The Curiosities (Carolrhoda Ya) (21 page)

“I’m not supposed to,” she said. “They said it would hurt.”

“It’s not that bad. Only if the homily is really long.”

She grinned at me. “I’m not that good at sitting still.”

It was such an ordinary, human exchange. I had expected her to sound more like an insect. More like a child. My eight-year-old self suddenly realized that he was holding the hand of an adult, an adult halfway between birth and death, and I lost my nerve. I released her hand and ran. I was a coward.

. . .

Three years later, it was cold for the Papillons, and most of them died before they ever lived; frozen, dried corpses inside papery cocoon coffins. The ones that did emerge were hungrier than they had been in previous years, and though they were fewer, it seemed they were everywhere.

That year, I learned a new word for Papillons: whore
.

. . .

By the time I was in college, both the Papillons and I were well-managed. Some city dignitary had come up with the idea of shelters with glass roofs, and now there were fewer gruesome mornings after late frosts. My parents had realized that the only way I would stay in college was if they took away my car and gave me an apartment. Now there were fewer gruesome mornings after final exams.

So we all had a roof over our heads.

It was spring semester; classes were just beginning to grow odious, and the weather broke. So, like every year, it was simply this: one morning they weren’t there, and then they were.

As a college student the Papillons offered me a different sort of entertainment than they had when I was a boy. The further I was from childhood, the easier it was to tell which day they were on. Day one: birth, discovery, innocence. Day two: the frantic search for other Papillons, the mad desire to pursue and be pursued. Day three: the weaving of new cocoons and then the countdown to death.

It seemed such a futile life. Such frantic scrabbling, only to die before the week was out.

But I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it. I had classes and exams and a campus full of college girls. The only time it stuck in my head was when I had to step over a body, newly minted and already exhausted, lying in doorway of my apartment building.

Then it was pretty hard to miss.

. . .

In my senior year, I broke my mother’s rule.

It was spring, and it was late, past Papillon season. Summer was edging slowly onto campus, stretching the days longer, robbing the threat of night. Soon college would be out, I would join the ranks of the matriculated, and the real world would steal me for one of their own.

And yet, here was a Papillon girl, new and damp, hazel eyes huge in her face. There was no other Papillon for her to be wrapped around, none of her kind to flock with, and so she just sat on the sidewalk with her knees next to her chin and her arms wrapped around them.

I started to walk past her. Every other year I’d walked past them. This year, even, I’d walked past hundreds of them. But this time, there was just the one. And next to her the dead body of what had been another Papillon girl.

I stopped.

It was easy to be brave when it was just words.

“Hello,” I said to her.

She looked up at me. “Hi.”

She reminded me of someone eleven years earlier, holding my hand, looking into a church. I said, “Come to breakfast with me.”

So we went to breakfast. We sat outside and she sipped a juice while I made a tornado with my spoon in a cup of coffee. It occurred to me that I’d missed Western Civ II.

“Don’t you get bored?” she asked me. “If you don’t mind me asking?”

I blinked at her. “Bored...with...?”

She twirled her hand around in a circle. “With all that time. What do you do with all of it?”

I looked at her, bemused. “Live? Party? Become wise and wonderful?”

“Are you wise and wonderful yet?” She was smirking at me. I’d known her two seconds and she was smirking at me. It had taken her no time at all to arrive at the same conclusion my parents had about me.

“Getting there,” I said. “Are you?”

“Naturally,” she replied. “I was wise and wonderful hours ago.” Again that wicked grin that reminded me of the Papillon outside the church.

“Aren’t you afraid of dying?” I asked. I thought about the dead Papillon she had left behind when she stood, looking down at it with an unreadable expression.

“That’s days from now,” she said with a shrug. “Thanks for the juice. Would you like to go dancing?”

I should have said no, because I had more than two days left to my life, but she was holding her hand out to me.

So we went dancing. At first we danced on the campus green, to the bad band that was playing a free concert at the other end. Then we danced on the sidewalks, to the music that leaked out of cracked car windows. And then, as the night came and she got older, we danced in my apartment.

Naked, you could not tell which of us would be dead by the weekend.

. . .

We went to church in the morning, because guilt pinched my chest like an ill-fitting sweater. She did not catch fire. She just looked bored and discontent at being indoors, and afterward she asked me why I went.

“So I don’t go to hell when I die,” I told her. Her fingers were laced in mine, and every so often she would stop to loop her arm round my neck and kiss me. We both kept our eyes open when she did, so I could look into her hazel eyes.

“How do you manage hell?” she asked.

“By doing something awful.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” she said. “I’m disgustingly good.”

She hadn’t been around long enough to do something awful.

“Aren’t you afraid of what will happen, after?” I asked.

She stopped to kiss me again, only this time she didn’t put her lips on mine. She just rested her forehead against mine and we stood quietly, both of us smelling of flowers and dancing.

“I’ll come back,” she said. “Do you come back, if you don’t go to hell?”

“No,” I said. “I believe I stay dead.”

“Why are you crying?” she asked me.

. . .

She was dead in the morning.

During the night she had told me, “I feel old. I miss being young.” She’d curled her arms over her chest, looking already like all the dead Papillons I had seen littering the grass beneath the sycamores on campus. Unlike any of the other dead Papillons, though, she was in my apartment, curled in my lap.

I missed being young too.

Only I had thousands of days left to go.

I don’t know how to write a story like this.
All interlocking pieces and spirals of narrative moving around and around to somehow make a cohesive whole.
Every once in a while I try and then end up lying on my floor, staring at the ceiling. —Tessa

Snow White is a story I’ve never quite come to terms with. It bothered me a lot as a child (did I mention that I was a slightly neurotic child?), and I couldn’t really get a handle on the stepmother, because she was always two different people: the aging beauty, destroyed by her own vanishing youth, and the evil witch, lashing out, bent on destruction. It seemed like different versions of the same story, playing out in different ways, and this is kind of the same thing. —Brenna