In the Museum of Temporary Things

In the Museum of Temporary Things

A great yellow mind sat above the floorboards of the world, visible through the eye of something older and colder than thought. Candles leaned toward it with the concentration of scholars who had mistaken warmth for certainty. Maps unrolled in every direction, coastlines loosening at the seams, entire nations curling like old receipts — gum-stuck, lint-flecked — inside the pockets of history. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi above the doorway. The room made its intentions clear.

Everything here was ripening — fruit in silver bowls, saints in darkened frames, the pomegranate split open like a small argument for mortality, the banana peel already halfway to nothing. Even the silence had begun to freckle at the edges.

A nobleman in velvet rested one hand on his chest as though personally responsible for the invention of permanence. By evening, asbestos auditing the corners. By morning, his certainty belonged to the candles.

The great yellow mind went on thinking its fragrant thoughts — held inside the body of something that had always known how to disappear — while the world gathered beneath it in peels and paper and unfinished prayers: a bright arrangement of perishable things trying, for one astonishing moment, to glow before dark.