"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.
"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true."
-Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark (1876)
It's his birthday today, and Jizabel wonders if his wish will come true this year.
After dressing—he's old enough to dress himself now, finally—he peeks down the stairs, listening for the familiar soothing, jovial laugh, waiting for the sharp tobacco smell. He inches a little forward, in case his timidity is preventing him from spotting his father, but his curiosity wins over his wish to surprise his father with a hug—one day, he'll surprise Father, and then how happy he'll be!—and he runs through the house, not as fast as he'd like, but he finds only his mother, sitting at a set table, biting her lips.
"There you are," she says to her teacup, a not unkind smile on her lips, and Jizabel pretends that she has looked at him.
He throws himself into a hug, which his mother gingerly returns with a frail pat to his back, and when he tries to smile at her, she averts her eyes to the table, pulling away even in her stillness.
"Hurry up now, dear."
He almost forgets her strangeness in the happy difference of today. Hannah serves him a piece of the birthday cake on the special china, the ones kept behind glass like something much too strange and fragile, and he's sorry to see it cut open now, imperfect again, but then he loses his momentary sadness when he tastes the cake: raspberry jam and rich, golden butter cake and the sweet cloud of clotted cream!
Then he bites into something hard—his birthday charm! What will be his fortune this year? Adventure? Love? Luck? Against all better manners and a sharp breath of disapproval from his mother, he pulls it from his mouth—
"The wishbone," his mother says, as though he does not know this already, as if he is so young that he needs his world interpreted. "Your dearest wish will come true this year." For some reason, the sadness in her voice wounds him.
What dear wish could make her so miserable? Wasn't he allowed to have wishes of his own?
He notices that a cake-dotted thimble has been tucked to the side of her plate, carefully excavated, resting on one of the painted flowers. (A thimble—unmarried, the life of a spinster. He's puzzled at this: how can this be if she is his mother? Aren't mothers married? Respectable, nice mothers like his, anyway?)
A small sadness tugs at him. He must think carefully about this dearest wish, make the best one he can because all the ones that follow will be less dear. The cake is much less joyous now, as he carefully measures all his wishes to find the best one.
With the last of the warming lemonade, he wanders the bounds of the outside world, much as he always does. He is twelve today, but he really only feels like eleven. Perhaps they got his birthday wrong, and that's why he doesn't feel like he's another year older until much, much later when the leaves burst into a starkly blazing red and then burn themselves out into thin husks on the ground.
He shows off his new book, his beautiful, calfskin-bound book, to the forest animals. "It's about—" He glances a few pages in. "A Bellman, and a Beaver, and—and…" He pauses, closing the book. "Well, I haven't read it all yet," he confides to the nesting robin. "But I will soon. They're all looking for a Snark. Have you ever seen a Snark?"
Something calls into the forest and calls an idea into his head. "Do you think I can find a Snark out here?" he asks. "There are all kinds of animals that haven't been found yet! Why I could—I could… And such fun it would be!"
With that, he selects a walking stick, like all the explorers in the pictures, and wanders the undergrowth in search of that call. He taps against rotting logs, lichen spreading across the tree rings; tramps past the circling light falling through the oak leaves and the mushrooms dozing in the dark; catches his shirt in the frenzy of new raspberry bush shoots and then stays a while helping himself to the remaining fruit; skips along the stream with a slowly blinking, unimpressed frog, before turning his attention to the minnows darting in time with the water.
Taking his rest, he returns to the book, flipping through the pages to see if there was indeed a picture of the beast in question. Nothing. And at the end, just blackness, unceasing blackness around a few jagged rocks. How strange. I guess they don't catch the Snark after all, Jizabel decides, and he is quietly grateful that the Snark got away after all. He doesn't like it when animals hurt.
His adventure concluded, he makes his way back, listening to the birds gossip about his presence in their high, fluttering voices. He calls back every once in a while too, to let them know that he understands them just fine. The trees thin with the encroaching promise of civilization, giving way to a meadow that, for some reason, slightly frightens him to be in. It's not the terror of the unbroken dark, but a quiet unease, as if something bad had happened in the meadow, something bad that the grasses and wavering tuffs of Queen Anne's Lace had never forgotten. It's being out in the open, unprotected, he decides with an air of feigned rationality. Anyone would feel that way, even the animals. He understands why they don't often leave the forest. He wouldn't want to either.
He feels unpleasantly small in the meadow, and so, he's glad to be near the house now. Just a few more minutes, and he can slip into his room before dinner. Then, a quivering nose nuzzles his hand, wet lips sorting through his fingers. The black eyes of a lamb stare back at him, and he gasps—a Snark! He's found a Snark! He throws his arms around its tight pale wool, and it nips at his own gently curling hair, and something moves inside him to have a creature treat him so kindly.
He feels as though part of his soul is bound up in this lamb, and this is only confirmed when it follows him back home. It's so good to be wanted, he decides. Tomorrow, his birthday will be over and he won't be special anymore, but Snark thinks he is, will think so even tomorrow. He will love this lamb for ever and ever until they both shall die (but they would never die) with all the exuberance of childhood, not realizing that some vows should not be made in haste.
He shows Snark to his mother, but she only shakes her head in bemusement and tells him to keep the animal outside with all the rest.
It's ok.
She doesn't understand him the way Snark does.
Jizabel curls under the covers of his blankets, watching the sunset spill orange across the wallpaper. Just out of curiosity, he tries to catch the light, to weigh it and store it in a jar for a rainy day, but it only lingers on the back of his hand, whispering that dear things can't be caught. Frowning, he settles back into the pillows, as the sun falls and the angles on his ceiling sharpen into darkness.
He thinks about turning the gaslights on to read—just one!—but the idea of disappointing his poor mother stills his hand. Well, he'll have to find out tomorrow what happens next to Bellman and his crew, and why they don't find the Snark in the end.
"Softly and suddenly vanish away," he yawns to himself.
He turns on his side, wishing he weren't old enough not to be tucked into bed anymore. He misses the soft smell of his mother's hand lotion, chamomile and ginger (and a little bit of arsenic to whiten back the years). It would be a yellow, he decides, playing one of the many games he's made for himself to pass the time. The bleached yellow of a fading daffodil, its thin, dying leaves peeling away from it.
He clutches the wishbone under his pillow, warming the raised metal. It's so small that it would have slipped through his fingers if he had been a little bigger, but he won't lose it, not yet, not for a while. Today was a good day, he decides. Soon his dearest wish would come true, and he's finally decided on it.
Soon Father would be home, to never, ever leave him again. And Father, well, he would love Snark just as much as Jizabel would.
Jizabel is certain of it.
Notes:
This just sort of came into my head. So, there was, from what I understand, a Victorian tradition of baking charms into a birthday cake as a way of foretellling the future. I haven't been able to find any good books on it though, so let me know if you have a recommendation.
Title is from Charlotte Bronte's "The House Was Still."
Thank you for reading. Comments are loved.