Unhinged (Splintered, #2)(24)
I ease back into hiding, wanting to smile so much it hurts. Seeing them flirt like kids in love breaks my heart into so many different pieces. They’ve earned it after all the years they missed together. I just don’t want this to be the last time I see them so happy.
When we sit down to eat, the pancakes are light, spongy, and dripping with syrup. They taste like home and comfort and security. I swallow it all down, drowning in the sweetness.
While my parents do the dishes, I escape to my bedroom and feed my pet eels some chopped boiled eggs. Aphrodite and Adonis perform a graceful dance, entwining their bodies, capturing the food as it floats down like they’re lovers catching snowflakes on their tongues.
The scene reminds me of the snow globe the clown held in my hallucination today, and just like that, I’m hit with a Wonderland memory; it crashes over me, so vivid I feel like I’m there again: my five-year-old self, glaring at my eight-year-old netherling companion and competitor, driven to near tears as he held a snow globe out of my reach.
It was the time Morpheus and I visited the Shop of Human Eccentricities. He always brought me to Wonderland in my dreams, but we didn’t often interact with other netherlings. Unless Morpheus let them, they couldn’t see through the veil of sleep standing between us. We could observe them, though, like watching fish swim in a tank.
But that day there was something Morpheus wanted me to learn, so he had temporarily dropped the veil.
“I’m busy,” Morpheus teased in his young, cheeky voice, shaking the snow globe in front of me again. “You want a toy of your own? Find a way up on your own.” His black wings brushed across my bare foot as he turned his back to explore the store.
“But you’re the one who can fly,” I grumbled, poking the end of my braid through the space where I’d recently lost one of my front teeth.
When he glanced over his skinny shoulder and rolled his inky-patched eyes, I knew his mind was made up. I looked at my red pajama top. The matching pants were mud stained from an earlier game of tag beneath some giant mushrooms. Morpheus had won that game without even dirtying his white satin shirt and black velvet pants. I was tired of him always winning.
I pouted and strolled around the shop. A woven canopy of branches and moldering leaves made up the ceiling; the floor and walls were decaying stone, and moss peeked through the cracks. It smelled damp and felt cold to my feet.
Solid wooden shelves stood back-to-back to form aisles. The shelves were lined with sparkling new plates, silverware, lamps, toothbrushes, combs, and thousands of other items from the human realm. Our ordinary artifacts were prized collectibles in Wonderland.
A top shelf in the back of the store caught my eye, too high for me to reach. A cheerful muslin rag doll slumped over the edge, eyes the color of cornflowers and a smile kissed with pink glitter. On the seven shelves stacked beneath her, other shiny new novelties sat: a silver Christmas ball; a magnifying glass; a stuffed yellow canary in a cage—so lifelike, I questioned if it were really dead; white crockery jars with happy, smiling ladybugs painted on the front; fancy perfume bottles; a doorknob; and candy keepers made of converted kerosene lamps whose lids were topped with vinyl doll heads. But none of those things intrigued me like the rag doll.
Morpheus had wandered off to another set of shelves, purposely ignoring me.
Hesitant, I padded to the front of the shop, where the clerk, Mr. Lamb, sat next to his cash register. He was an odd-looking creature who appeared to be pieced together from the same curiosities that lined his shelves: raised gray and white patches coated his humanoid face, as if his flesh had mildewed. His lips, eyebrows, whiskers, and hair were made of fungus, green and nappy like worn felt. His body—nothing more than a tattered dress form—had twenty sets of pencil-thin robotic arms and legs affixed to the empty shoulder sockets and torso’s edge with rusted nails and hinges.
“Mr. Lamb, I found something I’d like. Please reach it for me?” I pled in my most polite tone.
His flat, open-ended bottom teetered on the bar stool, and he peered over square glasses with eyes as sharp and shiny as wet rocks.
“No,” he snipped.
Knitting needles clacked between his brass fingers and toes as he wove butterfly wings into strands of glistening rainbow cloth. With the help of his abundant appendages, he kept adding more knitting needles and was producing bolts of the fabric at an alarming pace. The pile of butterfly wings that had touched the ceiling when I arrived now came to just above his head. I looked at them longingly, wistful for a set of wings, although I knew I would never use them because I didn’t like heights.
“My job”—his guttural voice scraped inside my ears like fingernails clawing across a coffin lid—“is to assure the customers don’t get bit. It is up to you to capture your own buys. And mind you don’t offend the shelves. They’re made of tulgey wood. Now step off. I’m busy sewing myself a new dress.”
I wondered what was so special about tulgey wood and what he meant about customers getting bit. But I had a bigger problem. The only way to get the toy would be to climb, but my tummy kicked anytime I went high.
I wove through the maze of aisles back to the rag doll. Plush and clean, she looked down on me. Her pretty face promised hours of fun make-believe in my sandbox at home. Something inside me thrummed to life, a subtle assurance that I could meet this challenge.
I cautiously balanced my bare feet on the first shelf, gripping the one above it with my fingers. I made my way up slowly, as if climbing a ladder. Two shelves, four, then six shelves high. The steady clacking of the clerk’s knitting needles gave my movements rhythm.