Mad Hatters and March Hares by Ellen Datlow

Author:Ellen Datlow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

SENTENCE LIKE A SATURDAY

Seanan McGuire

Doors

Doors swing

Doors swing both ways.

* * *

Doors swing both ways, yes, that’s physics, that’s logic, nasty creeping crawling clinging logic that gets into all the cracks and crevices of a concept like sand inside a swimming suit. If something doesn’t swing both ways, it’s not a door. It’s a hatch, it’s a gate, it’s a barrier, it’s an accident of space and time and cruel causality. It’s not a door. Doors. Swing. Both. Ways.

Doors can look like something that’s not a door, because doors are tricky. Doors are traps masquerading as opportunities. So a little girl tumbles down a rabbit hole or stumbles through a mirror and ah! That’s the door, that’s the trap snapping shut, jaws of the Jabberwock claiming its prey. That’s the story starting. Stories are doors, you see. Stories swing both ways. Can’t trust stories. Can’t trust doors. Can’t trust anything, not once logic gets involved.

So snap! go the jaws, and slam! go the doors, and a little girl falls down a hole, and something else falls up, because doors swing both ways, and if something has gone in, something else must come out. There are rules to these things. Wicked, awful rules.

The rules say “cats do not speak.”

The rules say “if a thing can think for itself, why, it must be a person, and to be a person, a thing must look like so, and stand like so, and tie ribbons in its hair like so,” and suddenly the something that came out of the hole is a little girl, because the rules say it must be, and the rules are not to be denied, however much they should be. However much they burn to be.

Doors swing both ways.

The little girl who should not have been a little girl sat in the dust in front of the burrow, trying to sort through what had just happened. It was all very perplexing, and she did not care for it, no, not at all. Where was her fur? Where were her claws? It occurred to her that they might have gone off on an adventure together, seeking her whiskers and tail, which were equally missing, and equally missed.

“No,” she said petulantly, and clapped her hands over her mouth, which was entirely the wrong shape, and entirely lacking in proper teeth, or a proper tongue—or, it seemed, a proper yowl. She was accustomed to speaking as the humans did. All things in Wonderland could speak as the humans did, when they so chose. But she was also accustomed to having a strong meow at her disposal, and it seemed to have absented itself along with the rest of her.

“This will not do,” she said, and stood, wobbling on unfamiliar legs, feet pinched by unfamiliar shoes. The sunlight shone through the leaves above her, casting dappled shadows on her skin, where the stripes should have been. She attempted to brush it away, and it refused to go, behaving more like light than like syrup or molasses or any of the other things that afternoon sunlight should have taken after.

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