Synkroniciti is excited to welcome back writer Lissa Staples, based in Colorado, with a marvelous feminist fable “The Hatter’s Wife,” inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The Hatter’s wife has been cooking and baking for eons, trapped on the serving end of an endless tea party with only the elusive Cheshire Cat for occasional, and somewhat dubious, companionship.
“So much Time lost over such a small infraction, she thinks. And the crime? Her husband’s singing, which so vexed the Queen of Hearts that she decreed it should remain Tea Time indefinitely at the Hatter’s house. The Wife had bristled: She’s a right little tart herself, stopping Time at exactly three o’clock in the afternoon. What if she forgets about us? We’ll be here forever. And why should I have to suffer this punishment as well? But the answer was obvious: someone had to cook.”
It’s quite stressful, and after the Hatter viciously tears apart an exquisite cakelet she slaved over, she feels betrayed.
“The Wife sat straight up in shock, gasping as if the fork were shredding her own body: her face, her breasts, her belly, the backs of her legs, the fiery undersides of her feet. The carelessness of the act shocked her deeply and something essential to her love for him, something that had been joyful and warm, rushed out of her like a falling soufflé.”
Eventually, the supplies run out and she decides to go to market. Opening the door onto the lane, she finds a world that she had forgotten, and that had forgotten her. She also picks up a new skill from the cat–invisibility. There are allusions to Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, but a different decision is made.
“You ought to have come too, she calls out loud in a teasing singsong knowing that he is unaware of her mutiny.”
Lissa gives us a playful confection that contains some complex and insightful flavors. This ingenious and colorful story is a tale of a “relationship out of balance, lacking in creativity and empathy on one end while physically and emotionally taken for granted on the other.” It’s also an apt allegory for women who have spent years toiling to keep up illusions and to support the system which has enslaved and abused their husbands. As a woman begins to find her mid-life legs, wisdom and autonomy, society declares her invisible and uninteresting. This a lie, but grants her some space to define her boundaries for herself.
Read “The Hatter’s Wife” in Synkroniciti’s “Identity” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/. Lissa will be joining us in our upcoming “Recovery” issue.
Lissa Staples is a classical singer and an emerging writer. She has been a student at The Writers Studio since 2014 and won Synkroniciti’s short story contest with her piece, “The Month of Drowning,” which was published September 2023 and subsequently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work can be read at Corvus Review, Synkroniciti, Heartwood Review, The Stickman Review, Bright Flash, Emerge, and The Write Launch, among others. She lives in Colorado.