It was a bad day to eat on the ivy-railed second floor balcony of Pierre's Bistro: the wind was both gusty and persistent. But Sue Merriweather simply *had* to eat outside, having spent the better portion of the last six days cooped up in a sterile Angel City glass box of a skyscraper. She was more than willing to put up with a bit of a breeze for the privilege.
In the end, Pierre charged her $15, and the wind charged her one forest green beret.
*****
Mary "Gosh" Johnson had been told many times not to take that alley. All of her friends, her parents, her schoolteachers. "Don't go through Wilson Way - it's not safe."
Unfortunately, Mary hadn't gotten the nickname "Gosh" because she thought things through. Much in life was a surprise to Mary Johnson, sometimes for the second time.
Today, it was beginning to look like there wouldn't be a next time.
There were two men, one holding her up against the wall and frisking her, and another backing him up and keeping lookup. She would have screamed, except that one of Goon #1's first actions had been to plaster his huge hand to her face.
She didn't have much money, and it didn't take much thought at all to figure out what the men would want next.
There was a gust of wind.
Suddenly, Goon #1's face was covered with a green beret. He and his victim were both surprised by it, but while he tried to figure how to use one hand to hold Mary up, one to frisk her, and one to remove the hat, she kicked him hard in the family jewels. She'd tried it earlier, but he'd been to good at reading her movements.
This time, however, he couldn't read through a hat, and collapsed with a womanly scream onto the ground, balled up.
Goon number two cursed, and ran towards her with his knife. Mary screamed loudly, and reached for something, anything to throw at him. Her fingers closed on the beret again, tossed into the air after the first Goon's collapse. She tossed it at the knife wielder.
Goon #2's luck wasn't much better. Seeing that she'd thrown something at him, but not what, he flinched, caught the beret, and then tripped over his thrashing companion, the knife going into his own arm.
Mary ran to safety, and police. The Beret flew off.
And it wasn't more than another four weeks before she tried the alley again.
Gosh.
*****
One small problem with Angel City is the wide assortment of trouble that a hat gone astray can run into. For example, the buildings.
Amazingly enough, the hat survives being blown into the wall of a building down the street from Pierre's Bistro. Unfortunately, this is not the last wall the battered beret must endure.
Finally, the wind lets up for a moment and it comes to rest right onto the nose of a slumbering Sammy Coyote. Spent from a night of soul-searching and self-berating, the itenerant canid lies, Snoopy-style, on ledge on top of an Angel City brownstone. That is, until the careening chapeau drops lightly onto his shnozz.
"Wha?" Sammy's eyes open and cross as he focuses on the hat that is adorning his nose. He snatches it off and sits up, seeming oblivious to the six-story drop that his right leg is dangling off. "Hmm," he hmms, pondering the beret. With a quick motion, he pops it onto his head, and, pulling a small mirror out of the recesses of his coat, he examines the look.
He adjusts the fit slightly, making room for his ears. As he looks at himself in the mirror, he grins his goofy grin. Pantomiming puffing elegantly on a cigarette, he stands up and prances a small box-step around the roof. "Zank heaven for little girls," he croons, in a very bad imitation of Maurice Chevalier, "for little girls get bigger every day ...."
He stops in mid-prance, and looks in the mirror again. He turns the beret slightly, folding it off to one side. "Quiet, Marine!" he barks. "Green Berets don't sing pansy-ass Frenchie songs! Green Berets sing hardcore, marchin' songs!" He leaps up onto the ledge and marches the length, chanting, "From the halls of Monkey-Ziiima, to the shores of the Tasty Freeeeze!"
He pauses again and looks in the mirror once more. Pulling the beret down over the top of his head, so that it looks more like a skullcap, he grins again. "Vhat a mensch," he comments on his reflection. And then, dancing a slow, intricate step, he sings, "Hava nagila, have two nagilas, have three nagilas, they're rather small!"
He whirls about, humming to himself. Suddenly, he stumbles and, arms flailing, teeters on the edge. The wind plucks at him, threatening to blow him off balance. It seizes the beret and whips it off his head, and with a burst of effort, he throws himself back off the ledge and onto the roof proper.
Panting, he watches the beret whirl away on the wind. He ponders its dwindling shape for a minute, and then starts laughing. His laughter is open and healthy. "I feel better!" he shouts, and with a whirl of his coat, and a swirl of road dust, he sets off to find something to eat.
Meanwhile, the hat drifts out away from the buildings, settling down on a young girl with blonde hair all done in ringlets. She takes the hat, turning it this way and that. She speaks with a British accent, "Why hello there, Mr. Hat. I do feel muchly silly to be talking to a hat here but ever since I fell into that closet at the pet store, chasing that rabbit, I've met so many curious people. And they keep getting curiouser and curiouser." She peers at the hat a bit more. "You know, you remind me of someone I once met at a party. He was quite an interesting man and I finally figured out the answer to his riddle. Oh, dear me, where are my manners?" She places the hat on a nearby statue of Richbardton, the Zorkanston god of in-laws. She curtsies towards the statue and the hat, saying "My name is Alice and..." At this point, a gust of wind blows Alice away from the statue, down the street, leaving the beret perched upon Richbardton.
A perch from which the white-gloved hands of Luminous Frank soon pluck it. The tophatted Victorian magician turns the hat over and over with a great deal of nodding and muttering. "The green beret!" he intones. "As it is foretold in the Book of Lightless Brilliance: 'Yea, verily, shall the beret of green silk, found upon the Lord of Mate's-Parents, be thy key to the Realms Beyond!' And it is here, and it is *mine*! *MINE*!!"
Then his eyes chance upon the label, and his jaw goes slack:
"80% cotton/20% polyester blend"
He casts the beret from his sight in disgust, the back of one hand going to his forehead. "O Unseen Masters!!" he cries to the uncaring Heavens. "SILK!! Give me SILLLLLK!!!"
Meanwhile, an errant gust of wind lifts the beret higher into the air, only to drop it in the lap of a small, ragged child, no more than 12, dozing against the dumpster. At the sensation of something brushing against her small, bare legs, she starts and wakes up.
It's been autumn in this section of the City for some time now - the black-bagged piles of leaves in the dumpster can attest to this - and it's cold.
Especially for someone who's been wearing the same oversized orange cotton polo shirt and threadbare jeans since she stole them from the Goodwill box last August.
She blinks, looks around, and begins to stand up before she remembers that she shouldn't...the soup kitchen, in another part of the City, had been closed for the past two days - arson, she'd heard, and the stale carrot she'd found last night had made her sick.
She crumples back onto the ground, clutching the beret. "Looks like th' one Mama gave me 'fore-," she mumbles, before huddling into the corner once more.
Then the wind picks up, and rips it out of her hands - carrying after it the sound of half-heard sobs.
Meanwhile, two blocks over, Tim "That Boy" Richardson was walking morosely down the sidewalk, his aura of teen angst going at near full power. His scuffed grey sneakers made a schuff-schuff noise as he dragged them across the concrete. Of course, he reasoned, he had every damn right to be annoyed and angsty. The Silver Avenger had threatened to fire Tim from his job as hero's sidekick unless he could come up with a good theme.
"I'm tired of having a sidekick I can only refer to as 'Boy'!" the Avenger had said. "You'd better come up with something decent and respectable by tomorrow, or I'll just start looking for a new lackey!"
Suddenly, Tim was broken out of his reverie by something brushing against his leg. Looking down, he raised one angsty eyebrow at the sight of a green beret which the wind had just deposited at his feet. Picking it up, he brushed the dust off of it and set it on his head, looking at his reflection in the window of a nearby shoe store. Turning his head this way and that, he smiled as an idea popped into his head. The Green Beret!
Perfect! All he had to do was grab a decent uniform, and--
A scream echoed on the other side of the street. A crime! Perfect! Just in time to usher in his new life as The Green Beret! He jumped onto a couple of parked cars, crossing the street in a flash (Hero School didn't teach gymnastics for nothing) and caught sight of the purse snatcher making off down the street as an old woman screamed in dismay. "Pictures of my grandchildren and cats!" she exclaimed, looking pathetic. Perfect; the newspapers would eat this up! The Green Beret, not caring that he was still only wearing jeans and a Metallica T-shirt, dashed off after the robber, following him down an alley.
"Stop! In the name of justice!" he yelled, just as the Silver Avenger had taught him. He made a running leap, tackling the man--and hesitating as a laser rifle's shot whizzed by his ear. Looking around, dismayed, he realized he'd just fallen into a heavily technological section of the alleyway, and a bunch of drunken space bounty hunters were pouring out of a 34th century bar, ready for a fight. He rolled out of the way and tripped on a lead pipe, the beret falling off his head and picked up by the wind before he could grab it again.
"Shoot!" he muttered, and turned and ran, deciding that right now, saving his skin was more important than getting the hat. As he ran out of the alleyway, he could barely catch a glimpse of it high above him, the wind carrying it off into the distance.
(subtitled The Cat in the Hat)
A green beret comes to rest upside-down in a small city park underneath a row of bushes, attracting the attention of a small black cat. He pads carefully up to the strange new object, keeping low to the ground in case it made any suddden moves. He sniffs at it experimentally. It's not food. Dangerous? «It's a hat.» A thought passes over the cat-mind as if it came from somewhere else. This happens every once in a while. The alien thoughts never make much of an impression on the cat-mind because they're not in terms that it understands. Its mind moves on as cats usually do.
Having decided that this object wasn't going to attack, the cat gingerly steps into it. Flexing his claws, he turns around several times before curling up into a ball inside the hat, his nose next to his tail. Another thought slides across cat-mind. «Tail? What tail?» Man-mind, submerged beneath cat-mind, fights for the surface. Cat-mind calmly begins licking his tail, purring contentedly, unaware of man-mind's struggle. «Cat... cat?» A word is associated with that concept. «Pershka. What does that mean?» Cat-mind, in its contentedness and acceptance of the situation, has the upper hand this time. Man-mind sinks back beneath the surface like a punctured rowboat. He will bide his time until another chance arises. Cat-mind, firmly in control, takes a nap. An hour or so later the cat wakes up and wanders off in search of dinner. The beret remains for the moment, with the addition of a bit more cat hair.
The hat gets kicked into the air by an absentminded jogger, who starts as the hat flies up into the strangely strong wind. He falls over witha a curse.
The hat meanders in the air above the park, where is swirls around for several minutes like a feather, in a certain Forrest Gump-like fashion, until it plunks itself in a gutter, and down into a damp, dripping chamber in the Angel City sewers.
Of course, not all of Angel City's inhabitants live in the bright sunshine. This particular chamber was claimed three weeks ago by two imps, who have been content to amuse themselves by eating rats and performing various bodily functions. The beret floats to the ground, watched by four, red, beady eyes.
Groonk, the taller of the two imps (not saying much, as most imps average around two feet in height), ambles over the hat, and snatches it up. "It flies!" he rasps.
Funge, the other, fatter imp nods. "Is bird. Good eats."
Groonk sniffs the hat. He stares at Funge. "Not biiiird. Is hat, dummy!" He hits his fellow on the top of the hat. "Is weaaaar, not eats!" So saying he pulls the hat his head, immediately obscuring his eyes.
Funge takes a look at the floppy, oversized beret on his friend's head and giggles uproariously. "You dummy. Is bird! I eat!" The fat gremlin snatches the hat away and chomps down on the cotton/polyester fabric. "Is good bird!"
Groonk glares resentfully at Funge. "Is good hat, too. Is good with skin color," he says as he rubs his gray, warty skin Groonk is about to tear the hat away again, but a low rumbling (one of the city's many subways) makes him scream shrilly, and he dives into a crack in the wall. Funge, who drops the hat on an air grat, swiftly follows, and both imps huddle together, shivering, as the rumbling ceases.
The hat gets caught in a sudden blast of air from the grate, and shoots back up through the gutter. Plaintive squeaks of "HAAAAAT!" and "BIIIIIRD!" can be heard by careful listeners.
*thump* An inexperienced hawk makes the same mistake Funge did, but realizes its mistake rather quicker. The young bird finds a perch on the 33rd-story window ledge of a skyscraper, pecks a couple of times at the grimy fabric now mussed with cat hair and imp drool, and releases it. The winds knocks it off the window ledge and it falls towards the ground before a middle-aged man, his face bearing scarred flesh hinting at a fire long ago, a jagged slash across his left cheek that's mostly healed over. He bends down to pick up the hat after it hits the ground, and chuckles softly as he looks up at the sky while standing up.
"You're getting slipshod in your old age," he says in a soft, raspy voice, seemingly talking to the sky. He tucks the hat into a pocket on his leather jacket, continuing on his way towards the heart of Angel City.
A few minutes later, as he takes a shortcut through a back alley, a small hand snatches the hat, partly hanging out of the pocket, the owner of that hand running away. The old man turns just as the hand's owner -- a little girl barely into her teens -- trips on a pipe laying on the ground, the pilfered hat flung into the air unintentionally as the girl throws her hands out to keep her face from hitting the street. Not really paying attention to the hat, he heads over to the little girl, squatting next to her. "You know, you might want to watch where you're running," he says with a wry grin. "You really should try something less stressful than being a pickpocket," he notes as he helps the girl to her feet, her surprise blindingly obvious at the kindness he's showing her.
"Watcha bein' nice to me for?" she asks in wide-eyed confusion.
"Let's just say I'm a guardian angel of sorts. Now, do you really want to live out here in the streets, living off of whatever garbage you can scrape up?"
"Well, when ya put it that way... not really. What else is there?"
"'What else is there?' indeed. Perhaps I should introduce you to Father Mitch at the mission. I'm sure he could give you a few more options to consider."
She pauses for a moment to think about it. It's a brief moment, though. "You're not gonna do anything nasty to me, are you?"
He shakes his head, chuckling under his breath. "If I was going to do something like that you think I'd be taking the time to be nice?"
"I guess not..."
"Then c'mon," he says as he rises to his feet, holding out his hand -- bearing similar scars as his face -- to the little girl.
"What's wrong with your skin?" she asks curiously as she puts her tiny hand in his.
"Long story involving my former life. I'll tell you the story on the way, ok?"
As the two walk towards St. Jude's, the hat continues on its merry way, carried along by the strong wind until it falls into the crowded shopping cart of a hunched-over lump of flesh with long, dirty-white hair that might have been blonde once upon a time. The old woman turns sharply at the plopping sound, as if expecting something rather nastier.
"Hmph," she grunts, picking up the limp green tatter and examining it. "This'll never do." Clucking and tsking, she laboriously pushes her cart full of personal belongings along the grimy street, puffing from the effort. She makes her way slowly into the park, passing this smelly drunk and that lolling junkie and others who never see her because to do so would be to acknowledge that Life is not always Good.
She stops in her favorite place. Before the Fairie Fountain, so called for the bronze statuary of fairies, pixies and sprites frolicking in sprays of diamond-sparkle water. One fairie in particular dominates the tableau. She is larger than the others; nearly human-sized. And she looks down at the old woman with benign curiousity and a knowing smile.
The old woman bows and mutters something low. Then, bowing and inching forward in small stages, she reaches the basin at the bottom of the fountain. With a nod to the Lady Fairie, the old woman dips the beret into the water. She begins softly to hum to herself as she rubs and rinses and swirls the green fabric in the sparkling water.
Then, wringing it out, she nods one last time to the statue, with a muffled "Thank'ee, Lady" and shuffles back to her cart. She sits on the grass beside it, producing a needle and thread from some cavernous pocket in her trash-barrel coat, and proceeds to mend the nicks and cuts and tears in the fabric with a care that speaks of more than passing skill.
Soon, under her gentle hands, the beret would appear to a casual observer to be good as new. Dried, shaped and brushed, it rests beside the old woman as she passes into carelessness in the warm afternoon sun.
When she wakens, snorting slightly with the tail-end of a dream, she discovers the beret is full of coins, bills, credits and even a glinting stone that could be a genuine something. Crying out in surprise, looking around to see whence the bounty might have come, she sees nothing and no one. Only the Fairie, whose smile seems more pronounced than usual.
With a hoot of joy, the old woman empties the beret of its gifts and tosses it into the air until it flies in a window and lands on the desk of a busy manager. He does not even see the hat, but his secretary does. When he leaves to tell off yet another worker who is slacking off, the secretary sneaks the hat off his desk.
She examines it. It is a finer hat than any she has ever had, and it just matches her green dress. It will be perfect for her date tonight!
The secretary tries on her new acquisition in front of her hand mirror. She grins at her image. Perfect.
When she hears the manager coming back, she hides the hat and gets back to work before he decides to yell at her, too.
On the bus home, the secretary takes the hat back out of her bag and looks at it. She loses herself in her imagination, dreaming of the perfect date tonight.
It isn't until she walks in the door of her apartment that she realizes the hat is missing. The secretary rips open her bag and looks high and low, even cleaning the apartment, even though she knows it is not there.
Her date waits an hour at their meeting place before he gives up and leaves.
Meanwhile, the hat, abandoned on the seat of the bus, has ended up...
...right next to a college student. Rhia, a junior at Nexus U (home of the Gribbling Prustucios, which meant anywhere from the 'Fighting Take-Your-Pick,-Buddy' to the 'Cutsey Fuzzy-Wuzzies' depending on what language and dialect you spoke.) was studying on the bus again. Her final in quantum telepathy was tomorrow at 9am in 34B. But she was so close to burnout that she needed a break. A few of her friends had asked her out to do a little unwinding tonight and if she wanted to stay for even an hour, studying was to come before breathing. It was a major foul to bring textbooks to the Lurching Professor, but if she wanted to graduate, social graces be flambe'd. Looking around, she notices the green beret. Glancing around to see if anyone had dropped it, she shakes it out a bit. Placing it on her head, she wishes for a mirror but stops with a laugh. At her stop, she steps out, feeling better than she had all week. As she walks into the front door, a gust of wind grabs the hat, taking it right into the face of a bicycling Paulie Cabrini on his way to a delivery.
Yelping in surprise and uttering a string of syllables of which Mama Sofia would most certainly not approve, he snatches the beret from his face and tosses it aside, swerving at the last second to avoid crashing into a truck hauling a load of squawking wuvgrnts. The trucker slams on the brakes, and the panicked little beasties spray their stinkoil in all directions, hosing down many a hapless bystander. Or, in Paulie's case, bybiker.
After spouting another prodigious burst of words on Sofia's List of Things You No Are Gonna Say, Paulie decides that a detour through the carwash might be in order.
The hat, meanwhile lands atop a box, a cardboard box full of stuff, Brian's stuff, just sitting there on the sidewalk outside Val's apartment. Brian himself had asked her to put it there, but he hadn't really expected her to do it. He had been counting on her to put it off too long, so that he would then have to go up to her door and ask for it. One more opportunity to give her a hard time for being forgetful. One more opportunity to talk to her, smooth things over -- or something.
But she hadn't put it off.
When he bent down to pick up the box, Brian noticed the beret. "Not mine," he mumbled smugly. He had told her she treated him like another one of the strays she collected. The cats, the bird, the 62nd Street wino and that grubby food vendor who talked on and on about his kids. How long had they wasted that day? It must have been more than 20 minutes, because this guy's kid couldn't handle 5th grade math? It wasn't sensible. Just like Brian had told her, Val's priorities were all out of whack.
And this hat was material evidence. He imagined carrying it up to her door, presenting it to her with just the right words. Words that would cut her to the heart. He imagined the look in her eyes.
Suddenly a lot of stuff didn't matter to Brian any more. He dashed into the apartment building leaving the green beret dangling from the finial of the front stair railing.
A young man talking into a cell phone walks out the front door of the apartment building. "Okay, Morrie, sorry 'bout that, my roommate can be a bit loud. Now, what did you think of my latest story?"
He listens for a few moments, his face becoming more and more still. After a few more moments, an incredulous look appears. "You want to do _WHAT_?!?" he yells. "No, I do _not_ think that the main character should be changed to a unicorn! Do you think Edgar Allen Poe would be as well known if he had written about a cute fluffy pink bunny?! What is _with_ you? Did anyone ever tell Shakespeare 'Hey Bill, how about you get rid of those heinous witches in that play and replace them with lifeguards in bikinis?'" His hands clench on the front railing, right next to the beret. "What next? You're going to want me to be writing stories about plastic surgeons, tooth fairies, and...and...." He snatches the beret. "Green berets!" He flings the beret down the street when it lands...
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