There was something lying on the ground in front of the bench that had looked like just a random piece of junk, but in her state of extreme boredom the girl found herself looking at it. It was like a toy cabinet from a dollhouse, but it had knobs on the front, like an Etch-a-Sketch. After a minute of looking at it she remembered where she’d seen a thing like it before: in old cartoons. It was what people had used to think radios looked like.

Well, that was something. She could listen to some music. After a glance at her mother to make sure she was still busy… there was nothing wrong with listening to music and it wasn’t like the radio belonged to anything, but mothers seemed to have a thing about things picked up off the ground… she leaned way down and grabbed it up off the ground.

There were two knobs. She could read well enough to know what they said. The first one especially, because it was a word she knew: VOLUME. The TV and her real radio and even the computer speakers all said that. She twisted the volume knob up in case that was how you turned it on. No sound came out of the radio, but the platform got a lot noisier as suddenly it seemed like a lot of people showed up all at once. She turned the knob down about halfway. The station remained more crowded than it had been before, when it had just been her, her mother, and a few other people, but it wasn’t so noisy she couldn’t stand it.

The other knob said TUNE. She had to sound that out, but when she did she knew what it meant. Tunes were music, of course. She gave that knob a twist.

She was looking at the radio, so the first thing she noticed was the bench. She felt like it tried to buck her off, and when the seat of her pants landed on it again it wasn’t a hard metal bench but one of old splintery wood. The train platform wasn’t concrete anymore… it, too, was made out of wood. The train waiting on the tracks looked more like a real train now, the kind they had in the movies, with a real engine that wasn’t just a car with a snub nose on it, and a real caboose, and in between them cars that looked like carriages. The crowd around them had changed, too. All the ladies were wearing dresses and all the men were dressed like cowboys. Her dress had changed, too, into something itchy and heavy. The ribbon in her hair had turned into a bonnet.

She liked the train better but she didn’t like the clothes. She turned the knob back in the other direction, watching as things slided back to normal. She turned it some more, slowly. The light changed as first she found herself on a covered platform, then in an enclosed one, and then in a real proper indoor train station. Then she was underground looking at a subway train. She kept spinning the dial, watching the subway become a monorail like the one at Disney and then something that looked like something from a space movie or Japan. She kept turning the dial.

She’d completely forgotten her boredom, completely forgotten that she’d ever hoped to get mere music out of the little box… she’d completely forgotten her mother, until the woman abruptly vacuum-sealed her travel pouch and turned to regard her and the object she held.

“What are you doing? What do you have there?” she said.

“Nothing! I didn’t do anything, I just found it on the ground!” the girl said.

“Well, leave it there, it’s probably some… some alien thing,” her mother said. “Now, we have to get on board. They’re almost finished establishing the jump matrix now.”

“But I have to put it back…”

“Yes, put it back, right now,” her mother said, ripping the box out of her hands and then taking her by the wrist. “And come along, before we miss the transit!”

She goes to the box and picks it up. She starts to open it when she notices the key in its side. There is no reason to think that a music box would work after being left lying out in the woods… in fact, that was probably why it had been left there, she thinks… but on the other hand it seems to be in good condition, and if it does work it seems like it would almost be a crime to not wind it before opening.

So she does so, and when she opens it she is not at all surprised to see the tiny, perfect figure of a ballerina.

With slow, graceful moves that gave no hint of mechanical origin, tiny ballerina raises her arms above her head and goes into a perfect plie. She curtsies to the little girl… or straight ahead, the girl realizes, then makes a quarter-turn to each side and repeats the motion. Tiny tinkling chimes begin to play as the little figure’s hands go behind her back, and pull out a pair of cymbals.

CRASH! CRASH! CRASH!

The girl shrieks, her eyes closing as if to shut out the loud and terrible sound. When they open, the cymblas are gone, and the ballerina is reaching behind her back again.

This time she pulls out a gun.

The music box is still there in the woods.

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.

“No, honey,” her mother had said in a very tired voice. “Those are just lights. Street lights, cars, lights in buildings. Nothing special.”

“Oh,” the girl had said, disappointed, and she’d turned her attention away from the window for the rest of the flight.

On this flight, though, she had been able to see the green and brown of fields and the gray strips that were roads and the tiny-looking buildings, at least for the beginning of it… but as the plane had climbed higher and higher, eventually it had broken through the ceiling of clouds hanging over the city and now when she looked out, clouds were all she could see… a vast and snowy expanse of them.

At least, she thought they were clouds. She was enjoying looking at them, and wasn’t about to ask her mother, just in case they weren’t.

Topiary animals craned their necks at the sound of her feet on the cobblestoned path. Green shoots shot up from the rich soil on either side of her, delicate flowers budding and blooming into existence just for her. Up a gentle slope there was an orchard of trees, their low-hanging boughs laden with brightly-wrapped presents and cakes. A silver stream that sparkled like diamonds wound its way up the hill and among the trees. Fluttering faeries sang, giggled, and danced in air was full of delicate floral scents carried on a cool, soft breeze.

Just ahead, the path split and circled around a tall white statue of a winged angel, its arms spread out in a gesture of welcome. As the young girl’s face lifted up to see its own, it looked down at her.

“Welcome,” the angel said to the girl. “Welcome, to the Garden of Earthly Delights. All that you see here is yours to enjoy.”

“Why would there be an angel in a garden of earthly delights?” the girl asked.

“Um, er…” the angel said.

“You’re Satan, aren’t you?” she asked. It stared down at her impassively, saying nothing. “Come on, you might as well admit it… it’s pretty obvious.”

“…I might not be,” it said.

“Yes, you are,” she said. “Look, your horns are even showing.”

“What?” it said, slapping at its head to try to feel.

“Yeah, and they look like this,” the girl said, putting her thumb and forefinger up to her own forehead in the shape of an “L”.

“I am not a loser!” the angel said.

“Whatever,” she said, turning and walking back towards the gates. “It’s like you’re not even trying anymore.”

He did not fly swiflty upon them. They were so crowded upon each other, many growing out of the backs of others, that they could not hope to bear him aloft. Indeed, he could hardly bear their weight himself. He had six hundred wings, and more were springing up all the time.

He took a flaming sword and sheared off all that he could reach, leaving the smell of burnt feather and flesh in the celestial air. He hacked and he cut and he slashed until his back was a mess of stumps, and from that smoldering mass a dozen more wings swiftly arose.

Sobbing in pain and frustration, Gabriel sank down to his knees in despair and uttered a prayer, his first ever of supplication rather than praise. Would his torments never cease?

Somewhere down far below, at the front desk of a hotel, a four-year-old was being ignored by her parents and the desk clerk while they argued over a service charge. Lacking any other amusement, she slammed her palm down on the desk bell, again and again. She giggled in delight at the noise it made.

Ring, ring, ring.

Six more wings.

“The zoo is closing,” he said.

“But where will we go?” the penguins asked.

“You don’t have to go home,” he said. “But you can’t stay here.”

The More Things Change

“…and so, over time, as animals that dealt better with confinement and artificial conditions passed on both their behaviors and their genes to their offspring, eventually things reached a point where the animals we bred in captivity were of an entirely different species than their cousins in the wild, back when any still lived,” the zookeeper explained to the school children. “At that point there was a serious debate about the purpose and nature of zoos. Before conservation efforts had included the re-introduction of animals back into their native habitats as a major goal. Now, our enclosures are full of animals whose native habitats are the enclosures. Releasing them into the wild would be as pointless and cruel as ‘re-introducing’ one of the old polar bears to the Amazon Desert.” The zookeeper noticed a child raising a hand at the back of the group. “Yes, do you have a question?”

“Yes. I don’t believe in evolution,” a child said.

“But we’ve seen it in action,” the zookeeper said. “We have records, we have proof.”

“The Bible says that it’s always been this way.”

“Even if it did, we still have a complete timeline of the speciation of…”

“If your ‘timeline’ says one thing and the word of God says another, then your timeline is wrong,” the child said.

“What do you think the Bible says about zoos?” the zookeeper asked.

“It says in Genesis that God created man to have dominion over the animals,” the child said.

“That could mean any number of things,” the zookeeper said. “Back before the age of zoos when animals were still wild, people believed…”

“If you read the Bible literally, there’s only one meaning… and there’s no mention of any ‘wild animals’ in Genesis,” the child said. “All the animals were with Adam and Eve in the garden. All of them were with Noah on the ark. We’re all descended from Noah, and our animals are all descended from his. It’s a clear description of an unbroken chain of stewardship, from the first days of creation until now.”

“I’m pretty sure there are a few mentions of wild animals in the Bible,” the zookeeper said. “In Leviticus, God threatens to send…”

“Now you’re going and putting your own liberal interpretation on things,” the child said. “You have to really study the Bible to understand what that passage means.”

“What does it mean?”

“You’d have to ask my pastor,” the child said. “But Genesis makes it clear that there are no wild animals, so a literal interpretation of any other passage can’t say otherwise.”

“I’m not sure we’d agree on what ‘literal’ means,” the zookeeper said.

“If you disagree with God’s unchanging word…”

“I’m not disagreeing with the Bible, I’m disagreeing with you,” the zookeeper said. “Now, unless you actually have a question, I think we’re going to be moving along to the dolphin embassy.”

“I’ll pray for you,” the child said.