I woke but briefly with the dawn to a bleary sense of human noise and
activity.  Men were moving boxes and suitcases from behind and beside my
improvised loft bed, but they left my own sheltering boxes where they stood,
and I was grateful, for I could not have fled even had I opened my eyes in
the middle of a battlefield.  More asleep than awake, I witnessed a strange
phenomenon: a score of people walking up wide boards to enter open doors in
the side of a large, long machine, pointed at one end and squared on the
other, evidently the looming presence of the night prior, the purpose of
which yet mystified me.  When the last of the people had vanished into this
imposing device, the boards were removed and the doors closed, and the
people reappeared on a kind of railed walkway, waving and calling to others
remaining on the quay.  Issuing clouds from two great chimney-like fixtures
on its topmost section and hooting so violently as to nearly bring me fully
alert, the strange vessel moved out to sea and disappeared from sight.  It
was a boat, then, yet a boat of a size and aspect I had never before
encountered....my "Sailor King" had taken me now and again in rowboats or
sailboats, never anything like this.  As much as I longed to bid farewell to
France, my courage did not extend to entrusting myself to such a threatening
means of transportation.  I yawned and fell back into the arms of Morpheus.
 
Once more I awoke, this time to a new night, a warmer, brighter night, a
night illuminated by electric lights and filled with yet another and greater
commotion of human shouts and murmurs, combined with the clopping, naying,
jingling and crunching of horses and carriages, and accompanied by the
melancholy cries of late-flying seagulls.  In my utter exhaustion, I had
slept through the day.  To my consternation, a feather tickled my nose, a
rather large, stiff, quivering feather, seemingly disconnected from any sort
of fowl.  I stretched myself and peered about; I had made my bed at an
approximate height of five feet, and a cacophonous crowd of 200 or more
people stood between me and the edge of the quay.  The exasperating feather
was attached to a wide and ornate hat which was in turn attached to the
incessantly nodding head of a thin, shrill woman who shifted impatiently,
her head level with my face, causing my poor beleaguered nose to twitch
uncontrollably, with natural and inevitable result: I sneezed.  I trusted
that the small "Ah-vic!" sound I emitted would be lost in the general
hubbub, but the woman, evidently of a nervous disposition, immediately
turned about, stared me full in the face and shrieked "Rat!  Oh, a rat!",
galvanizing me at last into complete consciousness.  If there were a rat in
the vicinity, I would sup well!  I sprang and scrambled among the remaining
boxes, but there was nary a rodent within sight or smell.  Disappointed, I
returned quietly to my original vantage point; the distraught woman was
being calmed by a man.  Prey as always to undifferentiated and unrelenting
guilt, I felt sadly at fault for failing to capture the cause of her
distress....and perhaps even more at fault for missing a most delectable
evening meal!
 
It was only then I fully realized the destination of the gathered crowd: two
smallish boats, larger by far than sailboats or rowboats, it's true, but
nowhere near the size of the vessel whose departure I had witnessed that
morning.  I thought of my crime, my potential punishment, my exile, my
hunger, and it was as if my mind decided itself for me....I leapt forward
and landed softly on the shoulders of the woman who had been so frightened
by the invisible rat, my finely-honed dexterity preventing dislodgement of
her alarming headgear.  I say "landed softly"; even now I cringe to recall
my shocked recognition of the garment she wore wrapped about her upper body.
Mr. Poe himself would have been hard-pressed to convey the horror I felt as
I discovered that I was nestled among the bodiless, soulless skins, the
sweet faces and glassy eyes of my own cousins!  Did other humans wear such
dreadful garments?....if my charming Queen had possessed such a thing of
FACES, I had never seen it!  There was no time to think more on it; the
woman, along with the others, moved steadily forward to board the waiting
boats, and I lowered my head and moved silently with her.  Ah, if I had but
looked UP!  If I had seen that brightly lit waiting Monster to which the
boats were headed!  In truth, I would have leapt to the ground and run until
I reached Paris!....and I would have escaped the greatest terror and missed
the greatest joy of my life.  (To be continued.)
[Posted in FML issue 2259]