Through the Looking-Glass

Above the fireplace in her own drawing room, the mirror goes soft as gauze, and Alice steps through into a house running in reverse: the clock on the mantel wears a grin, the books hold their words backward, legible only when lifted to the glass, so that the first poem she reads there, 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves, reaches her already turned inside out. Lewis Carroll built the whole of Looking-Glass Land on a chessboard, and Alice moves through it as a pawn, square by square, toward the far edge where a crown is waiting for anyone patient enough to cross. On the way: a Red Queen who explains that here you must run as fast as you can to stay in place, a Walrus who weeps real tears while he eats his friends, a Knight who topples off his horse in both directions. Underneath the game sits one question the book never quite closes: whether Alice is dreaming the Red King, or he is dreaming her, and what happens to either of them the instant he wakes.