The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

In this story, the characters’ souls are outside their bodies in various forms. Rina, the protagonist, has an ice cube soul and, to keep her soul intact, she has two refrigerators in the kitchen, one in the living room, one in the bedroom, one in the hallway, and a cooler in the bathroom. She finds that “the bass chorus of all the motors, a low, confident hum” (10) makes her feel secure. She has pictures of glaciers and icebergs on her walls, along with a picture of her college roommate, Amy.

Amy has a pack of cigarettes as her soul, and it was half empty by the time she met Rina. When they lived together, Amy took Rina to a bar. Amy asked the bartender to keep the ice cube safe, but Rina was too worried to have fun. Amy smoked one of her cigarettes and told a boy that if he made Rina laugh before she finished it, they’d both go home with him. She said, “All life is an experiment” (20).

At Rina’s birth, the nurse almost missed the soul/afterbirth. They rushed in an emergency refrigeration unit, but Rina’s mother wondered how long they could keep the ice cube from melting.

Rina works downtown in a cubicle, near the printers. She is quiet, never looks up, and there is a chill in the air around her. Her coworkers don’t know her name. She brings her ice cube to work in an insulated lunch bag and keeps it in a freezer under the desk. At night, she reads biographies. She tries not to think that life is unfair.

A new coworker, Jimmy Kesnow, moves into the office down the hall from Rina’s. He is “the most comfortable person Rina had ever seen” (16). He belongs everywhere, and people like him. Girls like him, too. Rina knows he is going places and thinks his soul is probably a silver spoon. He asks Rina her name, and comments that now he knows something no one else does. He tells Rina that she reads a lot and remarks that her eyes are an interesting color: “It’s like the sea, but through a layer of ice” (19). He sees she is reading Catallus and asks her what her favorite poem is. She finds she can’t reply, and someone calls him away.

Soon, Rina learns that Jimmy is moving to an office upstairs. She shops, has her nails done, and goes to him on a Wednesday after lunch. She takes her ice cube, and everywhere she walks there is a chill. She puts the ice cube in a glass outside Jimmy’s office and enters, closing the door behind her. She recites her favorite Catallus poem, and Jimmy finishes it in Latin. There is a saltshaker on his desk—his soul. She echoes Amy’s sentiment: “All life is an experiment” (23) and takes off her clothes in front of him. When she leaves the office, her ice cube has melted completely. She walks back into his office to die: “It would be hard to freeze salty water” (23).

The story ends with a letter from Amy, who says her last cigarette was gone six months ago, but she is still alive. At a beach party, someone pawed through her purse and smoked the last one, but she didn’t die. It turns out, her soul then became encapsulated not in the cigarettes, but the cigarette box, and now she feels “open, careless, adaptable” (25). Now, she has undergone a state change. She thinks Rina is ready for one too.

The story notes several historical figures and what their souls were, according to their memoirs or biographies. T.S. Eliot’s soul was a tin of coffee, Joan of Arc’s was a beech branch from a tree near her village, and Cicero’s was a pebble, as he practiced speaking with the pebble in his mouth to become a great orator.

Additionally, Rina is reading a book of letters concerning Edna St. Vincent Millay. In the book, a letter from a woman named Elaine describes how Vincent, whose soul is a candle, wrote her a poem and then asked never to see her again. Elaine, whose soul is a feather, is heartbroken.