Llewellyn Cooper and his aunt Julia run Curio Cabinet in New York City’s West Village, where the clientele is as strange as the junk being amassed in their secondhand shop. Llewellyn and Julia have been as thick as thieves his entire life, and Llewellyn can’t imagine being anywhere else six days a week—even if Julia’s bizarre habits and inappropriate conversations drive him crazy. That’s family, though, right?
When Llewellyn drums up the nerve to chat with a routine customer—in part due to curiosity, as Henry McLaughlin returns time and again to purchase nothing but old photographs, but also because the bearded and bow tie–wearing man is the finest thing to ever step foot inside Curio—it seems like Llewellyn will finally have a plus-one for future RSVPs. But just when things start looking up in the romance department, it turns out Henry might be too strange for the Cooper family.
And that’s saying something.
What a deliciously fun novella and then to have the author connect it to one of my favorite series, Snow and Winter, no matter how short or "on the fringe" that connection is, it's there and a pretty darn near perfect fit.
Love the relationship between Lew and his Aunt Julia, the teasing, the friendship, and the love. It's obvious she wants him to find happiness but it's the snarky, witty banter that is almost more sibling-like than aunt/nephew. So fun.
As to what Henry does with the photos he's been buying, I loved that element. I don't want to give anything away so I'll not spoil it here but I'll just say prior to a local news story last summer, it never even occurred to me that this was a thing. I can definitely see why Henry does it and the emotional rewards as well.
Lew and Henry have a lovely connection and though some of the conflict is due to lack of communication Curio is just an absolutely delightful entertaining short read that will fill you with all the glorious feels needed to brighten your day.
😉And may I add just one more time: lovely, lovely, lovely!😉
Curio Cabinet was a secondhand odds-and-ends store that masqueraded as an antique shop, located in the gayest neighborhood of New York City, with clientele to match.
Gay customers, that is. Not odds and ends.
I mean, I suppose some patrons were the human equivalent of grandma’s attic, but mostly they were various flavors of queer, who liked to poke through the shelves, crates, and plastic tubs of cast-offs after a boozy brunch. In fact, Sunday between noon and six o’clock was basically when Curio made any money at all—lockets with broken chains, weathered vintage postcards, vinyl records sans sleeves, and creepy doll heads missing one eye were the bad decisions locals made after one too many mimosas with the crew.
But on weekdays, with the Gay Agenda being a mundane nine-to-five like everyone else’s, it was as dead as a doornail in here.
Well, almost.
“He’s back,” Aunt Julia whispered as she stepped around me at the counter.
My aunt Julia was the well-preserved sixtysomething owner of Curio Cabinet—the front for her stoop, yard, estate, and Facebook Marketplace buying addiction. She was also the full-time, stand-in parent for gays in the neighborhood. If she wasn’t out amassing more junk that eventually ended up as stock for the shop, she was sitting outside at the steel bistro table under the awning, sharing a bottle of cheap wine with whoever wandered in from off the street. And if they were in search of an adoptive auntie, they’d get Julia—with her dyed green hair worn in space buns, her exactly fourteen pet goldfish because fourteen was Julia’s lucky number, and who, when visiting anyone’s home, always gifted a single (uncooked) russet potato for reasons still a mystery to me. Julia was low-key nuts, but she’d raised me when my parents had taken a hike, loved me when I’d come out, and God bless her, wanted to keep loving my community the other eleven months of the year that existed outside of Pride—hence this sidewalk therapy she’d taken to.
I closed the magazine I’d been thumbing through, a retro Tiger Beat—exclusive fold-out poster of the Backstreet Boys still intact—and glanced up in time to watch Julia round the end of the counter and start through the disaster we called a showroom. “Who’s back?” I called after her.
She turned to walk backward on her way to the front door, miraculously not crashing into anything, while pointing toward my left with the bottle of merlot she carried in one hand.
I looked in that direction.
Ah. There he was.
Professor Bow Tie.
That wasn’t his real name, of course. I had no idea what it was, because our conversations had never ventured beyond “Find everything? That’ll be four dollars. Have a good day.” But he came by Curio several times a month, always between one and two o’clock on weekdays, and he always bought the same thing: photographs.
Allow me to be more specific.
Professor Bow Tie spent upward of thirty minutes during each visit meticulously digging through and studying loose antique family photographs, which number in the thousands, because Julia, in her words, “feels bad” leaving them behind knowing that they’ll be tossed in the garbage. Every time I’ve brought up the fact that it made no sense for us to create floor space in which to stock black-and-whites of some stranger’s great-great grandmother holding a chicken somewhere out on the Kansas plains, she always said, “People will buy anything, Lew.”
Enter Professor Bow Tie last winter, and Julia had not stopped her I-told-you-so’s since.
We had no idea what he did with the photos—our guesses ranged from professional scrapbooking to upcycled Etsy home décor—but neither of us had ever grown the balls to ask. Because while he was seemingly polite, he was also sort of intimidating.
Bow Tie, as his nickname suggested, always wore a dapper suit and bow tie whenever he pit-stopped at Curio to paw through someone else’s forgotten memories. He had a well-maintained strawberry-blond beard and hair that always fell from its part and across his forehead just enough to be ridiculously hot. Bow Tie was also built like the side of a brick building. Not terribly tall—in fact, I was taller than him—but where I was wiry, he was all chest and shoulders and biceps and thighs. A ten out of ten on the testosterone output while also looking like he might write you up for being late to class.
So yeah. Julia and I hadn’t ever managed to find out what he did with all the pictures he bought. And now that he’d been shopping here for the last three or four months, we’d blown past that window of opportunity in which to make small talk.
It was too late to ask his name.
We’d have to keep up the gauche silence for every visit until either he or I died first.
Saturday's Series Spotlight
Monday's Mysterious Mayhem
C.S. Poe is a Lambda Literary and two-time EPIC award finalist, and a FAPA award-winning author of gay mystery, romance, and speculative fiction.
She resides in New York City, but has also called Key West and Ibaraki, Japan, home in the past. She has an affinity for all things cute and colorful and a major weakness for toys. C.S. is an avid fan of coffee, reading, and cats. She’s rescued two cats—Milo and Kasper do their best to distract her from work on a daily basis.
C.S. is an alumna of the School of Visual Arts.
Her debut novel, The Mystery of Nevermore, was published 2016.
Curio
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Interlude
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Southernmost Murder
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