The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button -2008- Hdri... [ 90% TOP ]

"No," Benjamin said. His voice was a raspy whisper. "I'm a boy."

"We're passing each other," she said one night, lying in bed, tracing the lines on his smooth face. "I'm going one way. You're going the other."

Daisy drove to the orphanage. She found Benjamin sitting in a rocking chair—the same kind he had sat in as a "child"—staring out a window. He looked seven years old: small, dark-haired, bright-eyed. But his eyes were not a child's eyes. They were old. They were ancient. They were the same eyes she had seen in a courtyard fifty years ago. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button -2008- HDRi...

For five years, Benjamin worked the Mississippi. He learned to tie knots, read the stars, and shovel coal until his hands blistered and healed and blistered again. He saw men drown, barges sink, and once, a school of dolphins that swam alongside the Cherokee for an entire afternoon, as if escorting him somewhere. He kept a journal, writing in small, shaky letters: "Today I am forty. Tomorrow I will be thirty-nine. I am the youngest old man in Louisiana."

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. "No," Benjamin said

"You should leave," Daisy said one morning. Her voice was calm, but her hands were shaking. "Not because I don't love you. Because I do. And I cannot watch you become a child while I become a crone."

She died in 2010, at the age of ninety, holding a blue ribbon in her hand. The nurses said she was smiling. And somewhere, in the space between the ticks of a broken clock, a boy who was once an old man, and an old woman who was once a girl, finally met in the middle—and stayed there. "I'm going one way

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," he said. "It's me. Benjamin."

In the summer of 1918, as the Great War bled to a close, a blind clockmaker named Monsieur Gateau received a commission from the New Orleans Union Station. They wanted a grand timepiece, something to celebrate the boys coming home. Gateau, whose own son had marched off to the trenches and never returned, worked in silence for a year. When the clock was unveiled, the crowd gasped. It ran backward.

He went for a walk that evening through the French Quarter. The streets were alive with jazz and the smell of gumbo. And then he saw her: Daisy Fuller, now twenty-six, a professional ballet dancer in New York, home for the holidays. She was standing outside a theater, smoking a cigarette, wearing a red dress that caught the gaslight like flame.