There and Back Again

Word count: Approx. 500
Notes/Warnings: None.

He wasn’t supposed to have seen it.

The Underkitchens were always busy, always hot, never sleeping.

The boy, himself, slept only fitfully. He slept near Gwendolyn, in a pile of cast-off, no-color rags.

Gwendolyn was the oldest of the Great Ovens. Only rarely did she flare to life.

Unlike the boy, Gwendolyn—once Queen of the Underkitchens—only worked on special holidays, or Holy Days.

It was on one such holiday—also a Holy Day—that the boy saw what he wasn’t supposed to have seen.

Shoved into the dumbwaiter by an enemy he’d never asked for, he traveled jerkingly and judderingly up and up. . . .

Far, now, from the only home he’d ever known—far from the people he’d call family, if he’d known the word: Cook, Albert, Jenny, and Queen Gwendolyn—the boy eventually, when next the dumbwaiter door was opened, tumbled out into freezing, dry air quite unlike that of the sweltering Underkitchens.

All around and underneath him was cool green—as strange a carpet as the boy had ever heard tell. Above him, crowning the strange, enormous room in which he found himself, arched a great, pale-blue ceiling as far as his watering, squinting eyes could see.

And people! There were people, wearing yards of cloth fashioned into clothes of a sort the boy had never before seen. And in colors the boy could not name. They stood, seemingly a thousand feet tall, staring down at him, at least a million of them, their faces painted almost as brightly as their strange clothing.

Instinct saw the boy scrambling backward toward the dumbwaiter, his passport back to his own world, where ceilings were a dingy off-white, clothes were variations of the same, or of faded dun, ochre, or yellow. These were the colors his eyes understood and for which they sought in vain.

Panting and screaming the breathless chuffs of the congenitally mute, he closed his eyes and huddled back against what felt like cool stone, shaking, and frightened beyond thought.

Voices! Hands! Laughter!

“—one of the brats from the Underkitchens, my lady—”

“—so frightened! Look at its eyes, squeezed tight-shut—”

“—clawing at itself . . . oh, dear—”

“—oh, Charles, put it back in the dumbwaiter and send it back down before its poor heart seizes!”

“—yes, my lady—”

Voices! Hands! Laughter!

Slam!

Down and down the boy went, still shaking.

Shivering

Weeping.

He shouldn’t have seen it, that blue ceiling.

But he had.

Though he’d had his eyes shut most of the time, he would remember that blue, forever-ceiling till his dying day.

For it had hurt his heart.

Sooner, rather than later, he was tumbling back into the Underkitchens once more, into Jenny’s waiting arms. But, still sobbing, he escaped her, and darted away into the controlled chaos of the only world he would ever know thereafter.

It was most of an afternoon before she could coax him out from behind Queen Gwendolyn.

END