The Curiosities (Carolrhoda Ya) (20 page)

This story makes me desperate to know where it came from. I want to
pin Maggie down
and ask her all the most annoying questions about inspiration and muses, then take the story back to college and write an essay about time and sex and god and death. It’s about all my favorite things, but in a way it would never occur to me to write it. —Tessa

We’re such products of our surroundings. It’s not just where we grow up or what sort of people we are, but things that are specific to our species: how long we live, how far our eyes are from the ground, the fact that we see color, the fact that we cannot fly. If you change any one of these variables, so much of our culture suddenly fails to satisfy our needs.
This story is about me removing one
Jenga block
from the tower—our life span—and trying to see what shape the collapsed pile is afterward. —Maggie

T
he Papillons had ruled the spring for as long as I could remember. We were always told not to touch them, because it would hurt.

“Them?” I asked my mother. “Or us?”

I was tiny back then, a paper-thin facsimile of a boy, no hint of my almost epic height to come. My mother was in the long, thin cotton sweater that she wore every day—or at least in my memory she did—and she tugged my slender hand to guide me around a flock of them. “What a silly question, Mark.”

It was the first warm day of spring, and the Papillons had come out in flocks. Beautiful and shining and resplendent, no sign of the unformed creatures they’d been in their cocoons. They were clustered in Persephone’s two parks and around the trees that lined the streets, caught in the flowers that grew in the highway median and in each other’s hair.

Annoyed that she hadn’t really answered my question, I said hello to one of them.

“Hello,” the Papillon said back, brightly, his hair on fire with the sun and his smile alight with the sight of me. The Papillon loved children, the same way we loved them. I wondered if they’d been told not to touch us as well.

“Mark,” said my mother disapprovingly, not bothering to whisper.

“Mom,” I said back. I was always brave when it was just words.

“What did I just tell you?”

“Talking is not touching,” I replied.

Mom jerked my arm, leading me away from the red-haired Papillon. “It’s close enough. I’m going to tell your father you’ve been trouble today, and then what do you think will happen?”

I looked over my shoulder at the Papillon. He was singing to a group of girl Papillons, the simple delight of his face transformed to something more urgent.

My mother hadn’t answered my question, so I didn’t answer hers either.

. . .

I didn’t see much of the Papillons next spring because my parents enrolled me in a Catholic school. Not only was I in school every day—and the Papillons, of course, didn’t go to school—but I was also in Mass twice a week, and if there was one place Papillons definitely didn’t go, it was into churches.

“Is it because they’re demons?” I asked my mother once.

“No,” she said. “Ask the nuns.”

So I asked Sister Therese, and she told me they were animals or angels or something in between, and I didn’t need to worry about much other than their general lack of soul. There would be no Papillons in heaven.

“Will there be butterflies in heaven?” I asked her.

“Possibly,” she allowed. She liked me and knew I liked insects, so I’m sure she thought she was being kind.

The Papillons, as their name suggested, were very like insects. What else hatched from cocoons and lived for only three days?
I persisted, “Then why not the Papillons?”

Her lips parted and then pressed together again, twice, and finally, she said, “Because they are made in the image of God, Mark, and they choose to deny it.”

Later that day, I tried to persuade one of the Papillons, a girl still shimmery and damp from emerging, to go into the empty church with me. She let me take her hand, and I stood there for a moment, thrilling to the illicitness of it—touching a Papillon, four feet from a church. Her hand was like a bird in mine; I could feel the bones through her smooth, damp skin, and it didn’t weigh anything at all. It was very, very warm, and her pulse tapped against me at the base of her palm.

“Your hand is so cold,” she told me.

“Actually, yours is hot,” I said. She had brilliantly rich hazel eyes, very large and round, like those small dogs that you’re afraid of breaking. I was filled with the need to get this particular Papillon into heaven after she died.

“Well, it’s still a hand,” she said. “Both of them, I mean.”

It was true. There was nothing really to distinguish her as a Papillon aside from her pale skin, not old enough to have a tan, and her long, long hair, laying against her back like new butterfly wings.

“You should come into the church,” I said. “God’s in there, and I want Him to see you.”