The Collector

The dead rest in his pocket, their brittle wings catching against the fabric like whispered secrets. He’s been collecting them for weeks—the fallen, the forgotten, those that spent their final moments beating against glass.

His fingers move like a watchmaker’s, peeling back the paper shroud to reveal each specimen: a cricket frozen mid-leap, a luna moth faded to bone, a paper wasp with its warning stripes turned soft with time. He arranges them on the sun-bleached bench slats, smallest to largest, a procession of lost things.

“—probably tortures cats too—” A woman’s whisper slinks through the air as her companion tightens his grip on her arm, steering her away. Shadows pass over his collection, a brief eclipse.

He doesn’t look up. Judgment moves in footfalls, in voices pitched low but meant to be heard. His hands remain steady, adjusting a blow fly so its iridescent body catches the afternoon light. In death, it has become something else—not beautiful exactly, but worthy of attention.

The tissue paper crinkles as he unwraps the prize of his collection: a giant swallowtail, wings spread in eternal flight. He’d found it in a spider’s web three days ago, a stained-glass window caught mid-collapse. The spider had abandoned it, leaving him this gift.

More footsteps approach, hesitate, retreat. The whispers bloom and die.

He measures the space between bodies with a ruler worn smooth by touch. Ant to beetle to moth to butterfly—a journey marked in millimeters, in metamorphosis.

In his pocket rests one last specimen: a cicada shell, hollow but whole. Not dead, just abandoned. A ghost of something that climbed out of itself and flew away. He places it at the end of the line, a punctuation mark on his quiet arrangement of small deaths.

The sun sinks lower, soaking the bench in amber light. Soon, he will wrap them again, tuck them away like beads on a rosary, like treasures, like proof that even the smallest lives cast shadows. But for now, he sits with them, a keeper of forgotten things, an architect of this tiny cemetery.

He is fourteen. Strange. Surrounded by death. Yet his hands are careful, his heart steady, beating in time with wings that no longer move.

Above him, insects trace unseen paths through the dying light. Soon, they too will fall. And he will find them. And he will give them this: a place, a measure, a moment of remembrance. Until then, he keeps arranging, measuring the distance between what was and what remains.