Ethnaen

The chocolate-skinned boy shuffles into the Curios store, a worn rouble caged between his nimble fingers. Small Bolivian bells tremble in unified confusion at his entrance in an attempt to warn a clerk of coming danger. The boy's footprints follow him into the chamber of lost eccentricities, escaping the interest of very peculiar dust bunnies as he chooses a path through the main show room to the back where a flowered shower curtain hangs in an oddly-shaped doorway. Between towering piles of cook books and glass cases of beaver skeletons he threads, once or twice lightly brushing against this or that item, random objects brought into the merchant's collection through numerous means and surely questionable intentions. These articles, once touched, dissolve and dribble to the floor in streams of dark gray smust, like fine sand filling the bottom of an hourglass.

By the time he reaches the shower curtain there are gopher-like piles of smust occupying every few feet of the floor of the shoppe. Now he is through the curtain, the soles of his feet making no more sound than when he'd entered. Smust falls from the ceiling of a hallway, disappearing before it touches the floor but sticking resolutely to the lad's charcoal-black hair. At the end of the hallway is another shower curtain, this one decorated with pictures of Atlases.

On the other side of this curtain is a gargantuan room, taller than the Eiffel and more expansive than words can express. Shelves upon shelves upon shelves of books--books containing precious sketches of land masses and future sherpa paths through mountains--hang from a black ceiling above a white floor, each book containing hundreds if not thousands of maps and coordinates and hankerchiefs with clues. The boy crawls under the shelves, undisturbed by the idea of tons of paper and timber floating peacefully above his fragile head.

At last he is in front of a white shower curtain with room to stand. Unhurriedly, the curtain is pulled aside as the boy shuffles just a few paces into the small room to stand in front of a small desk. The colorless walls of the room tilt toward the center, much in the manner of a prism. The clerk, an aged white-haired man with unusually bewitching iron spectacles, sits cross-legged on the desk with a book in hand. Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, formerly titled The Possessed, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky.

"You sell curiosities, no?" the boy asks impassively."Indeed I do." Here the old man sets down his book and accepted the rouble from the boy, dusting off the smust with his tweed coat before dropping it into a coin slot on the desk's polished surface. A few seconds later the same coin reappears, having been spat out the coin slot, and the old man snatches it from the air before it falls back to wherever the desk contains (this is why the man does not sit behind the desk; he is afraid for his legs, if the desk should ever become bored, God forbid).

"Thank you." The boy takes the new rouble, puts it in his mouth, and bites down. His eyes brighten, and for the first time in his life, he wonders why.

Why, why, why?

Curiousity has been bought with a rouble.