• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 842 0

armoire, it was so deep and dark in there that I couldn’t see a thing. So I climbed inside. And the door closed so fast behind me. And I kept walking, until somehow the sun was shining again and I was standing in a field of the greenest grass and the prettiest red flowers you ever saw. And right there in front of me was a Leopard, as big as life.” The Marquess’s eyes filled with tears. “I Stumbled, September, into Fairyland. I didn’t know what I’d done, only that it was so beautiful, and the wind was so sweet, and there were no tomatoes anywhere. I certainly didn’t know I had a clock. I had such adventures, oh, so many! I grew up a bit, and was so glad to grow up a bit, and not be small and grey any longer. I learned such things--I met a young sorcerer with funny old wolf-ears, and he let me read all of his books. Can you imagine? A farmer’s daughter, being allowed to sit and read all day with no one to bother her? I though I would die with the pleasure of it. And every day the sorcerer would ask my name, but I was ashamed to tell him. Maud is so ugly and plain, and everyone here was named something marvelous. But, one day, we were working the garden. The sorcerer was showing me how to harvest a particular root to make a kind of candy that might, if you boiled it just right, turn your hair all manner of colors.” The Marquess looked up at September, tears streaking her face. She spread out her hands, trembling. “I took his hand in mine, and I said: you can call me Mallow.”

September’s mouth dropped open.

“The days went by like dreams, September. Before I knew it I had a sword and I’d faced down King Goldmouth and his army of clouds, and I was Queen. I ruled long and well and wisely. Anyone will tell you. I married my sorcerer. We were happy. Fairyland prospered, and I could hardly remember what a tomato was anymore. My Leopard played at my side. I discovered, by and by, that I was with child. I had not told my sorcerer yet. I was enjoying my secret, lying in the broad lawn outside my palace and drifting off into sleep, my head propped up on my Leopard’s flank.

I think, well, when I remember it now I think I can remember the tick. The last tick of my clock. With one awful ticking I was swept out of Fairyland as though I had never been there. I woke up in my father’s house, curled up inside the armoire, as though no time at all had passed. No Leopard. No sorcerer. No child. I was eleven again, and hungry, and my father was just getting home from his day’s work. He bellowed up to me, his voice thick with liquor. But oh, how I remembered it all! I remembered it fiercely, my whole life in Fairyland, taken away in an instant! Because a clock ran out! September, surely you can feel in your bones the unfairness of it! The loss! I screamed in the armoire. I kicked the wooden walls in, trying to get back. I cried as though I was dying. My father found me and gave me a good thrashing for sneaking around where I oughtn’t. I tasted blood in my mouth.”

The Marquess sank to her knees. Iago pressed his silky black head against her cheek.

“How…how did you get back?” September said softly.

“I clawed my way back, September. I would have broken the world open to crawl back in. I searched every scrap of furniture in that attic for another way. But the armoire was just an armoire, and the closet just a closet, and the jewelry box just a jewelry box. I read newspapers ravenously, looking for missing children, begging my father to take me to the places where they’d vanished. He refused. He got a new wife, and she sent me away to school, to be rid of me. I didn’t care--I was glad to be rid of them! My new school was old and creaky, with dusty corners and drafty halls. Just the sort of place that might conceal a door to Fairyland, in a story. And one morning, just walking to geometry class, I took one step on those dirty cobblestones and took the next one in a broad golden field full of glowerwheat. It was a hard passage--blood shot out of my nose and I think I probably fainted. We aren’t meant to come that way, so harshly. But it was the only