Alice's Misadventures Underground by Brad Craddock

Author:Brad Craddock [Craddock, Brad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781468909838
Publisher: Booktango
Published: 2012-07-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight: Pork and Porcini

It has been said by someone or another that if you want to teach a child responsibility it should have a child of its own. There is something sobering about suddenly having to leave one’s playthings, one’s plastic dolls and rubber balls; pea guns left on the top of dresser drawers, a bubble wand forever soaking in a half empty bottle of sodium stearate solution.

Alice felt feminine oppression press squarely down upon her. She grew cranky and refused to feed the little baby, even though it screamed and caterwauled like a sow being strung up by its hind legs in an abattoir.

She retreated to the farthest back room, the nursery, and pressed her hands over her ears as the child’s crying continued in the kitchen. The noise was a siren, a constant sound without interruption. It crescendoed and decrescendoed, but did not stop. Soon it was only background noise, like the sound of vomiting amidst a Christmas party.

Alice plopped next to the bed and began to stare at the wallpaper, yellowed with age and torn off in spots. She traced the pattern up and around, twisting and turning, with her eyes and an absent finger. There was a recurrent spot where the pattern lolled like the baby’s neck and there, traceable by delicate touch only, two bulbous eyes seemed to stare out.

Alice began to peel the wallpaper until the sticky stuff lay crumpled all around her squatting figure. The pattern enjoyed the change. The shadows along the wall grew long as day advanced and still the crying continued.

Her head ached.

Her teeth hurt.

She resisted the urge to jump out the window. Instead, Alice buried herself in the waddling peelings of wallpaper. She decided to wait, to astonish the Duchess when she returned. But this proved too difficult for the poor girl. She was on her hands and knees before she knew exactly what made her move across the floor.

She crept to the door.

She lifted the latch.

She crouched, creeping across the rooms to the kitchen.

Quietly, quietly.

The baby was asleep, grunting.

I must do this quietly or else they will suspect, Alice thought.

She wrapped the fat bundle in long clothes made from a convenient bed sheet and only dropped it twice as she carried the infant over the threshold, down the tenement stairs, past the subway entrance, beyond the city limits. She crept and crawled and, still, the baby slept.

Ah, the suburban air was comforting to her. More fragrant, fresher, invariably more crisp and clean than the air in the city. Even the lawns were greener, softer, fuller. She decided to rest among the trimmed elm trees in a local parkway. As Alice stopped to put down the heavy bundle of baby flesh, and wonder what exactly she was going to do, the baby woke, and, again, began to cry.

Instinctively, Alice tried to smoosh its face in.

The baby wet itself.

“Dear, dear me,” Alice said. “Now I suppose you’ll want a change.”

And the baby had changed. Its nose was a little too turned-up, its face pink with embarrassment.

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