Or to Begin Again by Ann Lauterbach

fact?
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    Yellow is a color, an attribute, not a fact; but that dandelions are yellow, at least
until they turn gray and lose all their hair, is a fact.
Alice took this in. It seems to have to do with sentences.
And things that happen, are they facts?
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    Not exactly. Events find their bearings by a kind of extrapolation; out of all the
possible relationships between and among the particulars of the perceptible world—
the dandelions—we construct events—they are hinges between the immediacy of the
present and what went before and what comes after.
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    But that isn’t quite accurate, Alice said, knowing that by contradicting the Voice she
was asking for trouble and, indeed, the wind began to pick up.
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    Events are in time. But the way you said it, it sounds as if we make events up,
whereas events happen that we have no control over. Earthquakes and storms and
terrible accidents on roads, for example.
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    As Alice made this observation, the crowd of dandelions nodded and swayed
excitedly.
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    You are talking about stories, I think, Alice went on, getting up from the grass and
walking quite quickly up the hill. She thought a storm was in the offing. But an
event isn’t a story; stories add event to event, as if stitching them to each other, or
putting beads on a string.
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    Event horizon! the Voice shouted.
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    What?
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    Event horizon! The edge of space-time! The great maw of the universe!
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    There was thunder to accompany these bald statements.
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    I am not looking through anything, Alice said disconsolately, and
whatever I say is not seen, except in the mind’s eye, whatever that is.
So far, nothing is as it seems or seems as it is. Really, I would prefer to be a cat and
trot along with a bird in my mouth, its head hanging limp, feathers listless.
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    Being a cat is nice, said the nearby Cat.
I grant you that. Being a cat means you can go from violence to affection without any
discernible transition.
I kill, I purr, I eat, I sleep.
These are excellent variations on a theme of being alive, if not exactly sentient, and I
recommend them to you as a
cure for your humanness.
But I like being human, Alice said, and then added, sort of.
And besides, I haven’t any choice in the matter.
But of course I am not exactly human, she added, I am a fiction, which makes things
more
complicated on the one hand and a lot simpler on the other.
However, said the Cat, you are the emanation of a human, so that makes you more
human than not.
No, Alice said, once again feeling disconsolate, I am only words.
This is a bare fact and there is nothing to be done about it.
But Alice, said the Cat, are facts not also a matter of interpretation?
Perhaps you are not mere words.
Alice was silent for a long time, long enough for the Cat to clean its face by licking
its paws and then wiping them across, first one side, then the other.
O I don’t know what facts are, Alice said at last.
Once I thought a fact was a thing, substantial and irrefutable, like a table or a
penny, but now I am not so sure.
I know facts have something to do with evidence, she added,
since the Cat had said nothing in response to her outburst.
When people say what the facts are they seem to be saying something about reality.
The Cat wandered away into the shade of a rosebush. It had lost interest. The Cat
was not interested in either facts or reality.
Alice went back to her book. She wished there were someone wise and informed
enough to help her with facts and reality. If that person appeared, then, and only
then, she might be helped with the more awful problem of truth.

    One day, Alice was leaving CityCity on a train.
As the train pulled away from under the tunnel of misgivings
it passed a message on a building:
IT IS NOTHING TO YOU, ALL WHO PASS BY
What a strange thing to say
to the passengers, Alice thought,
It is nothing to you.
What is