William Burroughs and Lewis Carroll on a train, playing jazz -- white rabbit pops out of the bell of the tenor sax and shoots a glass of whiskey off Alice's head. Alice, having forethought, as well as skittish reflexes after all those size-altering drugs, bends her knees slightly, as if to curtsey to the Queen in that deck of playing cards with girls on the back (Tom Waits is dealing Crazy Eights) and the bullet slams right through the whiskey glass, sending shards of pale brown booze, Wild Turkey feathers all over the empty seats at the back of the car. Alice is wearing a pale blue dress and long white gloves; she shakes the shrapnel from her hair and does three chin-ups on the rail of the overhead luggage rack. A little boy is up there sleeping, a nine-year-old Hindu boy to be precise. She could turn him into a rabbit hole but not wanting to leave him here for the plundering, she covers him instead with a beach towel (she knows where it is), long white towel with a map of the United States in pastel colors -- how many colors? Four, five? The cartographer has been drinking; Macedonia is clearly labeled but the southwest all smudges together in one long block of salmon pink marked "Indian Country." Alice tucks the boy in, takes off his glasses and eats them in small careful bites, doesn't change size but feels windows opening in various parts of her body. She looks at Burroughs, who's holding the gun now; she looks at the White Rabbit who still has one large hind foot stuck in the bell of the saxophone; Lewis Carroll is still blowing a sad note between sips of laudanum (sips?). Using the new glass eye in her left collarbone to watch for an opening, she knocks the gun out of Bill's hand, it goes off on impact -- sorry Hindu boy! -- but no -- the bullet was hurtling upward toward the luggage rack but behold! it gets caught halfway through the Queen of Hearts that Tom Waits (for no man) is holding in his perfect straight flush, Royal flush ace-high now bleeding a cold two-dimensional trickle out of the central Queen. The girl on the back is fortunately unscathed; the card was upside-down and the bullet passed right between her legs.

At this point Marilyn Monroe should descend from the sky on glittering tinfoil angel wings -- her white dress billowing around her, breaking her fall. Skydivers rain down all around, much worse than cats and dogs. Alice opens the emergency door and grabs the closest corpse, helps herself to the unopened chute in case of future rabbit holes; straps another on the sleeping nine-year-old; grabs White Rabbit by the ears to shove him back into the saxophone. Tom by now has put the magic bullet in his left breast pocket, recalling Woody Allen’s tales of falling Bibles, and he's stanched the Red Queen's bleeding with a small square of duct tape. Blood on the tray table proves upon closer inspection to be puddled red ink; it makes corrections wherever it lands, turning song lyrics grammatical (much to everyone's horror). Thinking he's thinking fast, the Reverend Dodgson grabs the beach towel, uses it to blot up the red ink. It blots not wisely but too well: rather than correct the eclectic cartography, the ink sinks in with new formations, Rorschach islands spring up out of Lake Superior and blotchy red mountain ranges appear across Ohio and Pennsylvania. Train tracks split, the train goes into a dark red tunnel on the side of a red mountain, cliffs ten thousand feet high and running at the edges. It's dark in the tunnel, dark red, and all that can be heard is the flat and creepy laughter of the Queen. Tom and Bill are shaking the sax upside-down trying to get the damn rabbit back out, clang and bong of the horn being banged against unbreakable Plexiglas windows. Instead of White Rabbit, an eerie glow; the train is illuminated now just enough to see the long and slimy tentacles emerging from the horn: green and slick as seaweed with a slow searching undulation like a blind octopus groping for a meal. The air in the train smells of wet sand, salt, and whiskey. Giving up on Rabbit, Bill lunges at the Queen and grabs her in a savage grip that bends her corners. He reaches right into the krakeny mass, thrusts the screaming card into the maw of the tentacled beast, or where its maw would be if it had one. His hand comes up empty, bloody, slick with slime; Bill pushes his fingers into his mouth and sucks them more or less clean. Wipes the saliva off on the towel, causing earthquakes in the northwest and a new spit of land off Seattle.

"We are human tapeworms climbing up the luminous red asshole of the world," old Bill Burroughs intones. Lewis Carroll (the right Reverend Mr. Dodgson) looks uneasy. He’s not good with adults in general and now he does not trust the saxophone.

"'Twas magenta and the slithy limbs / Came improtruding from the sax," he says nervously.

"It's okay, Reverend, we're still on the map," says Tom, holding up the towel. Alice inches slowly toward the Rabbit's gun, which lies bathed in reddish light on the floor of the train car. Just then the nine-year-old Hindu boy, awake and unperturbed, pees over the side of the luggage rack. His clear yellow stream hits the red-stained towel and disappears into the cloth, no splatters. The train gives a sickened lurch and there is no tunnel anymore, they are drilling their way right through the mountain, now made of amber with strange many-legged creatures petrified therein. Alice plucks the gun off the floor (which reflects a sickish sepia light) and tucks it in her apron pocket. She sits down and looks out the window at the giant Cambrian millipedes in the amber wall.

"There are no other train cars anymore," she says.

"All jaundiced were the centipedes / and frightly, to the max."

"This reminds me," Tom says, "of the time I jumped a boxcar in Butler, Pennsylvania and woke up on the inside of a mountain. Tunnel was six miles long and no air to speak of. I was sleeping off a four-day bender with a Pittsburgh showgirl--"

"How old was the showgirl?" asks the Reverend, forgetting to be scared. While they talk, the sax lies twitching on the floor, and occasional bits of white fur seem to peek out.

"Oh, she must've been seventeen or eighteen. Kinda out of your league, I suppose."

"hm, yes" mutters the Reverend.

Keeping her eyes on the flopping saxophone (which now seems to be extending insectoidal feelers), Alice reaches in her apron pocket and holds the gun. It is warm and pulsing, and as she strokes it, it begins to vibrate. She moves the gun to the center pocket where it can pulse and vibrate more usefully. Bill is standing up on the seat now, caressing the naked Hindu boy while reciting--

"He took his vorpal cock in hand / Long thrusts of sticky sex he sought / Then rested he by the Tumtum tree / And sucked the slime from the tot."

Alice debates whether to shoot him. He has already shot himself -- a spent hypodermic hangs limply from the loose skin of his aged arm. She watches him stroke the boy's hairless testicles as the veins in his arm turn black and green. Then the color spreads to his whole body; his hand grows sticky and greenish as it masturbates the boy; she looks around to ascertain that the light is still amber and red, not green; the gun continues to vibrate and hum at her clit (in fact, it’s started humming Coltrane tunes), and Burroughs extends his pinky finger (now greeny and tentacular) up his own left nostril. It emerges quite slick with slime and, thus lubricated, is extended into the anus of the boy. Lewis Carroll, who has by this time been dragged off to the front of the train car by his chitinous crawling saxophone, begins to scream.

Alice empties the gun of bullets and then lifts her skirt to let it climb in her white cotton panties. The gun, quite flexible and throbbing rapidly, gives off a tiny metallic sigh and begins to fuck her vigorously. Alice and the gun rock on the floor in pleasure. There is still spilled whiskey puddled under the seats. Alice reaches for the beach towel, catches it by one corner and pulls it toward her. She uses it to wipe up the puddles. The train car is pitch dark. The screaming stops. Alice continues to rock against the vibrating gun, its muzzle perfectly filling her cunt, as she gropes through the darkness to find Tom, waiting. She unzips his pants and begins to suck his cock. She’s remembering her last boyfriend's summation of her personality ("smokes during sex") as the train makes a final shuddering spasm and twists through continua to steam out of the bell of a giant saxophone of golden light.

(c) Dorothy J. Hickson