Mariposa Read Free

bursting out of willow fronds as if rending a veil. She darted back to the house.
    “Mom!” she yelled up the steep stairs. “Mother! Do you still have my fish?”
    “What?” Mom’s voice floated down from the attic.
    “My fish!” Aimee bellowed not at all like a polished professional woman. “My sunny!”
    Steps creaked down from the attic. Mom ambled to the head of the stairs and peered down at her. “Your what?”
    Just like the child she used to be, Aimee wailed, “My bluegill! The only one I ever caught. Do you still have it?”
    “Heavens, honey, I don’t…”
    “I told you to keep it!” Aimee screamed.
    “Check the freezer. No, wait. Check the other freezer. In the garage. In the top of the old Maytag.”
    The white matriarch of appliances, plump and rounded yet imposing in her bulk, still hummed in a corner as if waiting for choir rehearsal to start. Aimee felt her hands shaking as she opened the heavy door to reveal a shadowy, empty womb. Her heart dropped like a stone before she saw the other, smaller door to an inner sanctum. She snatched it open, trembling.
    At first she saw nothing in that tiny, heavily frosted hollow. She thrust both hands in, clawing, searching, and felt something amid all the whiteness.
    From the very back she pulled a packet so hoarily crusted that she could not at first tell for sure whether it was her own. Shaking, she hugged it between her hands until her living heat had melted the years away. Then she looked at thickly wrapped white freezer paper heavily taped and labeled in a childish scrawl.
    “Yes. Yes!” Aimee wanted to yell for joy, yet she started to cry.
    *
    “Oh, how beautiful!” the Warloctor exclaimed, gazing into the lunch cooler Aimee had placed on her desk. Today she wore a turban of dusky pink silk like the cabbage roses growing down from the ceiling, almost the color Mariposa’s belly had once been.
    Aimee murmured, “He was still alive when I put him in the freezer. His gills were still gasping. I hope it didn’t hurt him much.”
    “He’s long dead now,” said the Warloctor.
    “Can you get my soul out of him?”
    “Already did.”
    “What!” Aimee jumped up from her chair. “Is it—is it going to be all right?”
    “It’s more than just all right. As I said, it’s quite beautiful, one of the loveliest I’ve ever seen. Come see.”
    Standing beside the craggy, dark woman, Aimee gawked. “It’s glowing , she whispered. “Like a firefly.”
    “Uh-huh. I believe your mother was right, Aimee. You are a bit precocious.”
    Gazing at her own fragile, gauzy immortality, Aimee felt herself begin to cry again, quiet tears like warm rain wetting her face. Probably her makeup was running, but she didn’t care.
    The W.D. asked, “Are you ready to have it back?”
    “Yes.”
    The Warloctor unlocked a desk drawer, drew it open and pulled out a white silk bag. From it she fished a length of silver filament as fine as spiderwebbing. She warned, “Even though the procedure is noninvasive, there may be some degree of psycho-emotional trauma afterward. Having a soul is not always easy.”
    “I’ll risk it,” Aimee said.
    “Good. Stand facing me, then. Spread your arms like wings. You’d better close your eyes.”
    Aimee felt the return of her soul like a soundless explosion of inner light. All her dead certainties blew up and away as if in a sweet wind, and a fountain of lively contingencies flowed in to quicken her breathing and her heartbeat. She whispered, “Oh!” and her eyes snapped open. “Oh!” she cried aloud. “Oh, I love your turban. What the devil am I doing in this monkey suit?” Her pantyhose itched, her waistband cut her breathing, her high-heeled shoes pinched. She had always hated to be dressed up like a Barbie doll; what had she been thinking? “Oh!” The glitter of a sizable diamond caught Aimee’s eye.
    She stood staring at her own ring finger, remembering as if cozening back a dream—
    Colin. Her fiancee.