The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button -2008- Hdri... -

At forty-two, Benjamin looked twenty-five. Daisy looked forty-five. Strangers began to mistake them for mother and son. Then for grandmother and grandson. The looks on the street, the whispers in the grocery store—they became a slow poison.

But when she mentioned Queenie's boarding house, and the old man in the rocking chair who had spelled Mississippi, his eyes filled with tears.

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

Daisy Fuller was seven years old, the granddaughter of a wealthy cotton broker who summered in the Garden District. She came to Queenie's boarding house once with her grandmother to deliver old clothes to the poor. While the adults talked, Daisy wandered into the courtyard where Benjamin sat in a rocking chair, wrapped in a quilt, watching a moth die on a lantern. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button -2008- HDRi...

"Benjamin?" she whispered.

"I can spell 'cat,'" Benjamin said.

They never saw each other again. But Benjamin never forgot the way she smelled of lilacs and regret. At forty-two, Benjamin looked twenty-five

"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."

It was around this time that Benjamin met Daisy.

"You don't look like a boy. You look like my grandpa, but sadder." Then for grandmother and grandson

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.

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

Prologue: The Unfinished Clock