#trans!jane

Jane Crocker sleuthing her way through nursery rhyme narratives

You wake up to the blaring trumpet of your alarm clock half on, half off your bed, a sock missing from your right foot. You bat at the ear-drum rending noise on your bookshelf, accidentally knocking off your honorary placronym that your Dad had given to you on your thirteenth birthday.

As you take a moment to replace it carefully in its spot, you relish how, despite your dad’s tendencies to ground you, he was never capable of the stuff and nonsense as to have it engraved with James or some other toshy name of the male persuasion.

But, even though you’ve succeeded in knocking over your placronym, you’ve still been unsuccessful in turning off your alarm clock.

Drat.

You finally succeed, and you remember your fancy spoon that you have recently received but have, unfortunately, been unable to play with. It’s a Junior Battermaster’s Bowlbuster Stirring Solution 5000, and today you are going to make something sweet, delectable, and delicious.

Perhaps that tart recipe forwarded along by your pal Lalonde.

You dress quickly, slipping into skirt and tee stamped with a Frightening Beast that, honestly, makes you giggle a little with its plump and adorkable cuteness—Lalonde’s words, not yours.

You gnash your teeth at the mirror on the Frightening Beast’s behalf before tramping down the stairs, whistling a merry tune, fedora capped at a jaunty angle on your head.

You prepare the dough and place it in a muffin pan, perfect for bite-sized pastries of sublime taste.

Or some such malarkey.

With a flourish of your trusty spoon, you pull out a blue plastic bowl for the custard. “Don’t forget your saucepan, heiress,” the spoon says with her soothing female robot voice, just like in science fiction.

“Shh, shh,” you say, papping the spoon. You pull out a faux mustache from your pocket and smooth it over your upper lip (which is neither stiff nor soft but completely your own) with a debonair flourish. “Call me—detective.”

“As you wish, Detective,” the spoon says. “Do not forget the vanilla bean extract.”

“Righty-ho,” you say. “It plumb slipped my mind.”

You beat the eggs and milk and sugar into submission, until they are smooth and creamy and, as you dip your finger into your concoction and lick it off, utterly delicious.

After pouring the custard into the muffin pans and dumping liberal amounts of fruit upon them, you slide them into the oven. As they bake, filling the house with their fragrance, you think—maybe a little smugly—that you are definitely worthy to be the heiress apparent to a baked goods empire.

While you wait for the tarts to finish baking, you amuse yourself with a slightly battered copy of A Slightly Abridged Edition of Sassacre’s Text until your tiaratop blips at you and you see who it is.

You sniff the air just as your spoon chimes, “Your baked goods have finished baking, Detective.”

You concern yourself with taking out your tartly goodies before they become singed, burned, or otherwise uninviting to one’s taste buds. Then you return to your correspondence with Lalonde.

  You take a moment to rub your eyes under the tiara. Gosh, you weren’t expecting that migraine to come on so soon. But then you notice that your plate of tasty tarts is gone.

You settle your favorite and only hat more firmly on your head.

Oh. It is so on.

You put on your dad’s tweed jacket that you find draped over a chair. You narrow your eyes before shoving your hands into the pockets while chewing your lip while pretending that you are, in actuality, smoking a pipe.

You find a pack of old playing cards in your dad’s pockets and slide the joker into the band of your fedora.

You think it’s cheesily fitting for a family of jokers and pranksters such as yourself.

You thumb another card from the deck.

The Queen of Hearts.

You remember the queen, having discovered the persons who have on numerous occasions finagled quantities of lovely baked goods from her own creation before her very eyes.

You wonder if the flagrant rumor still persists in the vivid imaginations of the realm: that she is, indeed, no queen at all, but a mere rogue who has insinuated herself into the hearts and minds of her subjects and that, during the midnight hours, she hunts in the forest, killing the monsters there with her bare hands.

Of course, her subjects only love her all the more as the rumors escalade into broader fantasies complete with scandalous depictions of her clad in the skins of her kill.

Naturally, the realm attempts to tease the truth from this gutsy gumshoe, but your lips are professionally sealed—though you won’t deny you haven’t found yourself sleuthing through the underbrush, pursuing suspicious looking tracks.

You flick the card away and draw instead the jack of spades.

Hmmmm. You crumple the card in your hand.

You are well acquainted with the thief and her incessant flirtation with the justice system.

To be quite honest—she is quite a scourge to your existence what with the thieving and the killing.  You’re lucky that she focuses most of her attention on your partner in crime-solving (though she prefers to call it justice).

Even so, this little incident with the missing tarts seems a little below her usual caliber.

You flick the card away and follow your very trusty nose through the sitting room and into your Dad’s study, where he is very predictably and totally unsurprisingly eating your hard-baked tarts, brushing crumbs from his fingertips.

“Dad,” you say.

“Hey, daughter,” he says. “Did you lose something?”

“Only because you stole something.”

He ruffles your hair, drops a wink, and says, “Only trying to make Sassacre proud.” Still, he gives you the rest of your tarts (he only ate the one) and you give him half anyway because despite your curmudgeonly spirit, he’s still your dad and there’s no way you could eat all those tarts by yourself.