A Cabinet of Curiosity

by Bradford Morrow

  “Well, the will’s one of those fill-in-the-blank deals they sell at stationery stores. On this day of blah-ba-dee-blah, being of sound mind and—you know: body. That sort of thing. And it ends with this totally standard clause about the estate being divided equally among the kids. Equally. That’s what it says. Tess has seen it ten thousand times. So has everybody. So anyhow, they’re talking about the funeral home, and Tess says they should check the will to see if Millie said anything about what she wants done with her body. And Harriet’s like, ‘Oh, we can just decide for ourselves’—which obviously makes zero sense. And when Tess discovers the will is gone, Harriet’s all, ‘How strange. I wonder how that happened.’ But then she says, ‘Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you: Mom changed the will and she’s leaving me the house.’”

  “Whoa!” Melissa cups her cheek with her hand.

  “I know!” Jack says. “How convenient—right? She tells everybody they’re screwed out of their inheritance, and the will just happens to have disappeared!”

  “So, what will they do?”

  “What this family always does.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Harriet will get everything she wants.”

  “Why? How can that be possible?”

  Jack makes a scoffing noise and shakes his head slowly. “You should probably ask that boyfriend of yours.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jack smiles. “Do you really want to know?”

  Melissa notices that one of Jack’s front teeth is lighter than the other and that the edges of his nostrils are laced with ruptured capillaries. She says nothing.

  “Well, maybe I should just stay out of it.” He clamps his mouth shut and folds his arms. “But on the other hand, maybe this is something you actually should know.” He licks his lips. “And perhaps you already do.”

  Melissa’s mouth goes dry. A hollow opens inside her chest.

  “I mean,” says Jack, “you’ve probably been with Spence long enough to have noticed that he doesn’t exactly have a complete set of—you know: cojones.”

  Melissa’s head jerks back as if she’s been hit.

  “Sorry! Sorry!” Jack holds up both palms like a traffic cop. “I didn’t mean to offend. That’s just how it’s always been. Anything Harriet wants, Spence is like, ‘Sure thing! Absolutely!’ He’s like her enabler.”

  Melissa is standing. The porch swing, having lurched away as she slid out of it, rams the back of her thighs.

  “Jesus Christ!” she says. “What the fuck!”

  “Sorry.” Jack puts one hand on the floor and uncrosses his legs. “I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” He shoves off the floor and rises, first hunched, then straightening. “You should just see what happens.”

  The instant Jack reaches his full height there is a loud click in the kitchen, and a low shudder. The walls of the house begin to hum to the vibration of an electric motor. In the basement a different motor makes a repeated snarling yawn.

  The porch light is on. It flickers. Stays lit.

  “You’ll see,” says Jack. “Just see for yourself. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Melissa comes out of the tiny bathroom under the stairs to find Spencer standing just inside the front door, looking as if he has walked into the wrong house.

  “Hey,” she says.

  “Hey.” He half lifts his forearms for an embrace, but they fall back to his sides. His face is deflated. One of his white shirttails has come out of his pants.

  Melissa approaches him, but she too keeps her arms at her side. “What happened?” she says, and when he only looks confused, she adds, “I hurried back so I could go with you, but you were already gone.”

  “Oh.” He purses his lips apologetically, but says nothing.

  She flings her arms around him. “Don’t worry about it.” She presses her chest against his chest; her whole face goes pink. “I just wanted to be there for you.”

  She pulls back and takes hold of both his hands. “How did it go?” Her smile is tender, sad.

  “Oh, you know.” He makes a short exhalation. “A barrel of laughs.” Now he too is smiling, but only for an instant. “She’s going to be cremated.”

  Melissa has always been horrified by cremation, but she keeps that fact to herself. “Is that what you want?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t really care.”

  “Is that what your mother wanted?”

  “Harriet says she did. I never really talked to her about it.”

  “What does Tess say?”

  “Oh, Tess and Harriet never agree about anything.”

  “What about the will?” says Melissa.

  Spencer’s brow knots with perplexity.

  “The will,” she repeats. “Jack said the will is missing and that Harriet wants the house.”

  “Oh, that’s nothing. It’s around here somewhere. It’ll turn up.”

  “But what about the house?”

  Again: that look of perplexity.

  “Harriet can’t just take the house,” Melissa insists. “It belongs to all of you.”

  “I don’t want the house. It depresses me. There’s no way I’m ever going to live here again.”

  Melissa lets go of his hands. “But it’s a matter of principle! The house is your inheritance.”

  “I don’t care about that. Harriet loves the house, and she’s got nothing else. I think she should have it.”

  Two pizza boxes on the round dining-room table: one primavera, one sausage. Two jugs of Chilean merlot, both nearly empty. The power is still on, but the lights in the dining room are off. Four burning candles like red stalagmites atop silver pedestals.

  Outside the window: frenetic yips, forlorn wails.

  They’re back, thinks Melissa. They’re all around the house.

  “Just because you believe it doesn’t mean it’s true,” says Tess.

  Although Tess can’t be older than forty-five, her hair is zinc gray and she has the papery skin of a dedicated smoker. Her dark eyes are too close together, which makes her stare fierce.

  “Why don’t you just say what you really mean?” says Harriet, who is sitting between her siblings. Melissa is sitting between Spencer and Jack. She wants to listen to what the siblings are saying, but Jack is leaning close, his voice rumbling in her ear.

  “Why?” he says.

  He has just refilled her wineglass. He’s been filling it all evening and she has been drinking because the alcohol helps keep her awake. She doesn’t think she’s drunk, though when she is not looking directly at the ceiling, it seems to be reeling away.

  “I just feel too crowded,” she tells Jack. “I want to be out where the sky is everywhere and you can see all the way to the horizon.”

  Spencer has been talking to his sisters, but Melissa only hears his final words: “We need to be practical.”

  “I look out my window,” says Jack, “and all I see is emptiness. Big roads with no cars on them. No countryside. No real fields like the ones here. Just vast parking lots filled with corn.”

  At first Melissa has no idea what he is talking about, but then she remembers he lives in rural Illinois.

  “No,” she says. “I mean in the west West. You know: Colorado, Wyoming. I just feel that I could be freer there. Not so hemmed in. Also, the people there are different. More open. Not so worried about what everybody thinks. More in touch with—you know: the land.”

  “They’re all Republicans,” says Jack. He takes a sip from his glass and puts it back on the table. A purple flood line runs between his nose and lip.

  Tess has been speaking and now Spencer replies: “Money’s not everything.”

  Melissa tells Jack: “I don’t care about that. People are people to me. I don’t care about their politics. Religion. Whatever. Anyhow, I’m tired of playing it safe. I want to bust out. Be someplace real. Find out who I am. I mean, sometimes I feel like my whole life is fake. What kind of life is that?”

  Ja
ck smiles slyly and leans close. “So, are you going to do it?” His breath puffs against her cheek.

  “What?”

  “Move out west.”

  “Yes,” she says. “I’m thinking about it. I’m definitely—you know: checking things out.”

  “OK. But if you do that, what about—” He nods furtively in the direction of Spencer, to whom her back is turned.

  Melissa is not sure she has ever disliked anyone as intensely as she dislikes Jack. His left hand—the one nearest her—is resting knuckles down on his knee. She is sure that in a few seconds that hand will lift into the air and come down firmly on her thigh.

  Tess slams her fist on the table. “This is fucking bullshit! You think I don’t see what you’re doing!”

  Melissa’s heart pounds. Cold sweat prickles out all over her body.

  But Tess is not looking at her, or at Jack. She is staring at Harriet. “I am so fucking tired of your manipulative incompetence!”

  “Tess, come on!” says Spencer. “That’s not going to help.”

  “Jesus Christ, Spence! What is the fucking matter with you! Don’t you see what she’s doing?”

  “I just think we need to be reasonable. Insults won’t accomplish anything.”

  Melissa is looking at Spencer and thinking that he is afraid to live, that he is passionless, that his soul is in a cage made of compromise, lies, and fear. That’s why she has always felt stifled by him. That’s why, never once, not for a single second, has she ever truly loved him.

  The back of her chair hits the floor with a flat wham.

  She is standing. Spencer is looking at her, eyes wide, mouth hanging open. The only sound in the room is the hiss of the capped seltzer bottle in front of Harriet’s plate.

  Melissa does not know why she stood up. “I’m sorry,” she says. The floor sways beneath her feet, and her head whirls in the empty space between the tabletop and the ceiling. “I have to go for a walk. I need some fresh air.”

  Nobody says a word. She strides from the room, leaving her chair lying on the floor.

  First she walks, then runs, her flip-flops slapping her heels, her feet thudding against the hard clay of the rutted track, cool, sweet air flowing into her lungs. This is good, she thinks. This is what I need. Her head is clearing.

  For a while she runs after her shadow, which grows longer and longer as she gets farther from the porch light. But as the road darkens, her shadow becomes ever harder to see, until finally she is just a body moving in blackness, accompanied by the gentle ringing of crickets and peepers, the sound of air flowing past her ears, and of her own breaths, her heart, and her running feet. She seems to be staying right in the middle of the track, however, and she thinks that maybe she can keep it up until her eyes adjust. But then, without slacking her pace in the slightest, she pulls her phone out of her hip pocket, hits the flashlight app, and sends an ash-gray beam bounding out in front of her.

  The night air chills her bare skin, but the water around her feet, her ankles, her shins is reasonably warm. She wades out until the custardy mud beneath her feet gives way to prickly lakeweed, then she flings herself forward. “Oh!” she shouts, hearing her voice and splashes echoing off the trees. “Oh my God!” She lowers her head into the water and swims as hard as she can, hoping to banish the cold from her shoulders and legs.

  Now she is drifting on her back, panting. The exposed portions of her face, chest, and shoulders feel glazed with ice, but her body beneath the surface is comfortable—though on the edge of being chilly. She wonders if the air is cold enough for her breath to fog. She blows, but can’t see anything. There are no stars. She lifts her head out of the water and scans the lakeshore. In a direction that she imagines to be northwest, the silhouetted edge of the treetops is visible against a faint, liver-gray illumination. Otherwise, there is no distinction between the woods and the sky.

  A weirdly elastic cry sounds from the darkness just beside the lake, possibly from the very place she entered the water, though she can’t see anything clearly enough to be certain which direction she is facing. She hears more cries from farther away, each of them ending with an almost-whispered yip. So beautiful! Melissa thinks. She is not sure she has ever heard a more beautiful sound. A chill runs through her whole body—perhaps in response to the beauty, but also, she realizes, because she is now truly cold. Her jaw is clenching. Soon her teeth will start to chatter. She tenses her stomach muscles to keep from shivering, and listens to the coyote cries, near and far, first on one side of the lake, then on the other—and then, it seems, everywhere at once: the whole night alive with wild joy.

  Fur, Bark, Feather, Leaf, Faun

  Matt Bell

  What is real, what and when is real? Returned again from the flicker, the faun Chapman becomes obsessed with the question. But the natural world, the granted given of the Territory in the year of 1799, in this only time he thinks of as his, Chapman believes this is the best answer to his question, even if it does not fully satisfy, if it does not resolve wholly with the apple planter’s life he and Nathaniel have chased for the past decade. Left to wander one late summer afternoon, Chapman roams the next uncut strand of forest, he kneels in black dirt to lift the loam in his clawed hands, working the moist life of the humus between his fingers, the soil rich with nutrients and smelling of rot and decay and potential, every handful riven with beetles, maggots, worms, bits of decomposing plant matter, seeds and shells slipping between his fingers. He scrapes at the raw earth with his hooves, the earth only seemingly solid, seemingly permanent, but every inch tells a story of passing sunlight and rain and birth and growth and death, of ice and snow and heat and drought, the earth itself never static, always being shaped from above by weather and abundance, from below by the tectonic shifting of the earth’s plates, by the tremblings of earthquakes in distant parts of the continent, by the slowly sloshing movement of great quantities of water captured in cavernous aquifers, buried deep between drowned pillars of ancient stone.

  How much slow attention it takes to read such a story! And all that story only preamble to the one Nathaniel and Chapman and all the other men coming west aim to tell, the story of the productive earth of men being made by ax and shovel and plow.

  Pausing along a thin game path, Chapman puts his hands to a granite boulder taller than any man he’s ever seen. Leaning his weight into its massive solidity, he tests its immovable resistance, studies how its knobby surface is softened by lichen and moss, by streaks of guano and bird shit. The realness of the boulder’s weight, the realness of the moss and the shit. A glitter-scaled lizard skitters over the boulder’s hulking bulk and Chapman knows the lizard is real too, that its life is real, but real cannot mean merely alive. It does not mean merely solidity, presence.

  Many fake things, Chapman thinks, are alive, many living but fake things have a solid presence in the world. You can touch them, you can help them or hurt them, you can hear them cry out in pleasure or pain, but that alone does not make them real.

  He turns a hand in front of his face, watches a tick crawl harmlessly through the fur along the back of his wrist. Surrounding Chapman and the tick, there is the uncut forest taken as a whole, an organism entire, made of many kinds of life, many kinds of nonlife too. Then there is each individual piece of that whole, many visible only if his attention lingers, if he learns the names other men have gifted the pieces of the world. Oak and maple and pine. Deer and elk and moose. The gray wolf, the red fox, the common coyote. Blue jays, cardinals, robins, ravens, and crows. If Chapman tarried long enough, he believes he could learn the individual titles of each of these beings, what they are called by men, then what they call themselves in their own languages, the barks and yips and birdsong, the scented airs of bloom and branch. But does a creature need to have a name to be real? What Chapman is was first called a faun and what does that make him, what does his matching that description prove, except that he is something shaken loose from a story?

  And surely not all stories a
re real. Surely anything but that.

  What is real, the creature Chapman asks again. What is it that makes this place real and another not?

  The flicker has shown him a future in which there is less realness than there is here, he knows this and still he struggles to define exactly what it is the future has lost.

  Chapman feels his mind grasping toward the revelation, a revelation held just out of his mind’s reach. He begins to move more frantically through the forest, putting his palms against trunk and root, upon rock and branch, soon he is on his hands and knees, digging claws into the dirt as if the answers to his questions might lie just below the surface of the earth, buried below pine straw and fallen beechnuts, hidden underneath an owl pellet he picks up and discards into the brush. The real, the real, the real, what is it? Around him birds flutter into flight, startled by his manic movements through ferns that sweep dirt from his furred flanks, each bird flying less than a dozen feet before taking up a new perch from which to squawk its disapproval of Chapman’s frantic curiosity, of his desire to know always more, to possess all the knowledge of this world, to make the world into his possession by that knowing.

  Leaving the birds behind, Chapman comes upon the remains of a hide shelter perched upon a hill, at the high point of a hidden meadow. A failed inhabitation, the shelter abandoned, creaking poles lashed together with sinew and cord, covered with rotting furs. He ducks inside, considers the inside of animals scraped raw, made walls: deerskin, elk skin, the tanned underside of what might have been a bear. On the inside every beast looks the same—even a faun, even a man. Upon the dirt shelter floor is a circle of stones, a black scratch of ash from a long-ago fire, a scattering of bones. The shelter unused for at least a season, maybe longer. He crouches in the dirt and ash, sniffs at the shadows. He scuffs the floor with a hoof until an almost-extinct human trace rises to tickle his nostrils. Hunger, desperation, want and want and want. Half-wild Chapman cannot sleep inside but if rain were falling he might return here, stay warm for a little while longer. Not that he is ever really cold—sometimes he looks at his thick skin and wonders if he is not just half goat but half tree too, a body of bone covered by bark and fur. Who was it that slept in this space last? A company of men, Chapman thinks, no women or children. Hunters moving through the Cold Moon snow, seeking meat in the year’s thinnest season. Their hunger lingers, a months-old stink of desperation soaked like sweat into the captured air. Chapman cannot stay. Not inside this ruin of branch and scraped skin, wracked by weather. Not inside the hungry memory of the men who last slept here, whose hunger haunts every breath of trapped air.