Wonderland: Hatter/the Cat
The day began as any other, with the sun dropping its yellow yolk down below the buttons of hill-snubbed noses—snubbed-nosed hills?—and the Cat lazing in the lanky limbs of limpid lineage, spiraling into itself in egomania strained sane as sand in sap. The Cat in his ginger grimgiber, peach-perfect sack suit, straw hat askew on oiled curls, cut and counted the feathers of a silver slit-throated canary he'd carried back from the mines. Coal be damned. The accentor's blood smeared across the ugly scab of bark, but it did not touch the light summery cotton of the Cat's trousers. Idly, languidly, he lapped the splashes of lifesblood, blood that had flown, as any man or beast could1, blood that had eaten through the copper of fear, from his long, thin claws. He'd named the tiny creature Wren, though a wren she was not. The name bloomed in the meat of his mind, born of avicide and lustration, ministration of roughshod tongue to burred fur. It caught as the wax of 72 pennyweights, Al-Jazari and his wick, and the Cat did so love puzzles.
A crater on the moon, planisphaerium in glass, the Cat appeared among the rending roots of the tree as the milliner twirled in approximation of polar azimuthal equidistant projection. He did not always answer a summons—he was, after all, a cat, and such fickle creatures are they!—but the mercury stink of the man in the hat earned, deserved attention. The Cat brushed against the small man with deliberate psilanthropism and a stone smile that stretched wide over bubbling brook. Red smudged the along the Cat's lips, amid unseen whiskers—it skewed the gruesome grin grisly.
"You come calling in the slander of the sun," he purred, ears perked, curiosity strung like pearls. Long fingers curled around collar and the Cat dragged Hatter close, the man's dimpling spine gouging against the vulnerability of feline stomach. Jade eyes caught. "What is it?"
1 see Icaraus and his dirigible; see the brothers' globe aérostatique