The Otto Digmore Difference by Brent Hartinger

Author:Brent Hartinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: hollywood, friendship, road trip, gay romance, gay friendship, gay actor, gay disability, burn survivor, gay new adult, lgbt disability
Publisher: Brent Hartinger

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An hour or so later, we arrive at a place called Saddlesore Junction — a tourist-y recreation of an old frontier town, not too far off the freeway. The buildings are painted in bright colors and marked with words like "saloon" and "bank" and "sheriff" and "hotel," but they're all gift shops and ice cream parlors, as far as I can tell. And at this point, I seriously want to bean whoever came up with the first decorative wagon wheel.

We park and get out to look around. There are a handful of people — parents with screaming little kids and bored teenagers staring at their phones. It's fine as far as tourist attractions go, but I admit I'm curious why Mo wanted us to stop here. The walk-through flying saucer sounded way more interesting.

We check out the closest of the gift shops, which is filled with racks of t-shirts, and beaded Indian jewelry, and a cabinet full of some locally made hot sauce and pickled asparagus, and, weirdly, a big collection of ships-in-bottles. In the middle of the Texas frontier?

A few minutes later, Russel tugs on my shirt from behind.

"You have to see this," he says, wanting to show me something.

He leads me to an area in the back of the gift shop — a little wooden storefront within the store with the words "Curio Museum" written on the glass in the fake, curtained window.

It's darker inside, everything lit by wan light in recessed fixtures, but I can make out the glass displays filled with all kinds of strange things — Indian scalps, and rusted torture devices, and cow embryos suspended in jars full of formaldehyde, that kind of thing. Everything is old and dusty, and the signs are all warped and yellowed with the letters faded.

Inside one of the cases, a bulb flickers. Being here makes me a little nervous for some reason.

Russel takes me by the shoulders and leads me to the one of the display cases.

"Look at this," he says, and I can tell there's something he's not saying.

Inside the case on a cloth-covered pedestal is an old box of dark weathered wood, banded with iron, with a big metal padlock on the front.

A sign on top of the box, a little sandwich board, says, BOX OF MYSTERY: Do Not Open!

There's another sign on the pedestal itself, and it reads, "Not long after we opened the Saddlesore Junction Curio Museum, a man came to us with an offer to give us one thousand dollars. In exchange, he made us promise to forever keep this box safe, but to never open it up. He wouldn't tell us what's inside, and we never saw him again, but visitors to the museum have speculated that it may contain any number of dangerous things, from the trapped spirit of an evil Indian shaman, to some imprisoned incarnation of the Devil Himself. All we know is that WE WILL NEVER OPEN THIS BOX!"

I roll my eyes. "Really?"

"What?" Russel says. "You don't believe? You really think a place like this would lie?" He smiles.

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