Some Beautiful Curiosities

A note---You may recognize the idea of memories in a bottle from Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, although I tried to use them differently than she did.

You walk inside. It smells musty, like dust of a thousand worlds, which it is. A man greets you at the front; short brown beard and eyes so far estranged from his skull they seem to be floating. Brilliant pale irises, receding dark hair.

You wait for him to welcome you inside, but that formality seems lost on him. He closes the door behind you and you cough on the dust.

“Look around,” he says.

You do. The shelves are lined with bottles, a myriad of stout and slim, sleek and ornate. You uncork one, and suddenly your

thoughts slide out from beneath you and

you are standing on a hill. You think you are standing on a hill.

The sun moves across the sky in half a minute. The moon follows suit. Waiting and waiting, endless days, stiff in awkward armor, palm sweating on a sword’s hilt. A dreamlike realness surrounds your thoughts. You are waiting for something. A void of hunger deepens in your stomach; heart beats, skin sweats in the layered armor and thick sunlight.

A hand yanks you from your reverie. He stares at you with those eyes of his, the bottle wrenched from your grasp.

“Not too long,” he snaps. “You live within these memories, but time moves faster. But Death does not leave you alone. His threat is as real and imminent as any other day.”

“I could have died in there?” you ask. Phantom hunger still pulses in your stomach.

“You could have died in there.”

“Oh.”

You uncork the next bottle much more warily, cocking the stopper at an angle. You enter a trance.

City streets. Loud. Obnoxious.

People talk over each other and shove through the sidewalks. Blinking lights, whizzing cars. You can still feel the shelves and the bottles next to you, but you can also feel the dark metropolis, equally real.

You sit to the side, faint, clothing tattered and fading, coin cup rattling. Time moves slower than on the hill, but still you can watch the people whizzing past. You can see the sun moving across the clouds; fading into the purgatory of the grey, unfeeling sky.

You are jolted from the vision with

a dull ache in your back from the hardness of the bricks,

a sting where the cement met your tailbone.

The man takes the bottle from you and hands you another one. Tinier than the rest, more translucent than the rest. It seems innocent; a youthful feeling of in-progress. Letting the bottle roll back and forth between your fingers, you ask the question.

“What is all of this?”

“Curiosities of mine.” He walks along the shelves as if they are his second home, which they probably are. “Some beautiful curiosities.”

“Explain them to me.”

He lowers his face to yours, but you can barely look him. Those pale, floating eyes; that softly folding face.

“They are lives,” he whispers. “Past lives, kept on shelves. All lives lived by one person.”

“Your lives?” you ask.

He seems amused. “Not mine. But I have seen them. Warriors and beggars. Wind-up assassins, floating prisons. I protected all of these until the time was right.” He nods toward the bottle in your hand. “Would you like it?”

“Maybe.”

“Take it. It’s yours.”

It seems irreverent to respond, so you just nod as you walk out the door.

You are barely down the uneven steps before the door opens again. You turn around, and

the man’s eyes are shining. The bottle

slips

from your fingers in surprise.

“You've forgotten all of it, haven't you?” he laughs. Laughs at you.

The bottle tumbles, tumbles to the earth.

His words rolling through your head.

You are so preoccupied that you do not notice the way the sky splinters,

as if it is being shattered by the kiss of unforgiving pavement.

-Kat

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/558235316285275477/
(and yes, I know it's from Alice in WL <3)