The Cabinet of Curiosities by Stefan Bachmann

Author:Stefan Bachmann
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-03-10T22:00:00+00:00

Upstairs, behind the little door, behind the yellow wallpaper, Mabel’s flower stretched its roots into the dirt toward a pale hand buried there. The hand had begun to grow roots, too, from its fingertips and from under its nails. The finger roots met the flower roots. Slowly, they began to twist around each other.

The next morning Mabel woke with a start. She’d had such a terrible dream. Her heart was still heavy with it, heavy as a stone. She got up and walked about her room. It was regular, hideous, she thought, with its silly paintings and its silly fireplace. And then she remembered the boy and the dirt closing over his staring eyes. She hurried upstairs and peered into the little attic. It looked quite harmless. The yellow wallpaper was slashed, but there were only boards behind it now.

“Mr. Pittance,” she called. “Mr. Pittance?” And then, quietly: “I suppose I’m sorry. I did not want to, but I was so angry with you! Please don’t be dead!”

But if there was a skin garden on the other side of the wall, it did not show itself, and Mabel did not know whether to be relieved or terrified. If there was a skin garden, there was also a beautiful flower with gold-speckled leaves lying on the floor with a chopped stem, and a little boy with golden hair, buried in the earth together with a pair of shears. And if there wasn’t . . .

Mabel shuddered. She looked out the window. She went to it and sat down. It was all just a dream. It had to be. She watched the milkmen and the ice men and the automobiles clogging the streets, and watched the smoke rise from the chimney forests, and it was all so deliciously normal that it convinced her she had done nothing wrong. She had only dreamed it.

She went downstairs and ate breakfast with her parents.

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