Flash fiction by Eleanor Mae
Notes from a Museum
Our lives were brief. When the hall falls dark, we dream of them; the breath in our lungs, the swooping rush, the rise and fall. The beating of our hearts.
Some dream better than others. The lower animals, tongue worms and tapeworms and sea mice, barely remember their lives. Their thoughts pool and bleach in the formaldehyde along with the rest of them. Only the swarms, the jarred bees and butterflies, can still conceive of the space they used to fill.
True knowledge, true memory, lies in bone. It pools in the porous cracks of cartilage, hardening with the weight of years. We larger creatures, we pythons and dugongs and great apes and elephants, still hum with unlived life.
We cannot live, though. We stand, stark and staring when once we clattered and screeched and sang, knowledge falling onto us like amber on flies.
So many of you, your words pouring into the gleaming hollows of our ears and eyes like dry, endless water. So many sly little gasps.
So many children. Your young are ghoulish creatures, and this is little more than a charnel-house of bone and dark wood and glass. How they scream at the halved heads, the lung-worms, the jar piled high with pink-pawed moles. That’s disgusting!
Disgusting. Our lives were brief, but our deaths are very long. Longer than our lives, and yours.
Your children think we move at night. Jars froth as things frolic in the dark; glass sea hares, Surinam toads, fleshy electric eels that flash with lightning. The toothpick bones of the howler monkeys click and shiver as the skull of the crocodile grins, a blue Nile rising in the sockets of its eyes.
What a menagerie we are. The womb of the world, the muscles and belly and back of it. Fish skins, penguin eggs, swan stomachs, turtle lungs, dodo bones, seals and skate and sugar gliders, making mountains and forests and seas of the cluttered glass cases. Dancing out the footwork of our world, instead of being rooted in yours.
But we don’t dance. All we can do is dream, and anything can dream. Even the dust dreams, here, of the days when it lay undisturbed.
We dream of the light in long-dead trees, the soft, liquid darkness of long-dried waters. We dream of our young, our bright-eyed young who never came to be.
You watchers, talkers - you slaves of words, who trap the moments of their lives in great wide nets of narrative. You who use stories like we used the ground beneath us; to sleep, to eat, to hide.
We are a part of your stories. A morning you can pull out and display, embellishing and tarnishing with time.
Time. We had no time before you. Time is a story, a strange, limiting story. We lived in flashes, in the throats of calling birds, the splash of water.
Now we are forced into your time. Trapped, and living our deaths.
Our lives were brief. When the hall falls dark, we dream of them; the breath in our lungs, the swooping rush, the rise and fall. The beating of our hearts.
Some dream better than others. The lower animals, tongue worms and tapeworms and sea mice, barely remember their lives. Their thoughts pool and bleach in the formaldehyde along with the rest of them. Only the swarms, the jarred bees and butterflies, can still conceive of the space they used to fill.
True knowledge, true memory, lies in bone. It pools in the porous cracks of cartilage, hardening with the weight of years. We larger creatures, we pythons and dugongs and great apes and elephants, still hum with unlived life.
We cannot live, though. We stand, stark and staring when once we clattered and screeched and sang, knowledge falling onto us like amber on flies.
So many of you, your words pouring into the gleaming hollows of our ears and eyes like dry, endless water. So many sly little gasps.
So many children. Your young are ghoulish creatures, and this is little more than a charnel-house of bone and dark wood and glass. How they scream at the halved heads, the lung-worms, the jar piled high with pink-pawed moles. That’s disgusting!
Disgusting. Our lives were brief, but our deaths are very long. Longer than our lives, and yours.
Your children think we move at night. Jars froth as things frolic in the dark; glass sea hares, Surinam toads, fleshy electric eels that flash with lightning. The toothpick bones of the howler monkeys click and shiver as the skull of the crocodile grins, a blue Nile rising in the sockets of its eyes.
What a menagerie we are. The womb of the world, the muscles and belly and back of it. Fish skins, penguin eggs, swan stomachs, turtle lungs, dodo bones, seals and skate and sugar gliders, making mountains and forests and seas of the cluttered glass cases. Dancing out the footwork of our world, instead of being rooted in yours.
But we don’t dance. All we can do is dream, and anything can dream. Even the dust dreams, here, of the days when it lay undisturbed.
We dream of the light in long-dead trees, the soft, liquid darkness of long-dried waters. We dream of our young, our bright-eyed young who never came to be.
You watchers, talkers - you slaves of words, who trap the moments of their lives in great wide nets of narrative. You who use stories like we used the ground beneath us; to sleep, to eat, to hide.
We are a part of your stories. A morning you can pull out and display, embellishing and tarnishing with time.
Time. We had no time before you. Time is a story, a strange, limiting story. We lived in flashes, in the throats of calling birds, the splash of water.
Now we are forced into your time. Trapped, and living our deaths.
Eleanor Mae lives in Italy. She has been/will be published in The Forge Literary Magazine, Madcap Review, Scrutiny and Spelk. She tweets at EleanorMae__.