“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.”
“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 h
er 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.
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CUT
by Brenna Yovanoff
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
My mother cut my heart out and put it in a box.
If this was a story, that’s how it would end.
It would begin with snow and the tragic, impersonal death of a young trophy wife and fade into a montage of the replacement bride, how she drenched her hair with honey and washed her face with milk.
That part’s true.
When my father remarried, the woman was unapologetically vain. She spent hours in front of the mirror, looking all alabaster and perfect. On Wednesdays and Saturdays she went downtown to the day spa, where they shaped her fingernails and peeled the top layer of her skin off with various kinds of acid.
I stayed home and dyed my hair. I caked my face with powder and drew black lines around my eyes to show everyone the difference between us, that I wasn’t like her, that she wasn’t really my mother. She kept buying me dresses in pink and turquoise and acting like we could be best friends.
Let me start again. My father’s wife had my heart cut out. She put it in a box.
The secret is that it wasn’t really my heart. Her slim gigolo boyfriend took me out to the Presidio, where the salt wind blew in off the sea. He touched my face and breathed licorice and aftershave on me, which made me want to scream. Then he bought a pound of lamb’s heart from a butcher in Greek Town and took it home to her. He told her he loved her. He told her that the dense, membranous muscle belonged to me.
Okay, that last part was a lie. Can you tell that I’m lying? My stepmother doesn’t have a boyfriend. But if she did, he’d be young, with wavy hair and bad shoes. He’d be the kind of guy who knows where to buy organ meat in primarily ethnic neighborhoods.
This is more like it: my obscenely vain stepmother put on her fifty-dollar Dior eye shadow and her Manolo Blahnik pumps and reached for her Gaultier clutch. She cut her own heart out and dipped it in lead or mercury—one of those metals that poisons you and makes you go crazy. She fed it to me in sly, careful moments, in pieces, so that I would be like her.
I sat in my room with the shades pulled down, and the venom of her heart moved like poison, getting under my skin and making me all drowsy. She spent hours by the country-club pool, trying to look younger, but washed-up socialites never do.
I lay with the blankets over me, so heavy I couldn’t move my head. My dye job was starting to grow out and the roots were showing. I stayed so long it felt like I was turning into stone.
Then one night she came to my room like a silentfilm star, slightly crazed, smelling like gin, and yanked me out of bed. She sat me in front of the ruffled vanity, studying me with bleary eyes.
“I just want you to like me,” she said. “I just want us to do things together. Why don’t you like me?”
The whole time she kept touching me in that clumsy, drunk way, tugging at my hair. I watched her reflection so I wouldn’t have to watch my own—the crumpled way her mouth seemed to just collapse. Her eyelids were dark and greasy-looking, like she’d bruised them.
She took me by the shoulders and shook me hard, suddenly. “Why are you doing this to yourself? Why do you insist on looking like a freak? Are you determined to embarrass me?”
She brandished a handkerchief—white, petal-soft—and began to scrub my face. She scrubbed hard and fierce until my mouth got pink and so did my cheeks. She wiped my makeup off like she was scrubbing me back to life.
“Answer me,” she kept saying, but her voice sounded weird and shrill, and the words had stopped making sense.
When I opened my mouth, it felt like a tiny version of a black hole, where light disappeared and nothing could come out. She shook me, and my head rocked back and forth. I couldn’t stop nodding.
She swept from the room without warning and came back with the scissors. I closed my eyes. The blades made a whispering noise, snick, snick. I felt lighter.
When she dropped the shears on the carpet, I didn’t know how to feel. It was the worst thing anyone had ever done to me. I had a sudden thought that no one had ever really done anything to me. It was glorious and shocking. I didn’t feel like myself, but for the first time in years, I didn’t feel like I was trying to be someone else.
In the mirror, my hair was brutally short. It stuck up everywhere, patchy-black in places, but most of it was blond—my real color. My mouth and cheeks were hectic, and my eyes looked wild. My blood felt like electricity. Like I could do anything.
We sat in front of the mirror, staring at my reflection. She was crying now, sloppy and horrifying, asking me to forgive her.
I wanted to tell her not to cry. That I forgave her for her smallness, for so many reasons.
I was something breathtaking and rare now, while she would never be beautiful again.
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PHILOSOPHER’S FLIGHT
by Maggie Stiefvater
This is another one of those stories that made me uncomfortable to post, because it was so strange. It was based on a dream, as many of my short stories are, but it spiraled wildly out of control from there. I played with two of my favorite themes: neurotic geniuses and fallible leaders. —Maggie
My name is Scott Anthony Caul, and I am E. M. Parmander’s only living assistant.
Parmander is a genius and a philosopher and as such is very difficult to work with. He also has a disregard for his own personal safety that would have been thrilling to watch if it hadn’t extended to my safety as well.
“I’m not certain this is the best of ideas,” I tell him. I bore even myself halfway through the sentence, so many times have I said it. Parmander is in the process of building a flying machine. It is all gears and canvas and rope, and somehow it is powered by thirteen frantic sparrows that are caged in a bamboo nest in its belly. The cage has no door.
“I will need you to fly it, Caul,” Parmander says in response. “My thighs are too monstrous to fit in the seat. No starches tonight.”
Parmander has no thighs of which to speak. Aside from being a genius and a philosopher, he is also vain, and his intelligent, thoughtful variety of vanity means that he will often skip meals while he works. He studies himself in reflective surfaces. Pinches the skin at his hipbone and makes a wrinkle to match the one that appears between his eyebrows. Pensively brings back up the contents of his stomach after lengthy luncheons. If his thighs are too monstrous to fit the seat of the machine, then he has built the seat too small or he intended all along for me to fly it.
I crouch to look at the sparrows. They are horrified by my presence and flap crazily about. Their activity makes something in the machine hum, and its canvas wings twitch as if to flap.
“Caul,” Parmander says, “You are agitating the engine. Come away.”
I come away.
“Where,” I ask, “is it you’re wanting me to fly this thing?”
“Pshaw,” says Parmander, “You needn’t sound so ill-te
mpered.”
“Have a tangerine,” I suggest, because tangerines will frequently improve his mood. He refuses the fruit. I have it. I say, “I don’t think there’s any use to having this flying machine. Where is it you want to go with it, other than up into the fog?”
Parmander gazes wistfully out of the garage. The scene before us is a maze of roads, crawling with vehicles driven by gears and powered by bellows thrusting steam and darkened by coal. There is nothing quite as elegant as Parmander’s flying machine, all bleached cotton canvas and whips of golden bamboo. Over all of it is the fog, and below it the black birds and the pigeons that cannot be troubled to challenge the clouds.
“Through the fog,” Parmander says. “Over the fog. To where the fog ends and the sky begins.”
I have another tangerine as he begins to expound upon how only in the unpolluted air can man truly be free to contemplate the complexities of existence. I should be tidying—geniuses leave a lot of clutter behind—but it seems to me that if I am going to risk my neck going up in the machine, I shouldn’t have to work.
“If I could fit my hideous buttocks into the machine, I would fly to the Tower,” Parmander muses.
He is just trying to bait me now. The Tower is a massive, prewar stone structure that lies in the middle of a moat. The fixed bridge that takes you over the moat is submerged under a foot of water so that there is no way to get to the Tower itself without getting wet. This is because the Tower contains a breed of cloaked monsters who cannot cross water. They are forbidden to come in contact with humans—not that this is likely to happen, as precious few cross the flooded bridge to the island.
“And convert the monsters to Parmanderty,” I say. This is what Parmander has named his brand of philosophy. It revolves around purification and denial and clarity of thought and women not wanting to have sex with you. There are finer points, but that is the bulk of it.
The Curiosities (Carolrhoda Ya) Page 11