A-Little-Tea-Rat

It took a second or two, but Haddler’s smile reemerged the rest of the way after a brief look of confusion. “Oh, Lise, that is stupid, isn’t it?” “Then prove to me you are where you think you are.” “You mean you think I’m dreaming this whole thing up,” Haddler mocked. “Sort of, but which dreamt it?” said Lise. “Not you.” Now where had he heard or read that before? He knew he had heard something like it somewhere in spoken words. Was it a twinkling? It was a blinking anyway. Like the blink of an eye it vanished as quickly as it had appeared. He looked around him just to see if he could discover a twinkling now, but it moved faster than a twinkling. In Haddler’s distraction, Lise grabbed his hand which had loosened from the bar, and she shoved it into the heart. Plinkle, came the most twinkling of sounds. Haddler yanked his hand away. He rubbed it on his coat as he glared at Lise. Then he glared at his hand. He felt the same. It looked the same. He wiggled his fingers. Then he

Before Lise went bouncing about like a bouncy ball, Haddler grabbed her by the foot and floated her to a root sticking out of the wall. Where these roots came from was only the root of the city and no real tree that anyone knew of for sure. Instantly she grabbed it and threw Haddler a very deadly-looking glare. Her teeth clenched enough to be a fist for a punch— splashing the drink into everything around it. All Haddler could do in response was let go of the root he was holding onto. Crossing his arms he let himself drift into the weightless space. He crossed his legs too as though seated somewhere normally on the ground. Everything stayed on, of course. The hat had no reason for leaving, and everything else was too attached already to his person. Lise shook her head with a downright growl as she pushed off as though from the wall in a swimming pool towards the heart. Instantly she went about like a

Long straight pale trees came in copses and small woodland areas. Plots and plains in between were spread out like square flowerboxes. The plots seemed to have words growing out of them more than flowers and shrubs however organic they looked. The plains on the other hand were truly plain and almost desolate with hardly so much as the thinnest weakest threads of grasses hissing. The sky was such a vintage blue and the steam rose so nostalgically and the sunlight filtered so goldenly that Lise found herself only for a second wondering how old she was and if she was not dreaming this whole thing far more than when she had been in the city. However, she did still feel the hum of it all. The ticking and the tocking— the metronome keeping the slightest breath or wind in time. She could feel almost more than she could see that every patch of land whether with trees, grass, flowers, and even brooks and ponds with loud blackbirds in chorus seemed to be moving like miniature plates on the

Lise grew more receded as they reseated themselves and had more tea and sandwiches. Was it the condiments or was it that her mind really wasn’t truly human, after all? It was the indecision which bothered Haddler most about her all around. Perhaps she was still filled with gears somehow, but Haddler felt more strongly it was something else. Was she an Alice or was she a lease? And what that even meant he had not sense to spend. Nevertheless he remained as cordial and helpful as possible in such a way that one would hardly guess at any sort of conflict. No one could say that Matthias Haddler was a bad host. At some point though, either while pouring tea or fetching cakes, he suddenly was offering something to an empty chair. “Lise?” He looked around even checking under the table again. If he had not heard the door shut, however quietly, he might have thought he had been visited by a ghost. He shuddered at the thought of that familiar tapping from Poe’s poetry, but it was more

The mail service was as reliable as clockwork. Of course, so was everything. Haddler had had the honor of fixing it in spots himself once when the official mechanic for the service was grievously occupied. It was a fascinatingly complex network that started at any of the city mailboxes as easily as turning on a faucet. Haddler had his own house modified not only to have his mail sent to his mailbox outside his door but to have it sent right into the kitchen to the center of the table and into a tidy little mail organizer into which all mail would fall. Its designated slot would be determined by size and weight with the heaviest in the middle and the lighter ones switching off on either side to the lightest. Packages were dropped next to the table on a designated welcome mat that read “Mat Welcomes”. It must be noted that none of this had anything to do with Haddler being particularly a neat freak or obsessively organized but merely to prove he could design it. Haddler was taking his

“I tell you,” Hakuto went on. “It’s just not possible that it can have been stolen! Who in all of Heartland could possibly steal it?” Pom was impassive to Hakuto’s consternation with anything but mild annoyance. “If a thing can exist,” she said simply, “it can be stolen, Mr. White, and if it was not a Heartland citizen then a thief from out of Heartland has stolen Lise. Unless it was a denizen. I have thought of the queen’s knave…” “Oh, despite what people say, doctor, I find more often than not that Sir Nevin is tardier than he is tart…y— Oh! Whatever,” sighed Hakuto impatiently and shook his head. “Couldn’t it have simply wandered off or been misplaced?” Wringing his paws, he resisted the urge to look at his watch again. Instead he was ushered by the beefy hand of Pom inside before he could so much as think to protest. “Wandered off?” laughed Pom humorlessly. “You don’t seriously believe that a clockwork person can just wander off without anyone knowing?” Hakuto paused and

There was a dark void. No sight or sound could distract from all that went on to watch the clockwork world save dim twinkling lights of pale yellow, green or blue looking lonely in against the inky blackness. There was no steam or ticking or tocking here in this cold dry emptiness, but the void was not as empty as it appeared in the space between worlds in the universal cosmos. Earthen gods spoke with power and foresight as they sifted over the world beneath them to speak one to another in this celestial parlor. The only drink to be had was that found in the Milky Way, the only seats the Pillars of Creation. Almost invisible, Jupiter, the most magnificent of all the gods was first to appear. His Herculean outline like the curve of a horizon just before the light dawn, he stirred his milk into foam. The steely glint around his eyes were halos of sterile skylight blue so that his real hallowed eyes could not be looked into by the unworthy. But he was not the first to speak. In the

Maybe it was the noxious and sight-blurring steam that caused Matthias to feel as though he was in the presence of an angel or at least a fairy. He almost bowed to the form, but he was too stiff to bend a knee without falling flat on his face. Though, falling on one’s face might be a more humbling form of homage than kneeling, Matthias Haddler was first and foremost a gentleman and could not bring himself to fall without first tripping. What he could say about the young lady was this. However blue her eyes were beyond the color of blue, however golden her hair was in perfect goldilocked-curls, no matter how smooth the petals of her daffodil dress with the violet stripes along the trim, and no matter how her feet were so hidden in the steam that she looked like she was levitating on some plane out of chronology and special legroom, she looked more real than anything to observe in this otherwise story-wise Observastory— including himself which was enough to ponder about. She looked

He had not quite finished his tea when he was sent for, and he felt just about as befuddled about it as a tea kettle being sent for at a beachfront ice cream stand. What made this notion even more absurd was the fact that a tea kettle might just as well be befuddled about being sent for tea, for it surely would be befuddled at being able to be befuddled at all. Either way, it must be said that Mr. Matthias Haddler was not a doctor or a professor however proficient he was with his hands. He was little more than a toymaker, really, though a highly sought after one in the sense that he could make just about anything if it had gears, windups, or any sort of clockwork. He could just as well gut the most masterful clock in the city and put it back together more perfectly than before better than a doctor could claim such a thing if a person could be taken apart and put back together in such a way. Haddler often fancied that if the mind had been made up of clockwork it would surely be far