Lost in the Museum

KM Sullivan

Today is the day – the day you’ve been waiting for. Museum day.
Ever since you can remember, the museum has been your favorite place. Mummies in cases, the spoils of their pyramid tombs piled high. Bones of ancient beasts, made all the more ferocious for their lack of sinew and hide. Dioramas of landscapes and civilizations lost, offering a peek into the world as it once was.
It’s like reading, but the words have been made flesh – or at least plastic and plaster.
Everything about the museum makes you giddy, but your favorite part is the Streets of the Old World exhibit. The exhibit was more than a glimpse into times-past. Even though all you could do was peer through windows, the Streets still managed to be an experience. It was a look at how your grandparents, or their parents, might have lived.
It was history – it was your history. These were some of your people. And you sometimes wondered – as a child – if these people should have been you.
It’s been a while since you’ve been able to enjoy the Streets. It was a rainy Thursday in March and you were playing hooky from work to sneak in a little museum time – ostensibly for a little ‘culture and sophistication’ since the museum is world-renowned for its research and natural history exhibits – only to see the entrance to the Streets cordoned off.
A big ol’ “CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS” sign glared at you as you sadly made your way to the dinosaur jungle instead.
That was three years ago.
No one knew why it took so long. The project, which you followed closely in the news – a little too closely, some might have argued – supposedly ran into funding issues. But considering the museum had an endowment ensuring its existence into perpetuity and beyond, ‘funding’ didn’t make sense.
The longer you searched for answers, the weirder they became. You chalked it up to the internet being a strange and wild place, but a part of you wondered if the tinfoil hat claiming the museum was building an exhibit so interactive that the parts of the Streets would literally come alive – and not with actors playing roles either, but with some sort of experimental time travel mechanism – was right.
You had closed the browser almost immediately after reading those words. There are some things even you don’t buy.
But when it was announced that the Streets would be opening again, you checked the museum website to see what the ticket prices were going to be, and if one had been added to the Streets, like they’d done with other special exhibits.
Free.
The museum – special exhibits and all – was going to be free for the week of the opening.
Well, that settled it. Time travel was not going to be free. No way, no how.
But, a part of your brain whispered, if they’d run into funding issues, why is it free? What was really going on? Was the tinfoil hat right?
You ‘shushed’ that little voice with a bite of your morning muffin. As luck would have it, you had off the day of the opening. You were going. You’d be first in line if you could be.
And today is the day.
When you get to the museum you’re surprised at how few people have taken advantage of the free week.
Maybe three years was too long for people to wait? Maybe the PR person didn’t do enough to promote it? Or maybe too much – were people sick of it already? You know conversation slid around the Streets whenever you brought it up to your friends.
Of course, it <i>was </i>9AM on a Monday.
You ignore the small hairs on the back of your neck standing on end, and smile to yourself. You’re going to have the place to yourself.
Just the way you like it.
With wristband firmly in place, you take to the stairs. A quick detour around the History of Man’s Evolution and the Buffalo Hunt (you quickly press the button to make the rattle snake rattle, for luck) and you’re at the newly-minted Streets of the Old World.
Your first impression is a good one. Gone is the standard doorway. In its place is a gated archway, and beyond that, a shadowed corridor.
From afar the whole thing almost looks like a mouth opened wide, ready to swallow the unwary traveler.
Or a portal to worlds unknown.
For some reason that thought is even less comforting and you shiver as all the possibilities crowd your brain.
A little girl and her father brush past you. She is practically levitating in her eagerness to get to the Streets and you shake your head at yourself. You’ve let your own fancies – and that of the tinfoil hat on the internet – get the better of you.
It’s a museum exhibit, not a supernatural gateway – or mysterious adventure.
You let the voices of the little girl and her father fade before you approach the gatekeeper. The young woman is wearing a faded gingham pinafore and her dark hair is pinned plainly behind her ears. She looks almost drained of color – except, you notice, for her shoes. They sparkle red in the dim light of the gateway, and you can’t help the goofy grin on your face as you approach her.
“Welcome to the Streets of the Old World – I’m the curator and you –” she looks you over with an appraising glance before handing you a red Chinese takeout pail. “You might have what it takes.”
“Pardon?” you ask, even as you hold the pail up to your face.
The curator lets out a horrified gurgle.
“Don’t! That is for you as you traverse the exhibit. Please don’t open it if you have no need to. Inside will be things you can use to help – but only if you truly wish to. Otherwise its contents will be of no use to you. But whatever you do, don’t look inside on a whim. Please.”
She shudders a little.
"Please."
Ignore the curator and look inside the pail.
Heed the curator and enter the exhibit without looking in the pail.