A Cabinet of Curiosity

by Bradford Morrow

  After rehearsal one day, I went up to Mona as she was preparing to leave. “You know,” I said, “you’re a really good singer.”

  Mona leveled her eyes on me and screwed up her face, trying to decipher whether or not I was mocking her. “OK,” she said, then got up and left.

  I didn’t know why I cared so much, but a week later I approached her again. This time I reached into my pocket and held out my hand. Sitting in the center of my palm was a glimmering chunk of rock salt my father had once brought back from the mines. Its edges were jagged; its translucent surface striated with fine cleavage breaks.

  “Here,” I said, handing it to Mona. She took the salt from me uncertainly and turned it over, running her pointer finger over the sharp corners. The spinning crystal cast rainbow shadows across her face.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Halite,” I said. “It’s supposed to ward off evil spirits.”

  Mona’s eyes began to brim.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “No.” She used the edge of her sleeve to wipe away the tears. “It’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me.” She squeezed the salt so tightly, I thought for sure its points would slice open her palm.

  Mona’s choir days were short-lived. One time, during the dress rehearsal for a concert, her leaves fell on the stage and Tommy Cutler, who had a solo, tripped over them in his long blue robe and had to be shuttled to the emergency room for a concussion.

  Everything changed in the eighth grade, when William Percy moved to town. William was tall, with an aquiline nose and light, piercing eyes. Rumor had it that he had been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on the town’s western outskirts, in a house that bordered the flats.

  Every day, William would come to school with his salt-caked hair matted to his head. Word quickly spread that he was working the night shift down in the mines to teach him the value of hard work. What could he have possibly done to deserve such treatment. Drugs? Larceny? Murder? We whirred with speculation.

  Each of us took to William instantly. Except for Mona, who wouldn’t so much as look at him when he stood beside her in Ms. Roger’s chemistry class. Whenever he reached out to adjust the cobalt flame of the Bunsen burner, Mona would recoil, drawing her arm back as though she’d been singed.

  “What is it, Mona?” we asked.

  She simply shook her head, causing the veins on her leaves to catch the overhead fluorescents.

  Behind her back, we sang, “Mona and William, sitting in her leaves. K-I-S-S-I-N-G!” Her remove unnerved us, though. Was it mere jealousy? The truth was, we would have taken Mona over William any day. Even though William was a delinquent, we’d lived long enough to know that delinquents were banal. It seemed to us that there was only one Mona Sparrow, and we vowed to do whatever it took to protect her.

  One day, Mona came up to me after English class as I was collating the assignments in my homework folder. “I need to talk to you,” she said.

  “OK.”

  “It’s about William.”

  Mona told me that she had seen William changing out of his mining uniform that morning behind the schoolhouse. When he’d removed his shirt, she caught sight of something strange, something glistening in the center of his stomach.

  “I can’t say for certain,” she said, “but it was like he had glass there.”

  “Glass? Like he fell on a vase or something?”

  “No.” She shook her head; her branches rattled. “His stomach was a see-through dome, and there was snow falling behind it.”

  I started to pull away, zipping up my knapsack and rising from my seat.

  “Look,” she said, reaching out for my arm, “I know it sounds crazy. But you believe me, right?”

  Mona’s dark eyes were lambent and imploring. “Yes,” I said.

  The next day, it snowed. It snowed and snowed. On the football field behind the school, white powder whirled in the beam of the floodlights. The chalky sky bled into the flats below. Mona looked over at me in chemistry and wiggled her eyebrows in William’s direction. I recalled what she had said, about the snow behind his stomach.

  The more I thought on it, the more plausible it seemed. William controlled the seasons. He was the reason Mona’s leaves fell out every November. I started to tell the other students at school what Mona had seen, and pretty soon it was all anyone could talk about. Behind his back, we referred to William as “Weatherboy.” We began to think, If we could just get rid of Weatherboy, Mona’s agony would be gone. No more pink cap. No more falling leaves.

  The boys were less enthusiastic. It wasn’t so much that they liked William, but they didn’t see any reason to get rid of him. That is, until two important events took place. The first was when Garrett Conklin, the boy who had insisted on wearing his mother’s strappy heels to the middle-school dance, tried to get a glimpse of William’s stomach in the locker room after gym class, to see if what Mona had claimed was true. When William caught Garrett looking at his exposed torso, he snapped, “Hey, fruitcake, quit staring.”

  The second was when William usurped Tommy’s role as lead alto boy in choir. Tommy had been lead for as long as any of us could remember.

  The boys strolled over to us at recess the following day. “OK,” they said. “How are we gonna do it?”

  There were a few details to work out. For one, there would be the matter of William’s absence, though we didn’t think this would be hard to explain. We could just say he was unhappy, that it was all he’d ever talk about—how depressing it was to work overnight in those mines, so much white. We’d say he had run toward the flats on the edge of town and there … well, you can imagine.

  Mona was the most skeptical. “What if it doesn’t work?” she asked, scratching at the scar on her head where a squirrel had once tried to bury its acorns.

  “It will,” we said. “We just have to time it properly. We’ll want to do it when your leaves are out, because that’ll be the color they stay.”

  “October then,” she said.

  It was already September. We didn’t have much time. The anticipation set in like a sugar rush. We spent a great deal of time speculating about what would happen when we finally killed the boy who controlled the seasons. Would each of us be frozen exactly as we were too, as fourteen-year-olds with acne and braces? This possibility terrified us. We wanted to turn into adults. But we loved Mona Sparrow—oh, how we loved her!

  We had agreed to kill William in one of the school’s music practice rooms, because they were fully soundproofed. Since it was I who had thought up the idea in the first place, I was in charge of luring William away.

  “Hey, William,” I said, sidling up to him by the lockers after class.

  “Yeah?” He spun to face me. It was the first time I’d ever looked at him head-on like this, and I felt my breath catch. He was astonishingly handsome. His eyes were lucid and chilled as they settled on my face. Like winter, I thought, shivering.

  “I heard you’re the best alto in choir,” I said.

  “Sure.” He puffed up his chest, just a bit. I knew I had him then.

  “I was wondering if you could help me with my vibrato.”

  He looked at me skeptically. “Now?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why not? The practice room is free. I would have asked Tommy, but he’s not as good.”

  “Right,” William said. He slammed his locker shut, then followed me to the practice room, where the rest of us were waiting.

  When he caught sight of the entire gang, packed thickly in a semicircle, he began to stutter. “Hey,” he said, “what’s the—”

  Before he could finish his sentence, we grabbed his arms and twisted them behind his back. He yelped in pain. Amanda unspooled a large strip of duct tape and plastered it over his lips. Then we stabbed him, piercing his skin with the plastic knives we’d pilfered from the school cafeteria, until beads of blood pearled on his flesh.

  It was a slow, painful way to go
. The knives were dull and rubbery and would bend unless we held them at just the right angle, wheedling them into his flesh. The blades chafed against his arms, scoring with hatch lines. It looked as though he’d been mauled by the raccoons that lived beneath my house.

  William heaved and gasped for breath. He didn’t try to dissuade us. It was then that something strange started to happen—an oppressive heat began to radiate from his palms, still tied behind his back. The heat was so searing, our knives melted into a bubbling puddle on the carpet. We looked at one another’s dampened faces. I shut my eyes and imagined that I was in an African veld, standing before a round, red sun.

  The room got hotter and hotter. It seemed only a matter of time before each of us suffocated. “What do we do?” Tommy sputtered, his face a mottled crimson.

  But just as soon as he said it, the heat seemed to burst like a blister. Water came shooting out of William’s kneecaps. “Agh!” we screamed, dodging the steady stream. It flowed and flowed, beating a dirge on the drum set in the corner. At last the surge petered out and each of us stood, soused, in awe.

  Then William died.

  For a moment, we all stared at his body, as if expecting his fingers to twitch, or his eyes to blink. Someone reached over and poked his side, just to be sure.

  “What are we going to do with him?” I asked. We had only thought of what we’d say to the police—not of how we would dispose of the body.

  We rock-paper-scissorsed. Tommy was the winner, and he said we should take William to the salt flats. The six strongest boys stepped forward solemnly, our pallbearers. “One, two, three!” they cried, hefting William’s body onto their shoulders.

  Outside, the world seemed as we’d left it. Shoulders hunched to our ears, we glanced around uneasily, trying to detect any differences. We noticed the birds roosting on the telephone wire first. Was it possible they were less blue than they had been? Someone pointed to the sky. It was grayer than we remembered. “Maybe it’s supposed to rain,” Amanda suggested, though we knew this was highly unlikely.

  The boys walked with William’s body on their backs, one of his limp arms dangling between their heads, while the rest of us trailed behind. They complained that their arms ached, but they dared not stop, not until we got to the flats.

  “Shh,” someone said. “Listen.”

  The wind skated over the crust, echoing through the cracks as if through hollow bones.

  We continued walking, tiptoeing over the endless sheets of salt. Was this what walking on the surface of the moon felt like? In the backs of our minds, we could hear the warning our parents had given us so many times before, not to go so far onto the flats that we lost sight of home.

  “Which way?” we asked.

  Tommy pointed his finger forward, as if he knew.

  “We should leave trail markers,” I said. “Bread crumbs or something.”

  “Good idea—anyone have any bread?” Tommy asked.

  None of us did. We decided to use articles of clothing instead, dropping stray mittens and scarves that curled sinuously against the white. We walked until we were out of clothing. The twinkling lights of the town disappeared behind us, and we could no longer see the smoke from the chimneys.

  “Let’s set him down,” Tommy grunted, wiping sweat from his lip.

  The boys squatted and shrugged William off their shoulders. He hit the ground with a thud. His skin had sallowed in the cold. He’d looked dead before, but this was a new level of lifelessness.

  “Godspeed, Weatherboy,” someone whispered.

  We bowed our heads and held our hands to our hearts. “Godspeed,” we repeated, taking in the sight of William’s tongueless lace-up boots, his crisp-starched shirt.

  “We should strip him,” someone suggested. “It’ll be easier for his soul to escape that way.”

  None of us wanted to be the one to undress William. And then, from somewhere deep among us, a voice, sweet as a lark’s. “I’ll do it.”

  Mona. We’d nearly forgotten she was among us. She lanced through the pack and knelt to the ground where the boys had deposited the body. With both hands, she lifted William’s head and positioned it in her lap. Her fingers worried themselves through his flaxen hair, combing the tangles free of salt.

  William looked so young, like a child sleeping in his mother’s arms. Mona started to undo his shirt. None of us made any move to help. When, at last, all the buttons had been unfastened, Mona slid off one sleeve, then the other. We gasped at the sight of William’s stomach, that stretch of marble-like expanse.

  Mouths agape, we pointed, glugging at the air. There was no glass in William’s stomach, no dome with snow behind it.

  “Maybe it frosted over,” Mona said, shrugging.

  She shifted so she was by his feet. She eased off one boot, then the other, working as if she had all the time in the world. Each of us was shivering, hearts thrumming in our chests. She peeled off William’s tattered socks, and we all stared at his feet, so large and exposed, calluses warping the whorls of each round toe pad.

  Then she unzipped his fly—this was what we had been waiting for! But once she had removed his pants and underwear, we stared at his naked body and found ourselves disappointed. There was something painfully human about how shriveled he was. We wrapped our disappointment in mirth and snickered.

  Tommy reached down and took William’s boots, cupping their soles in his open palms like they were water. “These shouldn’t go to waste,” he said.

  Someone else reached out and took William’s shirt, his pants.

  “Enough,” we said. “Let’s dig him a grave.”

  We got down on our hands and knees. Our fingernails scrabbled against the salt’s slick surface; it was like trying to shave ice. We only cumulated a few handfuls of salt—nowhere near enough to bury a person. We gathered whatever palmfuls we could and tossed them over William’s body, like we were trying to preserve his meat. We stared at him, lying there, salted. He looked like a mistake interrupting all that emptiness. None of us said so. Instead, we lifted our eyes and gazed longingly at the curve of the earth, like fish staring at the world that lay beyond our bowl.

  For days, we waited. We waited for the cops, for William’s aunt and uncle or his parents or a childhood friend to ring. No one did. It was as if William Percy had never existed, save for one detail: every day, the world turned more and more ashen. At first, we thought we were just imagining it. But then, other people started to notice too. It appeared as though someone had punctured the membrane of the sky and was letting all the blue ooze out of it.

  The sun cooled to a waxen yellow. The moon stopped cycling. Every night, it looked exactly as it had on the day William died. Riverbanks flooded in areas where it hadn’t stopped raining. Our hair and fingernails ceased to grow.

  Naturally, the rest of the world did not connect this state of affairs to William Percy’s death. I sat with my father’s radio every night and listened to the tinny voices complain about global warming. The miners in town said it was a conspiracy, or an alien invasion. Others built arks, thinking this was the coming of a second flood.

  “I bet it isn’t this drab in the tropics,” my father said, cheeks blanched by the anemic light that streamed through the kitchen window.

  The only vibrant things left were Mona Sparrow’s leaves. Whenever she walked into the classroom, we’d avert our eyes, not wanting her to see how thirsty we were for her brilliance. On the playground, her head glowed luridly beneath the pallid sun. We hated her for it.

  Gathering in the hallways by the lockers, we discussed how we might go about reversing the curse. When Mona approached, we turned our backs and ignored her.

  Wednesday, in gym class, we were playing dodgeball when we noticed a dark shadow blooming above Mona’s ear. “Look!” we said, pointing. There, perched in her leafy head, was a single plum, feltlike and purple. Tommy reached out to touch it, but Mona reeled back at the sight of his hand. She brought her own fingers to the plum, testing its
weight.

  “It’s exquisite,” we said.

  We looked at one another and nodded—now was our chance. We asked Mona to meet us after school, told her that we wanted to make amends for how we’d treated her these past few months. It wasn’t her fault she was so beautiful, we said. She regarded us skeptically, but none of us doubted she would be there.

  Once the bell rang, we gathered by the flagpole, hands wormed into our pockets, and settled in to wait. Five minutes went by, then ten. “She isn’t coming,” someone said.

  “She’ll be here.”

  Sure enough, Mona appeared. Two boys darted out from the pack and jumped her. She shrieked and rammed her gnarled branches in our direction, like an animal who realizes it’s been decked for slaughter. We held her fast in our grip, feeling the warmth of her limbs, the flutter of her veins beneath our hands. She went slack with defeat.

  “Don’t say anything or we’ll kill you,” we warned, as we marched her to the edge of town.

  This time, we knew where we were going. Just before the salt flats was a spiny thicket made up of cacti and acacia trees—the only sorts of plants that could thrive in such saline soil. The shrubbery there was thorny, barren, densely packed. The trees were black. Vultures perched on boughs overhead; their necks swiveled to follow us as we walked. A breeze blew by. The air smelled of tears.

  Around Mona’s middle, we tied a thick beige rope and tethered her to the tallest tree. Our eyes feasted on her rutilant leaves, her bright purple plum. Our bodies trembled with hunger. Tommy reached out and spun the plum on its vine, twisting it around and around. Mona howled—the sound of it something primal, as though he had sliced deep into her skin.

  We watched Tommy lean in again and palm the plum so fiercely, his fingers left indentations in its skin. He tugged. The fruit gave with the faintest snap and Mona winced. “Don’t,” she said.

  Tommy laughed. He opened his mouth and bit into the fruit. Pink juice sluiced from his lips and dribbled down the front of his shirt.

  “How is it?” we asked.

  As Tommy chewed, his eyes widened. “It’s delicious,” he said.