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"The head must’ve snapped off in the process..."

Decapitated Alice
by Lydia Ship

Ora’s figurine of Alice from Alice in Wonderland has been decapitated.  Now Alice’s head rolls across Ora’s fabric swatches.  Ora brushes the head aside, gathers her swatches, and drives an hour to a double-warehouse with twenty-foot ceilings.  The warehouse is filled with giant roll upon roll of fabric, hundreds of dollars a yard.  Ora flips her color swatches to and fro in front of the stacked four-yard spools of fabric while small Spanish men ask her in broken English if she wants help.  This is the only time she has spoken directly to any man in a year; she says, “No.”  Flitting between the layers and towers of opulent fabric, immaculate women step as if on stilts, flipping color swatches, standing back, glasses perched.  Here, Interior Designers gather, waif-thin, cloaked in swathing clothes, and bejeweled, like quivering photographs of butterflies.  Ora does not make a fabric selection today.  She becomes fabric-blind after looking for an hour.  Ora’s deadline for choosing the fabric is only a suggestion—she has been paid to take as long as she needs.  She needs, on average, sixty hours a week of sketching and shopping and tossing and turning in her enormous empty bed just to choose a client’s window treatment, treatment often for women also too busy to speak to men, even their husbands.  But perfection comes at a price, and Ora is the best in the city, and so are her clients, depending on your definition.  Now, all Ora can think of is blue, the blue gingham and red-striped socks Alice the figurine wears, or at least, the body half of Alice.

When Ora arrives home, Alice’s head tells her, “There are too many stripes.”

Ora agrees—the striped Cheshire cat, after all, sits at Alice’s feet in the figurine.  Ora sinks into the couch.  The striped couch.  Stripes like jail clothes.  She rises and goes about measuring to reupholster the couch, and she hears Alice prattle and patter.

Alice’s head is thumb-sized and clay, with a clay curtain of beribboned yellow hair secured on top.  The head bounces into the sewing room and onto the sewing table.  Ora’s college roommate made the figurine as a birthday gift, before Ora switched her major from English to Interior Design.  The figurine was tacky though meticulously detailed, and because of the careful striping along the cat and Alice’s socks, because of the pin tucks in Alice’s skirt, the small locket around her neck and the pocket detailing, because of the ribbon in Alice’s hair, Ora kept the figurine, but only a week earlier rediscovered it in a shoebox and stuffed it carelessly back into the closet.  The head must’ve snapped off in the process, and then it got out of the closet and began to talk:

Your home will rise up to meet you; your home is your sanctuary; your home and the way it looks is the most important accomplishment you will ever accomplish.  Your home is why you were born.

Ora wonders if this has something to do with men, this perfect-home business.  Really, she doesn’t know what interior design has to do with anything anymore.  “Does this have to do with men?”

Alice thinks this is so very funny.  She laughs, mocking Ora.  The figurine has come to life just to mock her.  Ora lives alone and loves her fabric and loves alone.  Ora is always preparing herself, but for what?  What is this obsession with how things look?  And when did decorating become more important than intimacy?  Alice’s head rolls out of the living room and Ora follows it.  Alice loses her blue hair ribbon while she tumbles and Ora picks it up.  The head rolls next to Alice’s figurine body and props itself against the Cheshire cat, a fat daddy cat.  Alice says to him, “Look, I’m your height now.  Oh, my, where’s my ribbon?”  The fat cat winks.  “I like you without your ribbon,” he says.

Instead of giving the ribbon back to Alice, Ora tosses it in the trash.

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© Lydia Ship 2010

Stories by Lydia Ship have appeared or are forthcoming in Night Train, Hobart, The 2^nd Hand, The Battered Suitcase, The Pedestal, A Capella Zoo, The Armchair Aesthete, Neon, and The Dead Mule, among others; last spring, one of her stories received a Pushcart nomination.  She is a Contributing Editor at The Chattahoochee Review.  Find links to more of her stories in online journals at http://lydiaship.blogspot.com.