Page 33 of Why Cheese?
“Cheers,” he cries out then takes a long bite.
This is a lot. They were cursed by eating a mysterious piece of cheese meant for someone else. Oh, and they’re somewhere in the range of two to seven hundred years old. I frown and think of Roq. Or it could be even more.
Another thought nibbles on my mind like a famished knight in the kitchen. “And here I thought you all became cheese because you were named after cheese.” I start to laugh at the foolish idea, but the men have gone quiet, eyes not meeting mine. “I guess it’s lucky that you share the same name as the cheese you turn into?” I can’t stop talking, my skin itching at the pressing silence.
“It isn’t luck,” Brie whispers. I look at him, hoping for more, when Cam takes my hand.
“My lady, we were not christened with thesenom de fromages. We adopted them over time.”
Both Brie and Cheddy nod along.
“Oh.”
How could I be so stupid? Of course, they aren’t named after cheese. Who names people after cheese? Well, some people probably. And didn’t Puritans name their kids things like Obedience or Dust?
“What are your real names…?” The second I ask, the air freezes. I nervously scratch at my arm without thinking. “Or do you not…it’s okay if you don’t want to tell me.”
“My beauty…” Cam whispers. “It’s not that we don’t wish to, it’s that—”
“We don’t know,” Cheddy shouts.
“You don’t know your own name?”
Brie mumbles, his eyes on the ground. “We don’t remember. We retain pieces of our past lives. Where we lived, the faces of our parents.” He glances at Cheddy. “Or our friends.” For that, he looks to Cam. “But our identities were changed, rewritten, eclipsed until our names vanished like a dream come morning.”
“I’m…I’m sorry,” I say, uncertain what I’d do if I forgot my name. Though, it’d be nice to lose some of my memories. Quite a few, actually.
“My bella,” Cam whispers, “put it from your mind. We have. Right, men?” Despite his insistence, Cheddy and Brie both nervously scratch their faces and refuse to meet his eye.
I need to change the topic, but to what?“How…um, how did you realize you became cheese?”
“When the maid shouts ‘God’s wounds, he was cheddar a moment ago!’ I started to piece it all together.”
“I fell…” Brie whispers from behind his hair, “off of a shelf labeledosten.”
The usually crowing voice remains absent. I sit up to catch the bandit’s eye. “What about you, Cam? You didn’t mention how you became cursed?”
He laughs it off. “A mere trifle in my florid and heart-racing life. The time I dueled a master swordsman who turned out to be swords-woman would be a far more entertaining tale.”
“He stole it,” Cheddy says. “Nicked it from a carriage bound for a king. You’re lucky it only turned you into a cheese. If the knights had caught you…”
“Your kind were long laid fallow in the field, my friend,” Cam says, obviously trying to pivot the subject again. “Yes, very well. I too alleviated the cursed cheese from the pantry of a noble who had more than enough to share. You can well imagine my shame of waking naked and cold in the middle of a field without any lustful memories to explain my predicament.”
As they all lower their heads and nervously scratch chins or tap their fingers on the floor, my body reacts to the same well of shame. I don’t understand the embarrassment, but I can’t escape it dragging across the floor like a death shroud. I reach for the first hand I can take.
Cam stops running the little cheese knife across the floor and drops it. He winds his fingers with mine, but won’t look up. “You must think we are spineless boys terrified of a switch hitting our buttocks from a single misdeed.”
He clasps his other hand over mine and peers into my eyes. “It is not a life for the soft-skinned. We live only for the night, and come dawn slip into an unending terror of never knowing if we’ll wake again or some ignorant villager might take a bite.”
I full-body flinch at the idea. It hadn’t occurred to me that if they are just cheese, helpless and incognizant to the world around them, then nothing can protect them. Nothing but me.
“That’s awful. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Compassion from a beautiful woman is the true grace of god. But do not sully those enchanting eyes with tears for us. We yet live, and…thanks to Roq’s bullheadedness, we shall continue to.”
“‘Course our next lord may not be so kind,” Cheddy says. “Or pretty.” His cheeks flush and he gulps, before giving a little wave my way.
What am I supposed to do? Not sell this place? Just give them the store, head home, and try to explain to my mother why I won’t have a five million dollar check? She’d eat me alive.
