There was only such a little space between the time the sleepers fell asleep and the time they began to dream in earnest, and it was only that space that began to the lovers. Once the dream began, the time for their pleasure was over. It was time to go to work.

“That’s okay,” the fisherman said. “I learned to like sushi for my last wife’s sake.

“What?” said Alice, certain that she must have heard him incorrectly. “But doesn’t it make much more sense to measure the person and then make the clothing fit them?”

“Measure the person? Make the clothing fit? Well I’ve never heard of such a thing. What queer ideas you have,” the Tailor said.

“But a person can’t help their size,” Alice insisted. “It’s not possible.”

“Then they must be awfully lazy,” the Tailor said. “Why, if we did things your way we’d have to make clothing in every shape and size. Our work would never end. So much simpler, so much more sensible, to make our things the right size and the right shape to begin with.”

“Okay, you know what?” said Alice. “Fuck this shit, I’m going back to the place with the rabbit and the caterpillar… that world made more sense than this one.”

“Why?” the cat asked finally. “My God, why?”

“He had it coming,” the rat said.

“For being successful?”

“For being lucky,” the rat said. “For being favored by his father.”

“Favored by his father?” the cat said. “The eldest son got the lands, the farm, the mill. Your owner got the mules. He got…”

“Don’t say he got nothing, Puss… you of all creatures know that for the lie it is,” the rat said. “The oldest brother got their father’s fortune. The youngest one got the means by which their father had won that. There’s never anything grand in store for the second born, the middle child. They never have great destinies. They never come to an impressive end. Nobody gave him a clever companion to make his way in the world for him. He found me in the barn.”

“Your master could have made a respectable living with those mules.”

“Made a living,” the rat spat. “While his older brother played lord of the manor and his younger brother became lord of the manor… land is respected, Puss. Titles are respected. A man who works for a living? With his hands? With a train of sweaty, stinking mules? Oh, and he has worked. He has worked so long and so hard. He’s crossed the country a dozen times in each direction, each time making just enough money that he can keep on doing it some more. And in that same time, what has his older brother done? What has his younger brother done?”

“Much.”

“Nothing!” the rat said. “He just sat back and let you win false praise and steal treasures and castles and love for him.”

“Well, that’s over now, isn’t it?” the cat said. “I suppose your master put you up to this.”

“No,” the rat said. “He doesn’t even know. Who is the Marquis de Carabas to him? We’ll have to flee, of course… leaving the mules behind. He’ll be devastated at the loss of his livelihood, and the land he thinks of as home… but once there’s a hundred leagues between us and this place I can start to build a better life for him, and he’ll see how his stubborn insistence in clinging on to his inheritance has held him back. I urged him to sell the mules. He could have had a fat purse to finance his ventures, ventures I would have guided but honest ones. Unlike your sainted master, mine would have been able to account for everything he had honestly.”

“Save the mules that got the purse that paid for it all,” the cat said. “Those were given to him. It’s easy to make money honestly when you have a pile of it to begin with.”

“Well! That’s all gone now,” the rat said. “This is where we part, Puss… I to my master and you to your mourning.”

“Is that what you think?”

“It is.”

“Well, I think that mourning is hungry work,” the cat said, and he smiled.

The rat gulped.

A second later, the cat did, too.

He emerged from the thicket where he’d met the rat, alone. The scene at the crossroads was just as dismal before: the twisted and battered wreck of the once-fine carriage in the center of it, the confused and frightened mules wandering around beyond it. It was the angry red teeth marks scored on the lead mule’s flank that had given the rat’s presence away.

“Captain!” the cat called to the head of the Marquis’s personal guard. “If you search a bit up the cross road, you should find the muleskinner who is responsible for this outrage. I’m sure the king, my poor master’s father-in-law, would like to speak to him.”

The men snapped to it, and the cat smiled, in spite of the tragedy. He had an idea about the second son’s ultimate destiny, and he wasn’t sure his ending would be quite as unremarkable as the rat had feared.

“You told me this was a magic can opener,” he said to the shopkeeper, who wasn’t at all flustered by this display.

“So I did,” the shopkeeper said.

“It doesn’t work!” the boy said.

“How very strange,” the shopkeeper said. “What exactly was the problem?”

“It doesn’t even open cans!” the boy said. “I can’t believe I fell for your lies, after you sold me that stupid magic feather that didn’t do anything…”

“The bird from whom I got it assured me that it had enabled her to fly,” the shopkeeper said. “She even showed me.”

“…and that stupid magic mirror I exchanged it for…”

“I’ll admit that the enchanter who made that particular item had a remarkably straightforward idea of what ’showing things as they truly are’ entails.”

“…and the hat you said I could pull rabbits from that I traded that for.”

“You could have when the hat was made, but myxomatosis is a pernicious disease, sadly,” the shopkeeper said. “Wipes out a warren just like that. Still, I stand by my merchandise, which is why I let you return the hat… despite my very liberal return policy not covering headwear for reasons of safety and sanitation. The customer is always right, you know.”

“Well, this time you’re not talking me into taking any more of your junk,” the boy said. “I want my money back.”

“Ah. Yes. Of course,” the shopkeeper said. “But after allowing you to return three items in the course of a week, I’m afraid I can’t take this back unless it’s demonstrably defective.”

“I already told you, it doesn’t work,” the boy said.

“You’ll have to demonstrate that.”

“Do you got a can?”

“Not on the premises, no,” the shopkeeper said. “Bottles and vials and urns are more in my line, I’m afraid.”

“Fine, then I guess I’ll go get one,” the boy said.

“Very good,” the shopkeeper said. “Just make sure that it’s a magic one.”

“What?”

“The can,” the shopkeeper said. “Make sure it’s magic. It won’t be a proper demonstration otherwise.”

“Where am I supposed to get a magic can from?”

“Well, you should have thought of that before you bought a magic can opener.”

The pilot was another story. That poor broken figure had been a being of flesh and blood, not of paper. It was a tragedy, an utterly senseless one. The instructor had said the same exact words countless times to many would-be pilots at the moment of takeoff, but nobody else had ever taken the instruction “unfold your wings and fly” quite so literally.

She rolls over in bed, kicking the leaf-blanket off of her legs. She punches the tiny pillow in frustration and gets herself settled back down in the midst of unmended pots and pans, though she knows it won’t do any good. As soon as she starts to drift off, it comes again… the words, the horrible, hated words. The staccato beat of those five words drives itself into her head, shocking her back to consciousness.

Every time. The same five words. They come at her from all over the world, from parents reading to children and children reading to themselves, from stage performances and from thousands of DVD players. From a global audience, the words come and they awaken her every time, all the time… and the clapping, the clapping comes with them like a hideous heartbeat boring into her brain.

“I do believe in fairies, I do believe in fairies, I do believe in fairies.”

The pixie can’t sleep. We won’t let her.

So she was considering, in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.

There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so verymuch out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and, burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just a moment too late to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.

“Oh, well,” Alice said. “It was just a silly rabbit, anyway.”

Liberally adapted from Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.

“How picky are you?” the fish asked. “It’s not enough that I can talk?”

“Well, maybe I’ve seen talking fish before,” the fisherman said. “Can you dance?”

“No,” the fish said. “But I can sing. I sing the most beautiful songs, the songs of fish.”

“What do they sound like?”

“Have you ever heard whalesong?”

“No,” the fisherman said.

“Oh, well, the songs of fish are kind of like that, but better,” the fish said.

“Can you sing ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’?” the fisherman asked.

“What?”

“The Bobby McFerrin Song,” the fisherman said. “I have a largemouth bass at home that sings it. Can you do that?”

“Why do you need me to sing that if you’ve got a fish that sings it already?”

“Well, it’s kind of a robot and if you could do it for real… honestly, I’m not sure I even need one singing fish, let alone two,” the fisherman said. “It was a birthday present, because I like to fish and so my wife thought… well, who knows what she was thinking.”

“Listen, if you let me go then I’ll sing you a song that will stay with you until the end of your days,” the fish said.

“I don’t really like music,” the fisherman said.

“What do you like, then?”

“Fish, mostly,” the fisherman said. “That’s why I keep coming out here. For fish. I don’t know why you guys keep making this so complicated.”

“You’re the one who brought up wishes.”

It has slept for a long time. Now for the first time in ages it awakens in pain, pain such as it has never known. The air is hot and thick, strangely invigorating but unfamiliar. The beetles which live on the forest’s trees, thinning them at a reasonable level and then dying in the winter, have not been dying, and so the trees are in agony. The forest is not the trees, but the trees are of the forest and it feels their pain. It acts. Taking in a deep breath of the newly vitalizing atmosphere, the forest acts. It adjusts its trees, changing their sap to be thicker and more abundant, better suited to repelling the insects.

It’s a start, but a slow one.

I can do better, the forest thinks, taking in another mammoth breath.

It reaches out and it awakens some of its children. There are spiders in the forest, and insects that hunt, and birds with long, clever beaks. They can be adjusted, too. Made cleverer, made hungrier, made more numerous. The forest is alive with activity now, fully awake and alert It reaches out within itself. The wolf packs that once roamed it are all but gone. The great bears are dwindling in number and lazy. Long paths have been cut through the forest’s body, and in some cases covered over with rocky earth and barriers of metal. Its boundaries have retreated inward upon themselves.

The forest exerts itself like it is giving a great shrug. Roots extend towards roadways, seeds find their way into cracks. The effects of this are not immediately apparent. The plant parts of the forest are not as quick as the animal parts, even with the refreshing effects of the altered air.

The forest touches the bears and the wolves, along with the bats and the owls and the blackbirds and the raptors and the raccoons and the badgers in their dens. It reaches out to all of them, along with the deer and the rabbits and the squirrels and the mice. All the hunters, all the scavengers, all the foragers. They are all awake now, attent and waiting for the forest to act.

I can do better than this, the forest thinks again, and it adjusts them all. They remember when they were larger, when they were wilder and fiercer, stronger and smarter. They remember when the forest they were a part of was a thing of greatness and they themselves become greater.

There are men in the forest. It didn’t notice them at first, because there have always been men in the forest, though they stopped being part of the forest long before they adjusted to their present shapes. Its attention is on them now that the initial shock of pain that jolted it to consciousness has subsided. Some of the men are felling trees, not with stone and fire or even with iron but with strange metal implements that shriek and spin. Trees are being dragged off by great mindless metal beasts that belch out precious carbon and toxic-flavored fumes. Elsewhere, the forest’s insects are being killed by poison, the forest’s birds are being frightened back into their accustomed timidity by the roar of men’s strange devices, and the forest’s beasts are being hunted with things it can’t even begin to describe.

Shocked, the forest reaches out… and receives yet another shock. Across the world, its brethren have all been similarly penned in, reduced, or even destroyed. Their cousins, as well. The wetlands: drained and built over, or starved, or poisoned. The undulating prairies: fenced in, ripped apart, made to bear tamer seeds from other places. Rivers channeled and dammed, and everywhere men have laid their rocky paths and spun webs of metal carrying lighting and water, built their odd angular lodges, and constructed their roaring engines.

We can do better, the forest says, and it starts to wake the others up.