guarding the door and went into the bathroom to talk to Squelchy Saurus. As monsters went, she wasn’t bad—slimy and oozy and unpleasant to look at, but also kind of shy. She was certainly better than Poison Bitey-Snake, who Betty was afraid of, even though she was too old to be afraid of monsters any more.

  Squelchy was in the back of the alcove, sitting on a towel. A washcloth fell onto her back, and slowly slid down toward the pink tile floor, carried by the flow of slime.

  “We need a new treaty,” Betty said, inching forward until the tips of her shoes were in neutral territory. With all the shelves, there wasn’t room for her to get all the way into the alcove, and she didn’t want to get too close to Squelchy anyway. She wondered if Allison had gotten all the way in. The Unsquishable Giant Cockroach was smaller than Squelchy, so there might have been room.

  Squelchy crept forward and licked one of her shoes.

  “Ew.”

  “Sorry, they smell yummy.” Squelchy backed away. “I can’t make a treaty. I’m not a leader.”

  Betty knew she’d rather deal with Squelchy than any other monster, so she went and pounded on the bedroom door. “Okay, prisoners—either you can agree to be bound by whatever treaty I negotiate with Squelchy, or you will still be locked in here when the nuns come up to wake the girls.”

  Monsters were afraid of grownups, and terrified of nuns. She hoped their fear would keep them from realizing that if the nuns found everyone out of bed, the girls were in worse trouble than the monsters.

  The monsters discussed their options.

  “We have voted, and we accept Squelchy as our representative,” said a raspy voice that probably belonged to Stabby Gnome.

  “This is a bad idea,” Poison Bitey-Snake hissed. “Ssshe is not a clever monster, and the girl will trick her into thingsss we don’t want.”

  Betty smiled and returned to the Bathroom Towel Alcove.

  After an hour of negotiation, Squelchy was ready to sign. Most of the terms of the Second Treaty of the Bathroom Alcove were the same. The monsters kept their territory of under-the-beds and inside-the-closets, and would hide during the day and refrain from kidnapping and eating children so long as they stayed in bed. The children were allowed to get things from inside the closet during the day, and were not allowed to have monsters shot or otherwise killed.

  The only thing different about the new treaty was that items under the bed would now be treated in the same way as items inside closets. During daylight hours, children would be allowed to retrieve them as long as the monsters were given ample warning beforehand. This seemed fair to Squelchy. Children had always been allowed into her territory, why shouldn’t they be allowed under the beds?

  Satisfied with the terms, Squelchy picked up a crayon in her mouth and signed the bottom of the paper. Then she ate the crayon, which was crunchy and waxy and smelled a little bit like Betty.

  Betty checked the hallway clock. The treaty was signed, and daytime rules were in effect. She read the treaty to the monsters locked in the bedroom. Janet and some of the other girls went downstairs to unblock the other end of the not-so-secret passageway. When the living room was back in order, Betty told the monsters that she would open the door in thirty seconds.

  She counted to thirty. There was rustling on the other side of the door as monsters hurried to find hiding spots.

  “I’m coming in,” she announced. The room was quiet and empty, and Betty stepped inside to make sure it was safe. Poison Bitey-Snake darted out from behind the door.

  “Under the bed is my territory! Things down there are forever lossst!” he hissed, and bit her in the leg.

  Squelchy charged into the bedroom when Betty yelped, and other monsters came out from under attic beds. Crushmonster and Pink Fluffy Flesheater subdued Bitey and threw him out the window.

  Squelchy went to check on Betty.

  “Will you move up here, now that the treaty is signed?” Betty asked, rubbing the spot where Bitey had bitten her. “You’ve earned the promotion.”

  Squelchy shook her head. “I like my closet. I’ve got it all set up the way I like it.”

  Janet went downstairs in search of Sister Mary Margaret, who was the most likely to help Betty without asking why everyone was out of bed. Squelchy snuck downstairs to her beloved second floor closet.

  She hid behind the laundry hamper when two nuns brought Betty in. They cleaned her leg and asked questions about the rat Betty claimed had bitten her. Squelchy waited quietly and hoped the towering figures in their scary black-and-white clothes wouldn’t notice that the closet door was ajar. Eventually, the nuns left.

  Betty kicked off the covers and examined her leg. The area around the bite was red and irritated, but Poison Bitey-Snake looked (and acted) more poisonous than he actually was.

  “I’m getting things from under the bed.” Betty announced, even though there weren’t any monsters under her bed. No one wanted Bitey’s old territory with so many nice third-floor beds available.

  By convention, monsters and children weren’t supposed to talk to ea
ch other, but after retrieving her books Betty said, “I don’t need this book any more, I’ll toss it in the closet.”

  The book hit the hamper and dropped to the closet floor. To Squelchy’s surprise, it wasn’t the children’s book that Betty had given up; it was the other one, Lolita. Poison Bitey-Snake had spent a lot of time reading that one. He almost never deigned to read the other one, the one about the rabbit that was so well loved that he became real.

  Squelchy Saurus wondered if Betty would ever love her that much. It must be a wonderful thing, to be real. Could children love monsters? Squelchy suspected it was rare. But if Betty was leaving snacks for her, they were off to a good start.

  ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS, LOVE, DEATH

  ROCK

  Rock crushes scissors. Nicole sat on a crowded bus to Spokane, knitting a turquoise scarf. The gray-haired man sitting next to her stared obsessively at his wristwatch. He was travelling with his son, Andrew, who sat across the aisle. She offered to trade seats so they could sit together, but both men refused. The bus wound around the sharp curves of Stevens Pass, and Nicole made good progress on her scarf.

  Out of nowhere, Andrew’s father grabbed her and shoved her across the aisle, into Andrew’s arms. There was a loud crack, and a roar like thunder. A boulder the size of a car slammed into the side of the bus. Nicole stared at the wall of stone that filled the space where her seat had been. The red handles of her scissors stuck out from underneath the rock, the blades crushed underneath. Andrew’s father was completely lost beneath the stone.

  Love shreds paper. After the accident, Nicole met Andrew for coffee. She returned his father’s watch, which had somehow ended up in her jacket pocket, though she couldn’t figure out how or when he’d put it there. Andrew gave her a pair of red-handled scissors, identical to the pair she had lost. She invited him for Thanksgiving dinner with her parents, since he had no other family. They took a weekend trip to Spokane, and when the bus reached the site of the accident, they threw handfuls of flower petals out the window.