(Re)Visions: Alice ((Re)Visions)

by Kaye Chazan

  Needless to say, I’m not the one who left it there. There’s a postcard next to it, showing a long gold building with a prominent clock tower, mirror-image in the water underneath it, clear blue sky. Greetings from London.

  “Hello?” I call out, hedging my bets, hoping, but there’s no answer. I look at the tag again. Far be it from me to ignore an invitation. I crack the top open and pull straight from the bottle, drop the cap to roll somewhere on the floor. I don't think I'll be needing it again tonight.

  The tag taps against my cheek, and I notice there’s something taped to the back. It’s a flat brass key, the kind that might go in a lockbox. Curious, I pick up the postcard. There’s note on the back, written in a perfect, even hand.

  You're a clever man. You'll figure it out. - A

  PS: Jimmy's paid. Call it a favor. The rest is a gift.

  I recognize the key, now that I take a closer look at it. It does go to a lockbox—my lockbox, the one under my bed. It never leaves the ring in my pocket, but when I fumble to check, sure enough, it’s missing. For all I know, Alice had plenty of time to snoop through my belongings last time she was here, so her knowing about the box is no mystery. And not that Alice isn't light-fingered enough to pickpocket me, but when did she find the time?

  Then I remember that kiss; her hand wandering and me paying no attention at all. Son of a bitch, I should have known she had an agenda. She always has an agenda.

  I shake my head. No point thinking about it now that she's gone.

  The thought hits me sideways. Fuck, I'm going to miss her. Even when I didn’t know her name, even when I wanted to wring her fucking neck, at least she made my life interesting. The whiskey suddenly looks better than ever, so I take another long drink and palm the key. Time to see what this “gift” is.

  My knees scream at me when I bend down to get under the bed, and my back’s not exactly a fan either. Might be something to do with how I’ve spent the last thirty-some-odd hours getting my ass kicked, I don’t know. The lockbox is harder to move than it usually is, something in it that weighs more than the rifle and assorted papers I usually stash there.

  I flip the lid open. Turns out, cash is heavy, especially in quantity. There has to be at least a hundred grand here, my papers and everything buried under green. I have seen this much money in one place before, but not often, and never in my bedroom. Holy shit.

  Holy shit.

  I’m thankful for the whiskey, because now I’ve got choices to make. I should give the money back. It’s not mine, and I know where it came from; that would be the honorable thing to do.

  On the other hand, fuck honor. I show up to the Queen with this, she’s going to think I was in it with Alice all along. Best case scenario, I lose the money, she thinks I’m an idiot, everything’s back to business as usual. Worst case scenario, all that plus she has me killed.

  I can’t keep it here, can’t do anything with it here without arousing suspicion. I can get drunk and look at it, and the lighter this bottle gets, the better that idea sounds, even if it’s not very productive.

  But who says I have to stay here? I think about that note, about the picture on that postcard, the note: You're a clever man. You'll figure it out.

  What the hell. I tracked her down once, I can do it again. And London looks like a nice place to visit.

  Maybe it is time I retired. I could use a change of scenery.

  The End

  The World in a Thimble

  By C.A. Young

  The world in a silver thimble,

  A girl's most precious thing.

  From grandmother's hand it must have come

  Before a wedding ring;

  It goes from pocket to thread-box,

  With buttons and with string.

  Her future children come and grow

  And soon enough are gone;

  But stories linger past her time,

  And pictures are re-drawn.

  Where once was Golden Afternoon

  Some new thing lingers on.

  A flourish here, a brush stroke there,

  The thimble time forgets.

  The new girls come. The old girls go.

  They dream as time permits.

  Their patchwork stories sally forth

  Formed by new tellers' wits.

  Eternal Alice watches them

  With decade-maddened glee,

  She takes new dreamers as she likes

  And never sets them free.

  They sing her songs and dance her dance

  And build for her a city.

  The Court of Hearts maintains its crowns,

  The Queen's cries are the same:

  And Rabbit white still runs all night,

  Its tardiness to blame.

  But Wonderland on newer shores

  Has newer things to claim.

  In alleys dark old Dinah smiles;

  Kits learn her Cheshire skill,

  While in the forest, wilder things

  Do wilder things there still.

  But in the city Alice breaks

  New dreamers to her will.

  Another time, another place,

  Another dreamer falls.

  It doesn’t matter where he lands,

  He'll end up in her thrall;

  'Cause from her nest of hidden dreams,

  Dread Alice always calls.

  The crowd at Blue Monday was thick for a Thursday afternoon, and the line to the counter was long. The coffeehouse was a student haunt, and to judge by the desperate-looking patrons packed in around table-strewn books, Toby guessed midterm season was in full swing. The place was jam-packed.

  He watched the patrons with curiosity, but also distrust. It had only been a few years since he'd finished college, but the student crowd still made him nervous. Toby's memories of high school were almost universally about being the wrong sort of smart and paying the price for that.

  College had been marginally better, but he'd never really connected much or fit in well. Being surrounded by slim blonde women and athletic young men in baseball caps (which demographic was just as much a majority now as he remembered it being when he'd finally graduated) made him feel like he was swimming with sharks and just waiting for one of them to catch a whiff of blood in the water.

  He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and tried to think about work.

  The gallery was doing well. The studio rentals more than paid for the space, and the shows he'd put on thus far had been successful, mostly. There were hitches, sometimes, like running out of hooks and needing to dash to the hardware store, or finding a way to repair the pegboard on the south wall without a second pair of hands. Most days, he was proud of his work. A couple of the guys who rented space took advantage and used too much storage, but Toby had enough room in the basement to move his own things out of the way when it got tight.

  A girl in a black hooded sweatshirt collided with Toby, nearly knocking him out of line. She glowered at him.

  "Sorry," he muttered, and stepped aside. She pushed past him, ignoring him, music audibly blaring from her earbuds.

  By the time Toby reached the counter, the barista working the register looked just as harried as he felt.

  He gave her the best smile he could manage and ordered his café macchiato to go. She called it out to a second barista, who was hard at work at the espresso machine, pulling shots and foaming milk. Toby paid for his drink, pocketed his change, and stepped aside into the crowd of patrons waiting at the counter for their orders. As the second barista finished drinks, he called out, "Mocha!" or "Latte!" and set the paper cup or mug on the counter.

  "Macchiato!"

  Toby grabbed his cup and carefully pushed his way against the flow of foot traffic to the door. By the time he hit the sidewalk, he was more than ready to be out of Blue Monday and on his way back to his apartment to grab some dinner. After that, Greg was coming by to borrow the truck (an inconvenience the night before an opening, but Toby lived close enough to the studio
that biking in wasn't that much trouble). If he was lucky, Hambrick—the last artist he was waiting on to finish up—would call early enough that he could catch a ride into town with Greg and bike back before dusk.

  He lifted his macchiato to his lips, took a swig, and frowned.

  His coffee had sugar in it.

  Some time after midnight, the trill of his cell phone woke him. He fumbled for it on his bedside table, knocked it to the floor, and reached over the bed to recover it. He tapped and dragged groggily at the touchscreen, managing to answer the call on the third try.

  "Hello?" he groaned.

  "Is the studio still open?"

  "What? No. Hambrick? It's…what time is it?"

  "Two fifteen. The show's in twelve hours. I'm just finishing loading up now. I'll see you there in forty-five minutes."

  Toby opened his mouth to complain, but the sound of Hambrick's antique phone slamming down into its cradle told him it was useless.

  He liked Hambrick. Of course he liked Hambrick. The man was difficult, sure, but you just sort of had to get to know him. He just had an artist's temperament was all, coupled with some very exacting standards. If he came off as a little bit of a prima donna, well…

  Under no circumstances would Toby have suggested to Hambrick's face that he left things to the last minute, or that he regularly abused his status to force his way into a show or drop out of one at the last minute. On one occasion, Hambrick had arrived at the same time that the catering truck pulled in and refused to let them set up until he was finished. These days, Toby knew better than to make a big deal out of it. The man had a temper shorter than most radio commercials.

  He chalked it up as being part of the business. People like Hambrick went with the territory, and if his work late again—and it was—Toby would just have to make it work. He felt on the floor for his jeans and pulled them on without turning on the light.

  Toby felt around on the shelf for his keys before he remembered that Greg had kept the truck overnight.

  He hoped his headlamp still worked.

  The city was peaceful as he biked into the arts district. The sky above him was clear and black and as littered with stars as was possible with all of the streetlights and stoplights around him. He coasted silently through intersections, trying to enjoy the beauty of the night. It was cold consolation, though, considering how tired he was. The gallery lot was empty when he rolled his bike up the back steps and locked it to the rail and let himself in. He yawned, then groaned. He should have stayed in bed. Two hours of sleep was not enough, especially for dealing with Hambrick.

  "Still…" he muttered to himself, though whether he wanted to end that utterance with some statement on his continued status as a business owner or the idea that something could somehow be worse, he wasn't sure.

  He sat down on a bench and regarded his darkened gallery with a certain degree of pride. The show was shaping up to be a good one, and most of the other artists' work was already up on the walls, waiting. He recognized some of it. There were a couple of Garsons that Toby liked a great deal, and was pleased to have on display.

  And then his eyes lit on Alice.

  Most of the work in the show was two-dimensional. Paintings, photography, the usual sort of thing. Alice, though, was a fiberglass and fabric sculpture that stood near the back of the gallery. Her blue dress hung heavier on her slim frame than a real dress would, and her skin had an strange, fragile luminescence to it. There was something about the way the artist had painted her eyes, too. They seemed to follow him almost anywhere he went in the gallery, and the flatness of her expression was haunting. She looked less like the familiar cartoon girl he remembered from Disney films and more like a hungry ghost from some Japanese horror movie. Her feet were planted just wider than shoulder-width apart and her unkempt blonde hair framed her face like Spanish moss. She reached out toward the viewer with one hand and clutched a fistful of crumpled playing cards in the other.

  With the lights down, she took on a whole new air of eerie malevolence. You couldn't see her face in the dark. Just her outline. Angry. Waiting.

  "Come on, Hambrick!" he hissed and pulled his phone out of his pocket to check the time. He was tempted to call and tell the guy that he was out of the show, and that next time the gallery would expect its artists to submit works via freight instead of via this brand of horse shit. He turned the phone over in his hands, trying to decide whether he could get some consignment pieces together in time to replace Hambrick, or if there was someone else local whose stuff might fit in on short notice. He tapped the screen with his thumb, scrolled his contacts for ideas.

  Not that he'd ever actually go through with it, but it was a nice thought.

  A crack like glass breaking startled him back to his feet. He made a quick sweep through the gallery, checking the windows and the art. When he was sure that nothing obvious had dislodged itself in the front wing of the gallery space, he turned to check the back space. He was halfway in, going to check the Garsons, before he realized that Alice was gone from her plinth.

  "Oh shit," he whispered, suddenly terrified. Not of thieves, which was a sensible fear, but of the sculpture itself, as if it was alive and hated him as much as he hated it. He scanned the darkened space for movement, or anything that might give him a hint about where the sculpture had gone.

  The possibility of a prank didn't escape him. Jimmy, who rented studio space on the second floor, was always pulling practical jokes. He knew how much Alice creeped Toby out, and given a dolly and some planning, it wouldn't be beyond him. He was just unprofessional enough to break in and mess with an installation in order to get under Toby's skin.

  There was another creak and pop. Closer this time. Toby spun around and tried to spot the source. It had to be something nearby. He hunted for the nearest light switch. He skidded to a halt when he spotted her. Alice. Standing there, facing him. Her expression was weird in the half light. More desperate than empty.

  Toby startled, stepped back, and then took a breath.

  "She's only a statue," he whispered to himself, then looked around again. "Jimmy? You've had your fun. Come out so we can get her back where she goes, okay?"

  There was a flat sound of cards hitting the ground. Toby's jerked his head to the left to spot the source. Alice stood there, empty-handed. Her cards were scattered on the floor. Toby reached down to retrieve them. Just as his fingers closed on the painted paper, there was a massive final groan and crack like a pond's ice breaking open, and the floor collapsed beneath him.

  He drew in on himself as he fell, bringing his knees in and covering his head with his arms. He braced for the impact of his floor crashing into the basement. When, after a second, there was no bone-jarring crash, he paused to take a breath. And then another. And then he peered over the edge of the chunk of floor that had fallen with him.

  His hair blew in the wind as he stared down at the tops of the clouds, which in turn reflected moonlight back to him on their cottony surfaces as he hurtled toward them. His makeshift raft sliced through the cloud surface, carried him through the cool, foggy interior, and then finally burst out of the cloud layer. From here, he could see the ground laid out beneath him as if he were watching through the window of an airplane.

  Well, the window of a crashing airplane, anyway.

  His legs jerked involuntarily as his body's instincts kicked in and he tried to climb away on the scrap of floor. Instead, he succeeded only in knocking it away and out of reach. Toby swore.

  "Problem?"

  Toby looked over, startled, at the coyote who had spoken. "You're a coyote," he said, unsure of what was more difficult to parse: his current situation, the fact that there seemed to be an airborne coyote involved, or the fact that the coyote was dressed in a white aviator's scarf, a bomber jacket, and goggles and was talking to him. The jacket was decorated with various patches and insignia, like a fighter pilot's. The scarf was fastened at the neck with an odd silver brooch shaped like a thimble.

&
nbsp; "You seem surprised by that."

  "We're in the sky."

  The coyote clucked its tongue in amusement. "I'm a coyote. Coyotes go everywhere. It's what we do." Its fur fluttered and flapped in the wind. "The more pertinent question might be to ask you what you're doing here."

  "I was at work." Toby said.

  "Mmm-hmm." It scratched lazily at one large ear.

  "And then something happened and I was falling through the clouds."

  "Didn't think to pack a parachute, I see," the coyote said. If Toby hadn't known better, he might have thought that the coyote was giving him a dismissive look.

  "Well, I wasn't exactly planning on going skydiving."

  "Nobody ever does," it said with a sigh. "Have you got anything to eat?"

  Toby felt at his pockets, then shook his head.

  "Pity. Oh well." The coyote began to paddle away in the air, its tongue lolling and flapping in the air.