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3.
"Of course you do, I already told you."
Alice continued on, paying him no mind, "I knew someone who met you once, when I was littler, though, of course when I last saw him I was much much bigger."
"Which was it, bigger or littler?"
"First I was smaller then big, then small again," said Alice, trying to find the words.
"It is confounding not knowing which, isn't it," said Time.
2.
He wasn't particularly ugly, nor particularly fair. He wasn't particularly anything, except peculiar. He seemed very old, with wrinkles splitting his brow into deep mountains and valleys, but then she looked a bit longer and there were no creases at all, just broad smooth planes. Alice shook her head and tried blinking her eyes furiously, but she couldn't make them agree from one second to the next. She compromised by closing them.
"Oh," he said, slowly, blinking his eyes.
Or at least, Alice was very sure he was blinking his eyes, because she knew that he blinked his eyes slowly when he spoke, an instinctual, constant motion, like a pendulum. The funny thing was, she hadn’t ever seen him do this, as her eyes were shut.
So Alice wasn’t sure how she knew it, though, to be honest, she wasn’t really considering it. It was just a fact, like lunch coming after breakfast and before tea.
Alice waited quite patiently, she thought, for him to expand on this. Perhaps it was because her eyes were shut tightly that the seconds seemed to drag on for ages until she thought she was about to burst with curiosity. "I don't mean to interrupt," she said, finally, toeing the carpet in the direction she supposed he still was, "but do you suppose you could tell me who you are?"
Again the time dragged on as Alice admired the white crinkles of white light that played behind her eyelids. Why, it was actually lovely. No wonder she spent so much of her life asleep if she saw this every time she shut her eyes, but still she did so want to open them, if only to see if the man had left. It had been so very long she supposed he must have. But when she cracked an eye open, there he was still.
"I said-" said Alice.
"Time."
"Well," said Alice, her voice trailing off as she did not want to explain that she couldn't exactly give him the time due to the broken clock. "I'm not particularly sure."
"Sure of what?" he asked, stepping closer to her.
"Time," she said, echoing back his word.
"I really am quite reliable," he said, peevishly.
"I'm sure you are," said Alice, watching his face sprout whiskers in reverse. This odd effect occurred when a full bristly, bushy beard appeared on his face, the longest edges brushing his belly, then just as suddenly began retracting.
"Oh!" Alice exclaimed interrupted herself with a sudden thought. "I know who you are."
4.
“Yes, awful,” said Alice, agreeing. For even though she knew who he was, and that this was most definitely a dream, things still seemed a bit too all at once. You see, Alice wasn’t seeing one thing at a time, which is the way she normally saw things. No, she was seeing the whole day all at once. From breakfast to the dinner she was quite sure had not yet happened, she could see it all.
Even though she had moved to window, she could still see herself knocking the clock off the mantel, and, oh, there the door was swinging open then closed, all in a loop. Why, she could see her sister starting to come in the room, and yet never actually coming inside, which was peculiar enough in and of itself, but to look at the door she had to peer through the shadow of herself toeing the capet.
“A dream,” she reminded herself. “This is a dream.”
The man laughed. “Is it?”
Alice was really quite sure based on the odd things happening all around her, but she had another way to check.
1.
It was not very like a dream, in that Alice was quite sure she was awake, and that, while accidentally breaking Grandfather's clock was not something she had ever done before, it was not precisely the sort of activity that made one fall asleep. It had fallen with such a clang, too, with bits and bobs and strings and such spilling outside and rolling round on the carpet.
"Oh, bother," Alice had said to herself as she walked to the window after watching it fall, wanting to pull back the curtains to let in more of the winter light. It was when she glanced out the window that she became quite certain that she must no longer be awake.
For rather than just the sun peering into the room, that jewel of the sky was surrounded by stars. And there, peeking around the edge of the window sill, why, that must be the moon. And while the sky definitely not grey, like it had been during her morning walk with her sister and Nurse, Alice did not have a better color to call it, for as it shifted as she looked at it, one second the deep indigo of midnight, while the next was the hazy glow of sunrise.
So you can see, Alice was very sure this was a dream, which is why when she turned around to see the man standing where he decidedly hadn't been before she went to the window, she did not do any of the things a young girl of almost eight ought to when she finds a stranger inside her sitting room. Instead, she just stared.
6.
"What a horrible story," he said, wincing.
"Quite terrible," said Alice, contritely. "I didn't mean to say it, at all. I mean to say the rhyme Nurse taught me to tell time."
"Well now that you have told me, I wish she hadn't taught to you. And I don't know how it pertains to me at all."
Alice shook her head, and slumped her little shoulders down, quite the picture of dejection. "It wasn't what I meant to say at all, though while I was saying it it seemed the only thing I could. It always happens to me on my adventures."
"Adventures?" asked the man, "I thought you said you were dreaming. Those aren't the same at all."
"They seem very much the same to me," said Alice. Her sister had Opinions about Alice's adventures and their status.
This was exhausting to be every bit of all of time at once. It was quite enough to drive a person mad, she supposed. Alice sighed as she looked at the specter of her sisters hovering half in and out of the door all at once.
What would her sister say when she made it in the room? Did she already know it? Or maybe it would never happen at all, and Alice was stuck in all these moments for all eternity. She contemplated her potential life here in this room with only a single book to read and nothing to eat or drink, either, and no way for it be brought to her, as she didn't suppose Nurse knew how to navigate through this pocket of times.
But then Alice started to smile, for there, slipping in through her sister's legs, why it was Dinah. At least if she was to be stuck here, she could pet.
"Why you are quite solid, indeed," exclaimed Alice, bending down and gathering Dinah up into her arms. This is why I was all bent over, she thought. Or rather, why I am. Alice supposed she could entertain herself for however long by figuring out the right tenses, for that would take ever such a long time.
This time it was the man who sighed. "Cats always ignore me, going this way and that with no care at all for me."
Alice knew it would not be polite to say that if she could she would rather ignore him, too.
"Well, you do move so fast, especially on Christmas, perhaps they just-," Alice paused, considering, "though of course you go so slow when it comes time for chapel-"
"I move just as I should."
Alice looked through herself, or rather the place she had been, or perhaps would be, to glare at him. "You aren't moving at any speed now at all."
He huffed, face crinkling up into a grimace. "Yes, I am."
But even as he disclaimed, things started becoming much more solid. And there! The door swung fully open with a creak that Alice had never thought she would find so delightful "See, you are going properly forward now," said Alice, her voice bright with giddy happiness.
5.
Alice put her hands together and began to recite:
Hickory dickery down at the dock
the mouse fell onto a croc,
And oh! Such a crocodile,
with glinting sharp smile
wide as the trunk of a gustaphon tree.
“Let me ride on your back,” said she.
“Then you must pay the toll,
along with the tax,” said his voice deep and droll.
“So please pay me now or get off of my back.”
The mouse crawled until she could see his plaque,
“I have no money with which to pay
But listen to my tale and hear what I have to say.”
"Oh," said the crocodile, then “Aha!”.
He shook his head and smashed together his jaw.
"That was a tasty tail."
7.
"Talking to yourself?"
"No, I'm talking to-" Alice turned to look over her shoulder, but the man was gone.
"Nobody," she said decidedly. "I was talking to myself."
"So, that makes you nobody at all,” said her sister, who thought she was quite the Wit. “Well, if you are Nobody, then what does that make me?”
Alice thought this was a silly question to ask, as the answer was so very clear. “Why, then you are Nobody’s sister.”
“Nobody’s sister!” she exclaimed, “Oh, what a bother to have no one to distract Nurse from her lessons or to share their dreams.”
“No, I don’t think you could have a brother, either, if you really were nobody’s sister.”
“No, bother,” she said, her eyebrows tilting in towards each other like peaks on the roof of the Queen of Hearts’ palace.
“Yes, no brother neither,” repeat Alice, worried now that her sister was cross. It was so disagreeable when she was. Perhaps it was best to move on, for oh, she had such stories to tell, and taking too much time before the telling made them slip around her head in awful disconcerting whorls of forgetfulness.
But her sister did not chide her. She only sighed, "Oh, Alice," as he knelt down and began gathering together the bits of the smashed clock. "You broke it."
Alice looked down at her sister, who looked just the right age, if not perhaps a trifle younger and said, "I think I fixed it, too."