“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.

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.

Strong hands grab at her. She’s pulled out of bed, yanked kicking and fighting towards the kitchen. The massive pot is already on the stove, already hot… so hot, boiling hot. Looking away from it, she sees the face of her tormenter, so angry and wild and yet distant. This is somehow impersonal… whatever this person wants, it isn’t about her.

She screams in fear turning to agony as she’s dropped into the water, and then the lid slams down leaving her in darkness, darkness she awakes to, her powerful hind legs kicking the wall of the den, showering her mate with dirt when her nails don’t catch him instead.

“Ugh, the dream again?” he says, shaking a clump of earth off his fur. She nods, still mute with panic. “Honestly, I don’t know where you get those ideas from… we’re rabbits, not lobsters.”

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.

“Do you ever worry,” the larger man said to the smaller, “about posterity?”

“About what?”

“You know, your legacy.”

“Oh,” the smaller man said. He held up a gaudily jeweled ring. “I think I’ll leave a fine one, if any bastard of mine ever tracks me down to claim it.”

“What I mean is, we are outlaws, criminals. We rob and plunder, and sometimes kill.”

“When it is needful to kill, only,” his companion said.

“When it is needful,” the big man agreed. “But needful or not, how do you think history will look back on you?”

“Kindly, I should think,” the man said. He shrugged. “I’m not particularly bothered about it.”

“Kindly?” the big man echoed. “Kindly?”

“Yes, kindly,” the thief said. “They think kindly enough of their absent king, whose wasteful wars necessitate the taxes that turned folks like you and I out of our homes. They lay the blame for that at the feet of his poor, duty-bound brother, who does his best to keep the realm running and feed the starving beast abroad. If my meager depredations are remembered at all, they will no doubt also be blamed upon John.”

“Or you’ll be cursed alongside him.”

“I think not. Who will curse us? The many and common poor folk who form the meat and blood of this lands? We have done nothing to them,” the man said. “It is the gentry they revile… the taxmen even more. They are vilified for the same reason that we rob them: because they have money that others do not. And if they’re villains to the multitudes,and we direct our evil against them, does that not make us good?”

“Does it?”

“Of course not,” the smaller thief said. “But posterity is a tidy custodian… it likes to keep things neat.”

“So you do not worry about posterity because you think you will be regarded as a hero?”

“No, no, not a whit,” the smaller man said. “I do not worry about posterity because I do not expect to be around to greet it… save in passing, as it were. I am an honest thief and would not misrepresent my intentions to anyone, for anything. That would make me no more than a common swindler.”

“Do you mean to say that if you could set down how you would be remembered throughout all of history, you wouldn’t do so?”

“Of course I would, but I can’t, so it’s no use worrying about it. Although, since the subject is up…”

“Yes?”

“It would be very kind if some considerate scribe were to write for me a lady-friend.”

It was with him through each humiliating defeat on the pitcher’s mound. It was with him for every lost kite and every missed kick. It was with him every holiday when he suffered through the loneliness of being the only one in his class to receive no seasonal cheer: no valentines, no Christmas cards, nothing but a sack full of rocks on Halloween. It was with him when his dog shunned him for the entertainment of its own inner life, barely noticing him at all until it was time for supper. It was with him when he paid his meager allowance to a neighborhood bully for advice that was invariably insulting.

It was there every time the little red-headed girl saw him make a fool of himself, every time she didn’t see him at all.

It was there, eating it all up… drinking down every last drop of depression and despair that suburban life could inflict upon an unfortunate child outcast.

“Good grief!” the child said.

Unseen, the imp nodded.

It was very good grief, indeed.