A Cabinet of Curiosity

by Bradford Morrow

  But he couldn’t read or write in total darkness. He struck the match and held it to the wick. Once the candle flared to life, he sat, untied the string binding his manuscript, and began to turn the pages of his book. He’d begun it four years ago, working on it in every spare moment: a story that unraveled a great mystery. Someday, well-known editors would help him and it would be read by hundreds, maybe thousands, of people.

  He stopped to peruse a picture he’d drawn of an outsized, misshapen hand clutching someone’s throat. The someone was meant to be a girl but looked more like a turnip that had been set on fire. The hand resembled a bear’s paw, or maybe a mitten.

  Not one of his better efforts. He continued shuffling pages until he came to one filled with more blocky writing.

  Never had General Dargero encountered such a foe as that evil General Forestor. “My heart fills with pity for those brave Girls” he thought. “How they will escape i cannot imagine. He has defiled this once beautiful countryside and when he lets the floods loose there will be no safe refuge for anyone, Least of all these brave Girls. Brave though they may be they are shockingly outnumbered.”

  He read it twice with approval. The page needed an illustration. He glanced over his shoulder at Tom Phelan, and from the drawer withdrew a cardboard folder. Open, the folder revealed dozens of pages from newspapers and magazines, culled from trash bins in the hospital and street. Pictures of children, nearly all of them girls. Only here were they safe, only here could he protect them.

  He sorted through them as though they were the books he’d coveted in the library at the asylum, the stories that fascinated him nearly as much as the fires and little girls. Dotty Darling from the Woman’s Home Companion. The rosy-cheeked Campbell’s Soup Kids; a sleeping child from an advertisement for Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes. Little Nemo and Princess Ozma, the latter torn from a library book at the asylum. A photograph of girls sewing at a Home School, and a chubby Good Housekeeping tot. The Kewpies. Illustrations from the Girls Sewing Book. Life-sized dolls in sundresses gay as a garden. A holy card depicting St. Joan in armor, hair shorn and a sword in her upraised hand, leading an army of blonde angels.

  He traced their faces with a calloused finger. All those round eyes and dimpled cheeks, white throats and Kewpie-doll mouths, ringlets topped by immense butterfly bows. The world was full of girls, real and unreal.

  He took out a sheet of onionskin and laid it over the smiling face of Princess Ozma. He loved to draw but always encountered a chasm between what he imagined and what he produced on the page. The longest, most painstaking sessions with pencils and crayons resulted in lumpen figures that resembled goblins more than the children and Civil War soldiers he’d set out to depict.

  As a boy at the asylum school he’d secretly traced illustrations he found in books. The Oz tales were best for this—the original pictures were done in firm yet flowing black lines, and there were many of them. He traced countless pictures of Dorothy Gale and her friends, especially Princess Ozma, the girl who turned into a boy. There was a good picture book about the Battle of Gettysburg too. He copied its fierce generals and brave soldiers and, as the months passed, began to combine these drawings with those of the girls from Oz. He gave the characters new names, and sent them on their own adventures. The girls brandished firearms and sabers; the Scarecrow and Tik-Tok took their places among the good generals.

  All of this came to an end when he was discovered one afternoon by the asylum school’s librarian.

  “I wondered who’d been vandalizing all those books.” Knocking the volume from his hands, she slapped him so hard he fell from his chair. “Who’s going to pay for that, you imbecile?”

  He attacked her as she snatched up his drawings, and ended up being beaten with a hose then left alone in a concrete cell for two days. It was only since he’d arrived at the Workingmen’s House that he’d begun writing and drawing again.

  He traced Princess Ozma’s mouth, but his pencil was too dull and the onionskin kept tearing. Frustrated, he balled up the paper and stuffed it into the drawer, opened the folder, and slipped the picture of Ozma back inside. He sorted through the other papers until he found a scrap of newsprint that felt like velvet, so worn was it from handling. His most precious possession, even more precious than his manuscript: a newspaper photograph of a five-year-old girl, fair-haired, her ghostly face bleached out so that only her eyes and mouth could be clearly seen. Elsie Paroubek. She looked otherworldly, elfin, her expression one of slight alarm, more sprite than living child.

  She was no longer living. His eyes welled, the image blurred as he brought it to his face and pressed it against his mouth.

  “Dearest one,” he whispered.

  He shut his eyes and saw her face floating before him, her tiny mouth and dark eyes. He bent over the picture, hands in his lap, and waited for the happy spell to come. Afterward he rocked back and forth, weeping silently as he prayed for forgiveness. When his grief subsided, he replaced the newspaper fragment in the folder and gathered up the pages of his manuscript. He tied them back together with the piece of string, his clumsy, damaged fingers fumbling with the knot. He opened the drawer and put everything back inside. Last of all, he blew out the votive candle, set it with his other things, and closed the drawer.

  In the room behind him, Tom Phelan kicked out, gave a muffled cry, and turned over in his bed. Henry stood and undressed, folding his clothes before pulling on his nightshirt. He knelt beside his bed and said his prayers, fingering the scapular. When he finished, he made the sign of the cross, stood, and crawled under the covers. Within a few minutes he was sleeping soundly.

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

  DIANE ACKERMAN is the author of twenty-four works of nonfiction and poetry, including The Zookeeper’s Wife (W. W. Norton), A Natural History of the Senses (Random House), and The Human Age (W. W. Norton). She has received the John Burroughs Nature Award, the Orion Book Award, the PEN/Henry David Thoreau Prize, and the Jan Karski Humanitarian Award, among other honors. A film version of The Zookeeper’s Wife appeared in 2017.

  JULIANNA BAGGOTT’s many poetry collections and novels include Pure (Grand Central/Hachette) and Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders (Little, Brown/Hachette), both New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Agni, at Tor.com, and on NPR. She teaches screenwriting at the Florida State University Film School.

  ANN BEATTIE has written over twenty novels and short story collections, most recently, The Accomplished Guest (Scribner). A Wonderful Stroke of Luck (a novel) will be published by Viking in April 2019.

  MATT BELL is the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall (all Soho Press). A native of Michigan, he teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University. His contribution to this issue is excerpted from a novel in progress.

  MARTINE BELLEN has written nine collections of poetry and three opera libretti. Her most recent collection is This Amazing Cage of Light: New and Selected Poems (Spuyten Duyvil).

  SARAH BLACKMAN is the director of Creative Writing at the Fine Arts Center, a public arts high school in Greenville, South Carolina. She is the co-fiction editor of DIAGRAM and the founding editor of Crashtest, an online magazine for high school–age writers and artists. Her books Mother Box and Other Tales and Hex were both published by FC2.

  GREGORY NORMAN BOSSERT’s short fiction sprawls across genre boundaries; recent works appear everywhere from The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Two, edited by Neil Clarke, and The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Nine, edited by Ellen Datlow (both Night Shade Books) to The Saturday Evening Post to Conjunctions:69, Being Bodies. His story “The Telling” won the 2013 World Fantasy Award. He lives across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, where he works for Lucasfilm.

  In 2016, longtime Conjunctions contributor CAN XUE was shortlisted for the p
restigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature; in 2015, her novel The Last Lover (Yale University Press) received the Best Translated Book Award.

  MAUD CASEY is the author of four works of fiction, most recently The Man Who Walked Away (Bloomsbury) and a book of nonfiction, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions (Graywolf). She is a recipient of the Calvino Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the St. Francis College Literary Prize.

  CHEN ZEPING has published widely in the field of Chinese linguistics. In addition, he has translated a number of contemporary Chinese writers into English in collaboration with Karen Gernant, including Can Xue, Zhang Kangkang, Alai, Yan Lianke, and Shi Tiesheng.

  SAMUEL R. DELANY’s works include Dhalgren (Vintage), The Atheist in the Attic (PM Press), and the forthcoming Letters from Amherst (Wesleyan University Press). He has won both Hugo and Nebula Awards from the World Science Fiction Convention and the Science Fiction Writers of America. He lives in Philadelphia.

  JEFFREY FORD’s most recent novel is Ahab’s Return: or, The Last Voyage (William Morrow/HarperCollins), and his most recent collection is A Natural History of Hell: Stories (Small Beer Press).

  KAREN GERNANT, professor emerita at Southern Oregon University, has collaborated with Chen Zeping in translating more than ten books of contemporary Chinese fiction, the most recent of which is Can Xue’s novel Frontier (Open Letter).

  LAUREN GREEN is an MFA candidate in fiction and poetry at the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers. She is the recipient of Columbia University’s Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts, as well as Glimmer Train’s Short-Story Award for New Writers.

  ELIZABETH HAND is the author of fifteen award-winning novels and five collections of short fiction and essays. She divides her time between the coast of Maine and North London. Her novel Curious Toys (Mulholland Books/Little, Brown), inspired by the artist Henry Darger and the 1915 Chicago murder of five-year-old Elsie Paroubek, will be out in 2019. Her contribution to this issue is excerpted from Curious Toys.

  BRANDON HOBSON’s novel Where the Dead Sit Talking (Soho Press) is a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award. His work has appeared in The Pushcart Prize XL: Best of the Small Presses, Conjunctions, NOON, The Believer, Puerto del Sol, and in many other journals. He is a member of the Cherokee Nation Tribe in Oklahoma.

  CATHERINE IMBRIGLIO is the author of Parts of the Mass (Burning Deck), which received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Intimacy (Center for Literary Publishing), which received the Colorado Prize for Poetry. She teaches at Brown University.

  GREG JACKSON is the author of Prodigals: Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), for which he received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award and was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. In 2014, he was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction.

  A. D. JAMESON’s books include I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and, with artist Andrew DeGraff, Cinemaps: An Atlas of 35 Great Movies (Quirk Books). Last May, he received his PhD in creative writing (fiction) from the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

  MADELINE KEARIN is a PhD candidate in historical archaeology at Brown University. Her work examines the construction and administration of insane asylums as therapeutic environments in nineteenth-century New England. Her first literary publication, “Fallout,” appeared in Conjunctions:67, Other Aliens.

  DAVE KING’s novel The Ha-Ha (Little, Brown) won the 2006 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems and stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Fence, and other venues, and his story “The Stamp Collector” is included in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018. A memoir about his 1974 travels is in the works.

  WILLIAM LYCHACK is the author of the forthcoming novel Cargill Falls (Braddock Avenue Books). He teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh and is at work on an account of his time in the monkhood in Burma.

  NATHANIEL MACKEY’s most recent books are Blue Fasa, Late Arcade (both New Directions), and Lay Ghost (Black Ocean). He edits the literary journal Hambone.

  GERARD MALANGA is the author of a dozen books of poetry, including Whisper Sweet Nothings & Other Poems (Bottle of Smoke Press), and recently completed his memoirs, entitled In Remembrance of Things Past.

  Longtime Conjunctions contributor JOYCE CAROL OATES’s latest books include the novels Hazards of Time Travel and A Book of American Martyrs, and the collections Beautiful Days: Stories (all Ecco) and Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense (Mysterious Press). She was recently inducted into the American Philosophical Society.

  STEPHEN O’CONNOR is the author, most recently, of the novel Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (Viking/Penguin) and the short story collection Here Comes Another Lesson (Free Press).

  KELSEY PETERSON is assistant teaching professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. She holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was an Olin Fellow. Her contribution to this issue marks her first appearance in print.

  BIN RAMKE’s most recent book is Light Wind Light Light (Omnidawn). He teaches at the University of Denver.

  A doctor by training, cover artist FARID RASULOV is active across a wide range of artistic media—large-scale paintings, installations, 3-D graphics, animation, and sculpture—and represented Azerbaijan at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. He is most widely known for his large-scale, hyperrealistic still-life paintings. He lives in Baku, Azerbaijan.

  LYNN SCHMEIDLER’s poetry books include History of Gone (Veliz Books) and the chapbooks Wrack Lines and Curiouser & Curiouser (both Grayson Books). She is completing a short story collection.

  JOANNA SCOTT has published twelve works of fiction. Her most recent novel is Careers for Women (Little, Brown). She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

  ELENI SIKELIANOS is the author of Make Yourself Happy (Coffee House Press) and the forthcoming What I Knew (Nightboat), among other titles. The poem in this issue is from a new manuscript in progress, Your Kingdom.

  LAURA VAN DEN BERG is the author of two short story collections and two novels, most recently The Third Hotel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Her honors include the Bard Fiction Prize, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Pushcart Prize, and an O. Henry Award. Born and raised in Florida, she currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard University.

  QUINTAN ANA WIKSWO’s works include the collection The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far (Coffee House Press) and the novel A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should Be (Stalking Horse Press). A Creative Capital grantee in Emerging Fields, she has been honored by a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship at the Lynchburg African American Cemetery and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Endowed Fellowship at Yaddo. She is the 2018 Mina Darden Endowed Professor of Creative Writing at Old Dominion University.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  EDITOR: Bradford Morrow

  MANAGING EDITOR: Nicole Nyhan

  SENIOR EDITORS: Jedediah Berry, Benjamin Hale, J. W. McCormack, Edie Meidav, Pat Sims

  COPY EDITOR: Pat Sims

  ART EDITOR: Jessica Fuller

  ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Leah Dworkin, Michael Sarinsky

  PUBLICITY: Darren O’Sullivan, Mark R. Primoff

  EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS: Nicholas Benning, Leah Duckett, Gi
lad Jaffe, Nate Kouri, Danielle Martin, Nohan Meza, Jay Rosenstein, Dominique Spencer, Lin Swanson

  CONJUNCTIONS is published in the Spring and Fall of each year by Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  Copyright © 2018 by CONJUNCTIONS

  Cover design by Jerry Kelly, New York. Cover art by Farid Rasulov: Cats in the Lounge, digital print, 2014. © Farid Rasulov 2018, all rights reserved by the artist.

  ISBN 978-1-5040-5775-2

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