Sick Boy[s] Paddle Club↓

The sudden fever made it impossible for the Cheshire Cat to hold her magic in shape. Her body faded away, little by little, leaving only that enormous head.

Yes, indeed, back when she was toying with the Queen of Hearts, she had never made her body invisible. She had simply withdrawn the torso her magic had conjured.

She, the Cheshire Cat, had only ever been a head. From the very beginning.

The fever’s spinning vertigo dragged her slowly toward sleep. Just before her eyes closed, she was still congratulating herself: Thank goodness, no more torso on me; otherwise this fever would be twice as miserable.

Perhaps the day’s thoughts had followed her into the night.

In the dream, the Cheshire Cat drifted, weightless, until she arrived at the foot of a mountain. This sensation reminded her, suddenly, of a little girl she’d once met. A little girl named “Alice.”

The little girl who was very good at dreaming.

“O my head! Is that you?” A voice suddenly emitted from somewhere.

The Cheshire Cat steered herself with the voice, with the grin, floating toward a heap of broken stones. She pressed her head against the rocks and peered in.

“O my head! You’ve come at last.”

“And who are you?” The Cheshire Cat asked, confused.

“O my head! I’m your torso!”

The Cheshire Cat folded away her grin. She brought her eyes close to a gap between the stones, and saw a headless body.

The torso looked powerfully built, yet strangely made: an eye opened on each side of its chest, left and right; a great mouth had grown at its waist, where a navel should have been.

“You’re really my torso? Ha… Then how did you turn out this odd?” She looked at the torso, up and down.

“O my head! Have you forgotten everything?”

Tsk. The distant past… Dizziness from the fever still coiled inside the Cheshire Cat’s mind, and she truly could not be bothered to think.

“O my head! We were once called Xingtian. Don’t you remember?”

Xingtian, was it? She thought.

The Cheshire Cat finally gathered up a few scraps of memory. Yes… there had been such a chapter.

She had carried shields and axes in those days, and had challenged the Yellow Emperor alone on Mount Changyang. In the end she was outplayed by a single move, and the head was cut off her shoulders.

Her torso refused to surrender. It fought on. But she had grown weary of endless war, and slipped away into a rabbit hole on the mountainside.

She probably had always been like this. Mild. Soft. Wanting nothing more than a bit of tranquility.

Honestly, how had her torso turned out the way it did?

“Look at the state of you. And you’ve even become… a male?” She queried.

“O my head! This is what we always were. You truly have forgotten everything!”

“You talk too much. And could you please drop that goddamned prefix?” She finally said.

“Do you remember where we lived, before we swore ourselves to the Flame Emperor?”

Mm. It was coming back now.

That desert, yellow sand filling the sky.

Her name, once, had been Sekhmet. Cat-headed and human-bodied, she was no mere mortal. She was the goddess of war and vengeance. Only later, too fond of wine, had she slowly softened into Bastet.

Yet she only cared for hot tea these days.

“So. I am the gentle one, the feminine one.” She said, “And you, being the masculine, must crave war and brutality?”

“Precisely so.”

Cheshire Cat was suddenly done with this dream. She wanted to wake up.

“We were one body once. Peace and war, gentleness and fury, feminine and masculine. It was an outside force that tore us in two,” the torso said, “O my head, come back to me…”

”Shut up! Don’t you know what the household I live in, the Duchess’s, has been wanting to do to me all this time?”

“What?”

“Neuter me! Because they’ve always assumed I’m a tomcat!” Cheshire Cat yelled.

“But as my other half, my opposite, you ought to be on the feminine side… You who are so docile, so soft… You…”

“If I want to be a tomcat, I’ll be a tomcat!” the Cheshire Cat interrupted the torso, “If I want to be a she-cat, I’ll be a she-cat!” With that, the Cheshire Cat rammed her head straight into the stones.

“Phew… That damned fever and that goddamned dream.” Cheshire Cat’s head still swam a little, but they had no interest in sleeping anymore. “Awake at last, aren’t we…”

Better to go have a cup of tea with the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. They thought.