by Kaye Chazan
Toby dropped down from where he'd been peeking over the edge of the crow's nest. He couldn't see the trio now, or hear them half as well, but the desire to spectate had lost out to the certain knowledge that he was in serious trouble. He looked around, frantic for a weapon. Failing that, he’d settle for some way to prevent the three men who'd apparently been hunting him from coming up.
After a moment of scrambling around in the dark, during which he came up with a stubby pencil, a tin cup, and a neatly folded empty paper bag, it became woefully apparent that The Amazing Brandy and her traveling show kept a very tidy crow's nest.
"Now look here, boy," the cowboy shouted up at him from the spot where the mast planted itself in the ground. "There's an easy way and a hard way to do this. If you're smart, you'll come on down here and we can do this the easy way, like civilized people. If you're not, well, you ain't going to like the result. You got me?"
Toby froze. They were going to shoot him. He was going to die. He was going to die in Wonderland, and nobody would ever know what had happened to him, and the whole thing with the gallery was going to go to hell, and he'd never see his parents again, or go to a bar, or have another one-night stand, or—
There was a small white box bolted to the inside of the crow's nest. The words "IN CASE OF EMERGENCY" were painted on it in precise red block letters. Toby wondered how he'd missed it before, but crawled over to it anyway. It was probably just a first aid kit or something, but any help was good help right now. He fumbled at the latch.
"I know you heard me up there, boy. You've got about five seconds before I decide you ain't cooperating."
Toby wrenched open the white metal emergency kit door and then blinked at its contents. There was no first aid kit, no flare gun, no practical-looking anything whatsoever. Just a single frosted glass bottle, corked with a jaunty little cork, and with a stiff paper tag tied around the neck with a bit of twine.
Fucking Wonderland.
The cowboy started counting down. "Five. Four. Three."
Toby grabbed the bottle and pulled out the cork. The label read, simply, "ARE YOU A MAN OR A MOUSE?"
"Right now? Being a mouse doesn't sound so bad," Toby murmured and downed the bottle's contents. It tasted sweet in a comforting kind of way, like the hot, buttery carrots his grandmother used to serve as a side dish on Thanksgiving.
He squeaked in surprise as everything around him began to grow, and his clothes suddenly got heavy. His hands vanished into his sleeves and soon he was fighting his way out of the uncomfortably massive bundle that had until now been his clothes. He found a way out down the leg of his jeans and scurried onto the planks of the crow's nest as the cowboy below finished his countdown. He found a knothole in the wood and squeezed through. His paws were good for hanging on, with tiny claws at the toe tips, and the wood was just rough enough that he could cling to the underside of the crow's nest and watch the cowboy climb.
He didn't wait long, though. Once the man's head was out of view, he made his way in, to the mast, and then dashed down it as quick as he could. If the musketman or the scoutmaster spotted him, they gave no sign. Toby hunkered down in a patch of dried grass and let out a tiny sigh of relief.
And then the cowboy started shouting something about yellow-bellied vermin.
Toby sprinted into the woods and didn't look back.
Being a mouse changed a man's perspective.
Toby skittered along the edge of the path that Brandy's show had taken and wondered whether he was quicker as a mouse than he'd have been otherwise. On the one hand, his stride was much, much shorter. On the other hand, he'd tried catching mice before. Mice were fast. How fast, though, he'd never really considered. Everything seemed to speed by this close to the ground.
He tried not to think about what would happen if he never found a way to change back into a human being. He'd done what he needed to do in order to escape three armed men who seemed determined to do unpleasant things to him. Being alive was the important part.
He almost didn't hear the flap of huge wings above him until it was too late.
The owl's beak and talons missed him by inches. Well, what he was still thinking of as inches, which were probably tiny fractions of inches, really. He cursed under his breath and bolted deeper into the leaves and the underbrush.
"Oh, please," said the owl, dismissively. "Like a mouse has never tried to hide before."
"I'm not actually a mouse!" Toby yelled back, then regretted it as the owl used the sound of his voice to target another swoop.
"Oh, really? And what exactly are you? A very small dog? I can also eat very small dogs, you know."
Toby found what he hoped might be a safe haven underneath the roots of a large tree. "I'm a human being. I drank a bottle of, uh... well, I guess it was kind of a first aid kit."
The owl perched on a branch above and tilted its head, curious. "If that's the sort of aid that shows up first, I'd wait around for second aid or third aid if I were you."
"It seemed like a good idea at the time." Toby watched the owl carefully. It blinked its round yellow eyes at him, but didn't move. "So, uh, since you know I'm a person now, if I come out of here, we're good, right?"
"If by 'good,' you mean that I will eat you, yes. Because you are manifestly not, as you say, a 'person.' You are mouse-shaped, mouse-sized, and you smell of mouse. Therefore, based on my empirical observations, you are a mouse."
"That sounds pretty final."
"Yes, well. I'm an owl. Owls are excellent at observation. For example, while you've been wittering on about being a so-called person, I've been observing the snake that's creeping up behind you, ensuring that it doesn't cheat me out of my meal."
"That's hardly called for, sir," a low, whispery voice hissed from a clump of grass not far from the roots in which Toby had taken refuge. "Not sporting at all."
"Humph. I saw the mouse first. I should get to eat it," the owl said, and puffed up his feathers.
The snake coiled and raised its head to glower at the owl. "Well, he's in my roots."
"Your roots? That's odd, since it’s one of my trees those roots are attached to."
"Oh, is it? I suppose you think you own this whole forest now."
"Well, between the two of us, I'd say I've got more right to it, haven't I? It's not as if you're particularly well-equipped to make full use of its facilities."
The snake flicked its tongue. "I wasn't aware you utilized the forest floor as extensively as I do. This, you will discover if you care to make use of those vaunted powers of observation, is what the whole of the forest emerges from."
Toby crept backward, close to the trunk of the tree. If he could slip away while the two of them were arguing, he might be able to escape before either of them noticed he was gone.
The owl turned its head and fixed its heavy yellow gaze on Toby. "If you think I haven't noticed you creeping away, little mouse, you are quite mistaken."
Toby sighed and slunk back to sit in his spot among the roots.
"That's owls for you," the snake muttered to Toby. "I don't see why the rest of us put up with it, frankly. Stuck-up bastards. They think they know everything."
"I heard that!"
"Good!" The snake retorted. "You should hear it more often! It might change your attitude."
"I'll change your attitude!"
With that, the owl swooped down and snatched the snake out of the grass with its talons and flew off into the night.
Toby fled. He had to get the hell out of this forest.
The sky had begun to lighten by the time Toby reached the edge of the forest. He was exhausted, he was famished, and he was still a mouse. Which, after the whole thing with the snake and the owl, had taken on a whole new dimension of alarmingness.
He'd had better nights.
At his size, he couldn't see much of the terrain, though he could tell that the trees had thinned out and he'd made his way into a sort of scrubland. "I don't care what The Amazing Brandy said. I'd kill
for a crazy guy in a funny hat having a tea party right now."
From above, a voice: "Did you say something?"
Toby froze and looked around. His tiny pink nose and whiskers twitched as he sniffed the air. He smelled something, but wasn't quite certain what it was. It probably would have helped to be a more experienced mouse.
There was a rustling, the sound of something moving around in the brush. A large, definitely unbirdlike shadow passed over him. "Hello?" the voice said again. "I'm sure I heard someone say something."
"That depends," Toby said after a second. If whatever it was couldn't see him, it probably couldn't hurt to talk back to it. "Do you have any food?"
There was another rustling, and the sound of someone going through a sack. "I have bread and some venison jerky. Oh, and a little bit of gooseberry jam."
"So you're a person, then?"
A face framed by an odd fur hat grinned down at him. "If you like, but I always preferred other things. I used to have this great patter about being half-alligator. I think there was something about snapping turtles and locust trees in there somewhere as well, though it's been a while. I'd have to ask around." The man put his hand down in the grass.
With some reluctance, Toby climbed into the man's palm and let himself be lifted up. He gave the man a good looking over and noticed he was dressed in buckskin, like a frontiersman.
"I've never talked to a mouse before," the man said as he sat down in the long grass next to his pack. He reached into it with his other hand, pulling out a bit of bread and handing it to Toby. "Do you enjoy being a mouse?"
"Not particularly," Toby said through a mouthful of the bread. "Last night an owl tried to eat me. And then there was this snake, and they got into this argument, and the owl sort of lost interest. If I had a choice, I think I'd rather be man-sized."
"It's not much better up here. Why, just a little while back I got into a situation like that with a bear and a wolverine."
"What happened?"
The frontiersman tapped his fur cap and smiled. "The bear lost interest." The cap had a certain wolverine-ish look to it, dark with light edges. A blunt, bushy tail hung from the back of it.
"Definitely more of a man than a mouse," Toby said ruefully, and the frontiersman chuckled. Toby made a mental note not to explain the particulars of his predicament to his new benefactor. His ego was in sad enough shape as it was.
"More bread?"
Toby nodded. "Yes, please." He held the new morsel in his paws and set about eating it. It was good, though it certainly went down differently on this scale, and with a whole different set of teeth. "This is probably going to come out all wrong, but you seem a little bit... sedate compared to the other locals."
"Sedate?"
"Not, um." Toby tried to come up with the right word. "Um. Not crazy."
The frontiersman grinned wide. "I'm sitting in a field having a picnic with a talking mouse, son. If that ain't crazy, I don't know what is."
Toby had to concede that the man had a point. "So what are you doing out here? Other than the obvious bit where you're dressed like some kind of pioneer?"
"Right now? I'm eating. Before that, I found you. Before that, I was walking through the fields and the forests, which is probably what I'll go back to doing when I'm finished eating and talking with you. Sooner or later I'll run into some varmint begging for a good scuffle. Then we'll scuffle. After that, if'n I'm lucky, I'll have a new hat to walk around in."
"That's what you do? You just walk around and... and scuffle?"
The frontiersman nodded. "More or less. Sometimes I just talk to 'em. Like right now. Makes a good story, talking to animals, or so I'm told."
"But don't you ever get tired?" Toby asked, dumbfounded. "Don't you ever go home?"
"Go home? I suppose I've done that before. A long time ago, maybe. Don't suppose I need to anymore now. Ain't no call for that kind of thing in this line of work." The frontiersman scratched his beard. "So, mouse, where will you go from here?"
"I don't know." Toby sat up on his hind legs and tried to see as far as he could. "I'd rather not go back into the forest again. I don't think it's a safe place for somebody my size."
"Safe a place as any. After all, there's cats in the city," the frontiersman told him. "Some of them with a knack for the Cheshire trick. You'd be lucky to see their grins before they pounce."
"They can't be any worse than the owls and snakes were. Which way is the city from here? I can't see over the long grass."
"Can't say as I recommend you go, but if it's what you really want, I can't stop you." The frontiersman stood up and held Toby out in the direction of the fields.
There was a vague grey skyline on the other side of them. Toby spotted something that looked a bit like a road as well, not too far away. If he could get to it, he could probably follow it all the way to the city. He didn't like the sound of a place full of cats, but it might be a safe refuge from the cowboy and his friends. It was also a likelier place for him to find some clues about how to get back into his own body, and then home.
"I should be able to find my way. Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet. You haven't seen the place." The frontiersman lowered Toby to the ground. "Good luck, and don't take any wooden nickels. That's how she gets you."
Toby scrunched up his whiskers. "Who?"
The frontiersman shook his head. "Best not to say. You'll know her when you see her, though. Or at least I hope you will."
"Okay." Toby gave the man one last puzzled look. "Thanks for all the help. And the breakfast."
The frontiersman turned and walked away. Toby sniffed the air and tried to get his bearings. He took his best guess at the direction of the road and hurried through the underbrush.
When Toby burst out of the foliage and onto the road, the first thing he did was to run back in and wait. If an owl had spotted him in the dead of night, there was no telling what might see him now that the sun was well up and shining brightly down. Only when he was sure that nothing was waiting to swoop down or leap out at him did he let out a sigh of relief and set out along the road toward the city. He kept well into the grass and weeds, but within sight of the actual edge of the road so that he wouldn't lose his way. He'd need rest eventually, but that could wait until he was in a safe place. Mouse or not, there was no way he was going to burrow down into a pile of dead leaves or something and wake up in some other animal's mouth, or trampled underfoot, or whatever else could befall a mouse minding his own business in the middle of the day.
He guessed that any real mice probably had better nests and burrows than a few dead leaves, too. "One day in and already I'm crap at being a mouse. Hooray for me," he grumbled. Grateful as he was for the escape, he wondered if maybe he shouldn't have let the situation with the cowboy play out. Alice hadn't been killed in her Wonderland. The Queen of Hearts and her whole “off with her head” thing was mostly nonsense. Wasn't it?
He thought of the owl and the snake. That hadn't seemed like nonsense at all if he stripped away the fact that animals talked. Which wasn't particularly encouraging. Nor was the question of what might have happened if he'd chosen "man" instead of mouse. Would he have stayed himself? Or would he have turned into some ridiculous stereotype of masculinity more like the frontiersman or the scoutmaster?
Someone, the critical voice in his head supplied, who fights back instead of running away or caving. Toby ignored it and hurried on through the weeds and gravel in the shallow ditch that ran along the side of the road.
The city in the distance grew less and less distant, albeit slowly. As he got closer, he noticed an increase in traffic coming and going on the road. Carriages and foot travel were apparently the done thing in Wonderland—the grandest conveyance being one driven by a frog-headed man in a powdered wig—but he'd also spotted several variations on the bicycle, at least one sedan chair, three slow-footed monks in brown hooded robes, a handful of rickshaws, and a stoat on a tiny motorcycle.
Eventually,
the city itself came into view, visible even from the tall grass along the road. Its boundary was marked by an unbroken chain of terraces, warehouses, and massive stone walls. As he drew closer, he caught sight of a winding queue made up of those same foot travelers, carriages, and others he'd seen before. With one last nervous glance at the sky, Toby joined the end of the line behind a traveling minstrel with an actual lute. They were joined a moment later by a woman dressed like a 1940s secretary, who spent a discomfiting amount of time trying to shush something in her handbag. Neither of them seemed particularly fazed by sharing the line with a mouse. Although he couldn't see particularly far up and down the line, Toby could understand why. A significant proportion of those in line were animals, both natural and anthropomorphized, all of whom were waiting their turn in a more or less civil fashion.