Miss Alice Merriwether's Long Lost Cakes & Further Arcane Inducements to Wonder

One Sunday evening, the town of Parcival, USA disappeared. It was Tuesday morning before anyone in the outside world noticed it was gone. There was something decidedly odd about Quentin C. Coriander. For one thing, no one in Parcival could ever remember seeing him arrive. One day the house was empty, bare as winter trees. Next, there was Quentin on the porch, reading the Parcival Post or doing the crossword. From then on it was usual for townsfolk to nod at Quentin as they passed and to receive a cursory nod in return. It never evolved beyond that. Quentin never encourage conversation. No one in Parcival much bothered to keep an eye on Quentin. What they didn't know was that he always had his eye on them... Miss Alice Merriwether's Long Lost Cakes is a transdimensional science-fiction satire that riffs on 1950s B-movies, Midwestern stereotypes, and small-town America. Cover design: Elspeth Fahey.

There was always something quite odd about Quentin C. Coriander. For one thing, no one in Parcival could ever remember seeing him arrive. One day the house was empty, bare as winter trees, and the next morning there was Quentin settled comfortably on the porch, reading the Parcival Post or doing the crossword as if he d been living there for years. From then on, the townsfolk would nod at Quentin as they passed, and receive a cursory nod in return. It never evolved beyond that. Quentin never invited conversation.

The town of Parcival was a hamlet of no importance, noteworthy only for having no fame whatsoever. Of course, the people of Parcival would never settle for that. They would usually point to some obscure event in the Civil War, conveniently forgetting it had been proven erroneous over a hundred years before. Still, as much as the townsfolk wished it otherwise, Parcival was a very ordinary place.

As a town, it was hardly unique. There were thousands of similar settlements all over America, and they fed the big cities their most valuable crop--their children. It was a process that saw the average age of townsfolk gradually increase as young people moved away for an education or more challenging employment. That, too, was far from unusual, but at least Parcival s ordinariness came on a grand scale.

Quentin, on the other hand, was as far from ordinary as a person can get. He had a shock of red hair with a will of its own that rose from his scalp in determined tufts. He reminded many people of an insect with his long legs and bone-thin arms and elongated face. When he sat hunched in the low cane chair on his porch, with his knees bent up higher than knees had a right to be, and his head poised as if ready to strike at the crossword in his lap, he seemed even more insect-like--and the nickname Mantis stuck. On the odd occasions when he d venture beyond his front porch, people would often huddle together and whisper, though the local youngsters decided very early that Quentin was not a person to make fun of. In their childish way, they sensed something abnormal and kept their distance.

***

Alice Merriwether was a spinster--a condition with which she had never come to terms. Jilted in her late teens, she d been clumsily rejected by several eligible bachelors since. Now approaching forty, she kept a keen eye on Quentin as a means of getting what she d wanted for so long.

No one in Parcival would have called Alice a beacon of beauty or glamour, but they would surely have acknowledged her other talents. She had a fine mezzo-soprano voice and sang in the Church of Jesus in America choir most Sundays. She was well read in the field of American poetry, particularly Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath. Her greatest talent, however, was with the culinary arts, creating fine cakes that men might kill for.

The opening skirmish of Alice s meticulously planned campaign took place on a Monday. She mounted her attack by means of a Trojan horse: a Sunshine-with-Passion Cake of enormous proportions, sculpted in a style that would surely have elicited the envy of Michelangelo. Quentin failed to answer her first knock, but Alice was nothing if not persistent and eventually he opened the door to peer out myopically. Her gift seemed to confuse him: he took it, but instead of inviting her in, he just mumbled a few words that she couldn t make out, and then abruptly closed the door. Never one for despondency, Alice considered she had just won a minor victory. Coriander had accepted her offering, and there was no disputing how memorable--and addictive--her Sunshine-with-Passion Cakes were.

She began planning the wedding.