Chapter 3: The Slide Collection
The elevator in her building smelled like bleach and someone's burnt dinner. Marcus leaned against the handrail while Veronica watched the floor numbers ascend, her thumb pressed to the button even though it was already lit—a small, unnecessary assertion of control that made him smile.
"You're nervous," she said.
"I'm not."
"You keep shifting your weight. Left foot, right foot. You do that when you're nervous."
He stopped shifting. "You're observant."
"I'm an entomologist. I notice small movements." She glanced at him sidewise. "It's how I know when something's about to run."
The elevator lurched to a stop on the eighth floor. The doors slid open with a tired groan.
Her apartment was at the end of a narrow hallway, past a door with a mezuzah and another that smelled faintly of curry. She unlocked three deadbolts in rapid succession—the sound like a code being entered—and pushed the door open.
The first thing Marcus noticed was the light.
Amber. Warm and low, emanating from a series of grow lamps suspended from the ceiling on adjustable chains. They cast the living room in shades of honey and rust, turning everything the color of old photographs. The second thing he noticed was the smell: musky, organic, faintly sweet with an undertone of something metallic that he recognized immediately. Formaldehyde. And beneath that, the clean, sharp scent of rubbing alcohol.
"Living room's normal," Veronica said, stepping past him. "Kitchen's normal. Bathroom's normal. The dining room—" She gestured toward an archway on the left. "—is not."
He followed her.
The dining room had no table. No chairs. No hint that anyone had ever eaten there. Instead, the space was lined with glass terrariums—stacked from floor to ceiling on steel shelving units that covered three of the four walls. Each enclosure held its own quiet catastrophe: beetles the color of coffee grounds, spiders with legs like cracked porcelain, centipedes coiled in spirals that seemed to breathe. The air inside those tanks was humid and close, fogging the glass in slow, irregular patches.
Under the grow lights, everything looked preserved. Not dead, but not quite alive either. Suspended in amber.
"You built all this," Marcus said.
"I built all this." She moved to a workbench in the center of the room—a butcher's block that had been stained so dark it was almost black, its surface scored with a hundred cuts. "The building inspector would have a field day. Climate control, humidity regulation, temperature gradients. Technically, this should all be in a lab. But I like having it at home."
"You like having it where you can reach it at three in the morning."
She smiled without looking at him. "Something like that."
He walked the perimeter of the room slowly. The terrariums hummed with a quiet, restless energy. Somewhere a cricket sang—a single, persistent note that cut through the ambient silence like a needle. He stopped in front of a tall enclosure where a praying mantis sat motionless on a branch, its head turned toward him, its compound eyes reflecting the amber light in a thousand tiny fragments.
"What's this one's story?"
"That's Amaryllis. She's old. I've had her for almost a year." Veronica opened a cabinet beneath the butcher's block and withdrew a small plastic vial. "Mantises don't usually live that long in captivity. I take good care of her."
"Do you ever—"
"No." Her voice was firm. "Not this one. She's a pet."
Marcus nodded. He understood. There were lines even here.
Veronica set two items on the cutting block: the plastic vial and a microscope slide with a small depression in its center. Then she looked at him—really looked, the way she had in the lab two weeks ago—and he felt the familiar shift in the air between them.
"Come here."
He crossed the room. She reached up and touched his face, her fingers cool against his cheek.
"Take off your clothes."
He undressed in the amber light, aware of her watching him. Not with hunger, exactly, but with a kind of analytical appreciation that was its own form of desire. When he was naked, she pointed to the hardwood floor between the butcher's block and the microscope bench.
"Lie down. On your back."
The floor was cold. He felt the grain of the wood pressing into his shoulder blades, the small imperfections of the varnish. Above him, the grow lights hummed. Beside him, the terrariums whispered with the movement of a hundred trapped things.
Veronica positioned the dissecting scope over his chest—a binocular model mounted on a swinging arm. She adjusted the height, the angle, until the objective lens hovered just above his sternum. Then she knelt beside him, her knees pressing into the floor, and opened the plastic vial.
A beetle emerged. Dark, glossy, about the size of her thumbnail. It walked in slow circles across her palm, its antennae questing forward and back.
"Neptunus. A rhinoceros beetle. Fairly common, but this one's been in my collection for a few weeks. I saved him for tonight."
"Should I feel honored?"
"You should feel whatever you want." She placed the beetle in the depression of the microscope slide. It scrabbled against the glass, finding no purchase. "It won't change what happens."
She adjusted the focus. The image swam, then resolved: the beetle's body, magnified twenty times, filling the eyepieces. Every ridge of its carapace. Every bristle on its legs. Every glint of its compound eyes.
"Look," she said.
He positioned himself beneath the scope, peering up into the eyepieces. The beetle's body was enormous now, monstrous. He could see the fine hairs that covered its legs, the hinged joints of its antennae, the small, complex mouthparts that moved in constant, mechanical rhythm.
Veronica picked up a scalpel. The blade gleamed in the amber light.
"Watch," she said.
She brought the blade down into the beetle's thorax. In the eyepiece, the insect's body shattered into a topography of unexpected complexity—layers of exoskeleton, muscles the color of wet thread, a respiratory system like the branches of a winter tree. The beetle's legs continued to move for a moment, then slowed.
"Incision one," Veronica said. Her voice was low, clinical, but there was something underneath it now—a warmth that hadn't been there in the lab. "I'm entering through the pronotum, just below the head. This gives me access to the thoracic ganglia."
Her free hand moved down his body. He felt her fingers wrap around him, cool and precise, and his hips jerked involuntarily.
"Hold still," she said. "I can't concentrate if you move."
She began to stroke him in slow, deliberate rhythm—the same rhythm as her blade moving through the beetle's tissue. In the eyepiece, the insect was coming apart piece by piece, its organs exposed and catalogued. Exoskeleton. Tracheae. The small, pale tube of the heart.
"Now I'm separating the tergites," she narrated. "The dorsal plates. They're connected by flexible membranes that allow for movement. Or they were. Now they're just—" She snipped. "—hinges."
Her hand tightened. He bit down on the inside of his cheek.
"Too fast?"
"N-no."
"Good." She kept going: cut, stroke, cut, stroke. "The genitalia are here, at the apex of the abdomen. Everything has a purpose. Everything has a place. Even when it's reduced to anatomy."
The beetle was coming apart under the scope, its components laid out like a diagram in a textbook. And Marcus watched all of it, watching her handiwork magnified to the point of abstraction, while her other hand worked him with the same patient rhythm. Every cut matched a stroke. Every stroke matched a cut. The two became impossible to separate.
"You're doing so well," she murmured. "Staying still. Being quiet. That's what I like about you, Marcus. You understand that the best things take time."
He was getting close. His breathing had changed, his hips beginning to rise involuntarily against her grip. She noticed. She stopped.
"Not yet."
He made a sound of frustration.
"Be patient. I'm not finished with the specimen."
She resumed her work with the beetle, but the strokes came slower now, more deliberate, timed to each syllable of her commentary. He could feel sweat forming on his chest, pooling in the hollow of his throat.
"The digestive tract is interesting," she said, her voice maddeningly calm. "It runs from the mouth to the anus, of course, but there are these diverticula—"
Another cut. Another stroke.
"—these small pouches that help with fermentation."
Her thumb traced a circle. He saw stars.
"The beetle doesn't know what's happening to it," she continued. "It doesn't have the neural complexity for that kind of awareness. But you do, don't you? You know exactly what's happening. That's what makes it worth doing."
The beetle was in fragments now, its identity scattered across the microscope slide. Veronica set down the scalpel and wiped her hands on a cloth.
"Look at it," she said. "Reduced to components. Every part catalogued and understood. That's what science is, Marcus. That's what I do."
She swung the scope away from his chest and climbed over him, her knees settling on either side of his hips. She was still fully dressed—a black turtleneck, dark jeans, her hair pulled back in its usual severe ponytail. She looked down at him with those sharp green eyes, and he felt utterly exposed in a way that had nothing to do with his nakedness.
"You're my finest specimen," she said. "The most interesting one I've ever studied."
She reached between them and guided him inside her. The sensation was overwhelming—her body tight and warm and completely under her control. She began to move with the same clinical rhythm she'd used with her hand, her hips rising and falling in a slow, deliberate pattern.
"I intend to study you for years," she whispered. "Take you apart. Understand you. Put you back together."
He couldn't speak. Couldn't breathe. Could only feel her moving above him, around him, the amber light turning her skin to gold.
"You understand that, don't you? You're not disposable. You're an investment."
He nodded, managed a sound that might have been yes.
"Good." She leaned down, her hair brushing his face, her breath warm against his ear. "Then we're agreed. You're mine."
She rode him to the edge and held him there, suspended in the amber light, surrounded by the soft hiss of terrariums and the single, endless note of the cricket's song. When she finally let him fall, it was like going under water—a slow, weightless descent into a warmth that swallowed everything.
Afterward, she lay beside him on the cold floor. The grow lights hummed. The insects whispered. And somewhere in the vast, quiet city outside, Sunday was beginning to dawn.
"Same time next week?" she asked.
He laughed. It was a small, broken sound, but genuine.
"Same time next week," he said.
She reached over and took his hand. Her fingers were cool, steady, stained faintly with the remnants of her work. He held on anyway.
"You know," she said, "I never thought I'd find someone who understood."
"Understood what?"
"That it's not about the hurting. It's about the attention. The care."
He turned his head to look at her. Her profile was sharp against the amber glow, her expression unreadable.
"I understand," he said.
She squeezed his hand once, then let go.
They lay there in silence, two people on a hardwood floor, surrounded by glass walls and the small, patient lives within them. Outside, the city was waking up. Inside, nothing moved but the insects and the slow, steady rise and fall of their breathing.
The cricket kept singing. It had no reason to stop.