For Old Time’s Sake

By Olivia Neale

“Late! You’re late!” Dr. Rawlings bellowed at the brass section. Those magnificently large ears missed nothing. “I went to school for many years to become this brilliant—play faster!” He rubbed a hand through his poof of white hair and called out, “Rehearsal letter M!” while flipping pages in his score.

Most music professors had metronome apps, but Rawlings clung to eccentricities that would have been endearing if it weren’t 11 p.m. He opened his pocket watch, wound it to the right tempo, and watched the hands spin furiously for a moment. His head bobbed along for a few beats before he set the watch on the music stand and cued the downbeat.

This time, the violas’ fingers faltered during endless arpeggios, and Rawlings’ next lecture on the importance of paying attention was even longer.

At last, his lecture slowed. “Tell your story,” he ended gently. “This isn’t where I want to be tonight either, but if we have nothing else, we have this story on this page in this moment. So don’t just read measure after measure; tell your story. I don’t care how far from home you feel tonight. Tell the story of your homeland with every beat, every note.” He adjusted his posture. “And don’t. Be. Late.” He punctuated each word with a swoop of his great baton.

With a deep inhale and a nod, he swept the baton down, and my mind raced along with every feverishly paced thirty-second note. Could he know how we ended up in this reality after all? I thought.

Finally, even Rawlings admitted that running the piece was doing more harm than good. He dismissed us with the reminder to ditch our casual clothes for concert black before the next night’s show. A pointed glare landed on my extravagantly layered blue skirt and mushroom-adorned t-shirt.

***

“I know, Katarina, but if we can get it to the right tempo, maybe…” Rawlings lowered his voice enough that I couldn’t overhear anymore. I could always sneak closer…

But sense won out; I closed my locker and started the walk back to my flat.

I should have known better than to take the tunnel shortcut. More Curiosities lived there, creatures of my late-night dabbling in nonsense and latest escape attempts, and with the stars torn down, I wouldn’t be able to see them approaching as well.

I tripped on a cobblestone peeking out saucily from the ground.

“Curio!” I chided. The massive, granite caterpillar edged his head between the cracks in the cobblestone and gave a gravelly, defiant chuckle. He dove underground again and inched along, upturning more cobblestones below me and propelling me along his path.

My complaints met silence; Curiosities responded more to my imagination than spoken requests. With a sigh, I let his motion send me back toward the concert hall and said hello to the gargoyles laughing at me from their perches, taking a moment to remind my crawling friend that I had rescued him from their grasp and could easily return him there. He called my bluff with a huff but sped up nonetheless.

The stubborn stone caterpillar deposited me at the doorway of the concert hall and slunk back underground.

“And so you destroyed the sky of a reality that wasn’t your own?” Rawlings’ voice seeped through his office door, the same disappointed tone used when I clearly didn’t practice.

I could almost hear him saying, “Do you even believe the notes you’re playing?”

The answer would have been “no,” of course. Wrong scales, wrong notes, wrong strings, all off by a shade, which was my first sign that this reality wasn’t really mine. But I couldn’t very well tell him that when he seemed content here.

“We needed a way to know, Wilson. The Parallels have become too similar. We need to know where we are,” an angry, shrill voice replied.

I crept to Rawlings’ office window and peered through. The woman leaning against his desk was wearing a crimson pantsuit that matched her hair. It was once made of fine material, embroidered with black and white flourishes, but now its strings were fraying like my bow hair at the end of a long year.

“And now we’ve not even a star to guide us home, thanks to you. I know where we are by my orchestra.”

“As soon as they are on time, we will shift again. Ever late,” she said in an affected accent. “Did you miss that part of her incantation? My sister knows she can’t keep us out of Wonderland forever, but she’ll certainly try. And then there’s the matter of the girl.”

“Yes, do come in, Alice,” Rawlings said.

I awkwardly pushed open the door, and the woman in red levelled a startled glare at me. She didn’t seem to share Rawlings’s intuition, but they both shared a relief that I wouldn’t need to be convinced we were not in our own Oxford. And I was glad to know that I wasn’t the only one tinkering with this reality in an attempt to escape it.

Our tenuous trio spent the night scheming against the enchanted city, and by morning, we had a half-formed plan.

Hours later, I watched Rawlings’ baton for the downbeat, and as the melodies mingled, we played with a cohesion missing from rehearsals. Although Rawlings tried to maintain his stoicism, his pride rippled through the energy of the piece. We stood to bow at the end, and I sneaked a glance at the skylight, a flickering light winking back at me and dispelling my doubt.

I’d likely never see Curio again; he’d stopped thumping the rhythm to guide us, and I felt him inch away beneath the floorboards when I stood to bow with the orchestra. I looked to Rawlings and then Katarina, who was applauding begrudgingly in the front row. Rawlings closed his pocket watch and nodded. After the encore, we would escape through the tunnels and hope our next reality was a familiar one.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Olivia Neale is an avid writer and reader of a myriad of genres, speculative fiction and mysteries being closest to her heart. When not writing, she can be found sipping an Americano, wandering among trees, or spending time with friends and family. She believes in the power of stories, not because they save us, but because they point us to the only One who can.

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