Daisy received a phone call in 1987. She was sixty-seven years old, a widow (she had married a kind, boring accountant named Robert, who had died of a heart attack in 1984), living alone in a small apartment above her dance studio. The call was from Child Protective Services.
She turned. Her eyes, still the color of honey, scanned his face. "I don't think so," she said. "But you look familiar. Like a dream I once had."
"Excuse me," he said. "Do I know you?"
"Daisy," he said. "It's me. Benjamin."
The other boarders were a circus of broken souls: a tattooed lady who had once been the star of a traveling show, a retired alligator wrestler with one arm, a pair of Siamese twins who spoke in unison and finished each other's meals. They taught Benjamin card tricks, how to spit watermelon seeds, and the difference between cheap gin and good whiskey. But no one could teach him why he felt so tired all the time, or why his bones ached when it rained.
"Are you a ghost?" she asked.
Benjamin grew smaller. That was the first strange thing Queenie noticed. At what should have been his first birthday, he lost a tooth. By his third birthday, he could sit up—not because he grew stronger, but because his spine uncurled. His hair, which had been white, darkened to gray. He learned to walk at age five, not as a toddler, but as a man recovering from a long illness: stiff, shuffling, leaning on a cane whittled by Mr. Daws, the blind pianist who lived upstairs.
"We have a boy," the social worker said. "About seven years old. He doesn't speak much. But he keeps drawing a picture of a house on Elysian Fields Avenue. And he keeps spelling the word 'Mississippi' over and over."
Daisy received a phone call in 1987. She was sixty-seven years old, a widow (she had married a kind, boring accountant named Robert, who had died of a heart attack in 1984), living alone in a small apartment above her dance studio. The call was from Child Protective Services.
She turned. Her eyes, still the color of honey, scanned his face. "I don't think so," she said. "But you look familiar. Like a dream I once had."
"Excuse me," he said. "Do I know you?"
"Daisy," he said. "It's me. Benjamin."
The other boarders were a circus of broken souls: a tattooed lady who had once been the star of a traveling show, a retired alligator wrestler with one arm, a pair of Siamese twins who spoke in unison and finished each other's meals. They taught Benjamin card tricks, how to spit watermelon seeds, and the difference between cheap gin and good whiskey. But no one could teach him why he felt so tired all the time, or why his bones ached when it rained. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button -2008- HDRi...
"Are you a ghost?" she asked.
Benjamin grew smaller. That was the first strange thing Queenie noticed. At what should have been his first birthday, he lost a tooth. By his third birthday, he could sit up—not because he grew stronger, but because his spine uncurled. His hair, which had been white, darkened to gray. He learned to walk at age five, not as a toddler, but as a man recovering from a long illness: stiff, shuffling, leaning on a cane whittled by Mr. Daws, the blind pianist who lived upstairs. Daisy received a phone call in 1987
"We have a boy," the social worker said. "About seven years old. He doesn't speak much. But he keeps drawing a picture of a house on Elysian Fields Avenue. And he keeps spelling the word 'Mississippi' over and over."