A Thing Came to My Attention

Journal Entry 10/15/2025.

I decided to listen to the audio book on YouTube Through the Looking Glass By Lewis Carroll while out for my walk yesterday. The following is a little stand alone story I came up with inspired by Carroll’s delightful story.

Prelude: The Nature of Attention

(in which the narrator considers who is watching whom)

I started out by wondering about something, something rather small, though it refused to stay that way.

When we say, “Something came to my attention,” do we mean that the something tiptoed up behind us, tugged at our sleeve, and said, “Look here!”? Or did our attention go prowling about, hunting for things to notice until it found this particular one and pounced? Perhaps it works both ways, I thought. Perhaps every act of noticing is a kind of mutual ambush, where each party shouts “Aha!” at exactly the same moment.

If that is so, who is the predator, and who is the prey? Is my attention a fox among ideas, or a small trembling rabbit caught in their gaze?

I decided this might require, well, further attention.

But the very moment I said so, I felt a strange stirring in the air, as if my own attention had heard me talking about it and taken offense. The curtains shivered. The clock gave a polite cough. Something unseen drew nearer with the faintest rustle of punctuation.

Then I remembered the phrase I had been thinking about and realized, with a small thrill of correctness, that something had indeed come to my attention.

And so it was that I found myself seated at my desk, the afternoon unusually full of voices, wondering whether I had gone out to meet them or they had all come to meet me.

---

A Thing Came to My Attention

(being an account of a curious day in which words misbehaved and tea took sides)

It had been, by any measure, a most untidy sort of week, one of those that begins by tripping over itself and ends by insisting it meant to do that all along.

“It is no use talking about it,” I told myself, which of course made me do precisely that.

“Hold your tongue,” I said.
“I would,” I replied, “if only you would stop wagging it for me.”

The air was full that morning, not merely with air but with voices, astonishing ones. Some sang, some sighed, and some scolded the furniture for not paying attention. I tried to listen, but they tangled together like a basket of eels, and just when I thought I had one by the tail, another slipped out entirely.

“I really love falling asleep,” I murmured, “listening to this right now.”

But I had not slept well. Every time I drifted off, the voices started arguing about pronunciation.

“Three syllables!” cried one.
“Four!” shouted another.
Then a calm but confident whisper declared, “Mischievous is mis-chie-vous, not mis-cheev-ee-us.”

At once the word itself popped out from under my pillow, shook off a dream or two, and made a neat curtsy.

“I do not mind which of us you invite,” she said, “but it is only proper to introduce us correctly.”

Before I could ask what she meant by us, two figures appeared like mirror twins, one neat as a pin, the other slightly unbuttoned at the edges.

“I am Mis-chie-vous,” said the first, crisp and composed.
“And I,” said the second with a sly grin, “am Mis-cheev-ee-us, mind the Cheev, that is where the sparkle lives!”

“You have an extra elbow in your name,” said Mis-chie-vous, primly.

“Analogical formation!” cried Mis-cheev-ee-us, waving a biscuit like a lecturer’s wand. “The mouth wants to say it! Think of previous, devious, oblivious! I am the product of pure poetic instinct!”

The Teapot, who had been simmering nearby, let out a gentle whistle. “Oh, let her have her extra syllable. She is only trying to be sociable.”

“Popularity is not propriety,” said Mis-chie-vous. “I am the original spark, the quick flick of wit, gone before the ink dries.”

“And I,” countered Mis-cheev-ee-us, “am the laughter that refuses to stop, the echo in the hallway after the prank has been played!”

The Teapot chuckled into its lid. “Two kinds of trouble, both boiling over.”

The Cat on the hearth rolled over lazily. “They are at it again, are they not? Last week it was either and neither.”

Mis-chie-vous climbed onto the mantel. “Words should walk briskly and with purpose. Every extra syllable is an indulgence.”

“Nonsense,” cried Mis-cheev-ee-us, knocking over a spoon for emphasis. “The more syllables, the more laughter! Why keep mischief on a leash when it can chase its own tail?”

To prove her point, she began to recite:

“The mis-cheev-ee-us breeze through the hedgerow creeps,
It tickles the leaves till the daylight sleeps,
And laughter forgets to be tamed.”

“That is not a real poem,” sniffed Mis-chie-vous.

“It is now!” said Mis-cheev-ee-us. “Poets adore me. They stretch me like toffee across the line. Cheev gives them the high note they crave!”

“Poets adore noise,” said Mis-chie-vous. “I am for thinkers, the tap of a clever line, the polished trick that leaves no crumbs behind.”

“And I,” cried Mis-cheev-ee-us with a grin, “am the crumb that makes them lick the plate!”

They glared, then giggled, then glared again until the teaspoons rearranged themselves into anagrams and the biscuits disappeared entirely.

At last, to restore order, Mis-chie-vous composed herself and began a neat little poem:

“This day began quite upside-down,
The sun came in with a sideways frown,
The air was full of voices bright,
They hummed of things I could not write.”

“Charming,” said Mis-cheev-ee-us, “but far too tidy. Try this!”

“If thoughts can wander, let them play,
Let language dance and lose its way,
For every twist and turn, you see,
Is just more room for Cheev and me!”

The Teapot whistled approval, the Cat purred, and both pronunciations curtseyed, each pretending to have won.

At length they turned to me and said in unison, “It is all the same sort of fun in the end, spelled one way, sounded two, and meaning exactly as much trouble as you can manage.”

Then they vanished, one with a tidy bow, the other with a wink.

I sat back, quite dazed, realizing that I had indeed given my attention to something, and something had very much come to my attention in return.

---

The Day of Twists and Voices

(a reflection written later that evening)

This day began quite upside-down,
The sun came in with a sideways frown,
The chairs all sighed, the clocks complained,
And nothing I touched would stay contained.

The air was thick with chattering air,
Of words that argued unaware,
Two sisters formed from syllables bright,
And dueled for truth from noon to night.

One neat and crisp, all lace and laws,
The other wild with open jaws,
They sparred across my cup of tea,
And somehow both made sense to me.

The Cat observed, the Teapot hissed,
The spoons reformed the words they missed,
The biscuits fled, the sugar sighed,
While syntax sang and meaning vied.

I wrote their quarrel down with care,
Lest I forget they had been there,
For words, like dreams, refuse to stay,
They slip through thought and run away.

Yet somewhere still, I hear them play,
Their accents chasing through the day,
Two mischiefs twinned, forever spun,
In rhyme and reason, both are one.

So here I sit, a little worn,
From all the whimsy I have borne,
And tell myself (with some delight),
I will dream it backward now, tonight.

---

As I put down my pen, the voices finally faded. The room grew still, though one faint echo lingered near the window:

“Mis-CHEEV-ee-us…” it sighed.

And from somewhere deeper in the silence, another voice replied, quite crisply,

“Mis-chie-vous.”

Then both dissolved into laughter, and I, being rather untidy by then myself, could not help laughing too.

For whether things come to our attention, or our attention goes to them, it all amounts to the same thing in the end,
a perfectly mischievous day.