The Museum and the Music Box: a Tor.com Original Read online

  I examine the mummified bodies of thermetic bats beneath my glass. Halfheartedly I sweep the pigeon droppings from the statue of the Sorrowful Maiden and the Dancing Crab. I can no longer control the blooms of purple algae, which plague the tanks of fluorescent hippocampi. In a fit of anger, I crush the fluted shell of the aeronautic periwinkle; it was the only known specimen of its kind. I remember how you would stare at it for hours, contemplating its translucent architecture, its shell of sky-blue glass. I return to the attics. Beneath scattered vials, which contain the larval stages of the Sythic worm, formaldehyde leaking onto the blueprints of dirigibles, beneath a trunk of spore samples collected on an expedition to a forgotten isle, catalogued according to the movement of distant planets, alphabets learned in dreams—in a tiny journal no bigger than my hand, I find another text. This brings me no joy. I long instead for your touch, the solid weight of your body. I read on anyway. Half the pages have been burnt.

  On the day they took my mother away, she told me a secret. “Buried in the corner of our hut, beneath the shards of clay, the scattered seed and grain, there is a music box your father gave to me, so long ago. I used to play it for you, as you rocked in a cradle of bark. Do you remember? As you slipped away to sleep. When your father was still alive, before the sickness, before the reign of Prince Artemia.”

  “Yes,” I told her, “the music sounded like rain, like it was raining inside me.”

  My mother had been gone for seven days when I was told I would be taken, far to the north, to be a servant in a great house. That night I dug in the corner of our hut, scraping the earth with a stick. I tore at the layers of sediment, my fingernails thick with mud. The music box was wrapped in a piece of burlap. I unfurled it in the half-light.

  It was as I remembered it, blue azurite which mixes with brilliant green where plumes of malachite erupt from its surface. It was carved with mermaids, waves which become jaguars, creatures half-fungi and half-men, which look as though they are dancing, performing some ancient rite.

  The key was missing. I picked through dirt and rock, scraped deeper, combed the earth. But I saw no glint of silver. I could not find the key. The box would never be wound. The music would never play. I had no time; the men were coming soon. If they found the music box, they would destroy it, just as they had destroyed our temples, ground our gods to dust. Just as they had poisoned our rivers; they were thick now with bloated fish, their bellies scarred with pustules, weeping a yellow fluid. The poison was everywhere. The beet fields stank of rot; the worms etched mazes in the fruit of the Ebel tree; the leaves of the Sillel grape began to blacken and die; even the rain tasted of death.

  Would I forget the days I had wandered, through thicket and through field, gathering the plants my mother needed for her dyes? Alder, lichen, and lilac; dandelion, bloodroot, and birch. The nights my father had brought home silver mackerel from the weir, brine glistening in his beard.

  I could not leave it behind; I could not take it with me. I sat by the burnt-out fire, thoughts circling like crows. I could hear their boots outside. I was desperate. I do not know why I did what I did, why I lay on the mud floor. Head tilted back. Easing the music box into my mouth, pushing it down my throat. I gagged, vomited hot acid, but it slipped down, cold metal and stone. It tasted of the sea, of rich forest humus, of brittle gills and meadow caps, of autumn chanterelles.

  Now my home was inside me. Now it could never be taken away.

  They bound my hands and brought me to one of their machines, a giant insect of iron. It rattled with ash and cloud. It hummed with rust and blood. Inside the machine there was a large chamber, already crowded with children. The journey to the north was the longest I remember.

  I find the tiny room you showed me so long ago. I examine the music box beneath its bell of glass. Cobwebs cling to the upper corner. Mites parade about its surface like tiny conquerors. They scurry in and out of the holes in its rusted cylinder. How foolish I was, to think I could have found the key, which you sought on every continent, at the bottom of every sea, to think I could have erased the loneliness which consumes you, as it consumes me. What an idiot, what a fool I was. To think I could have wound the springs of memory, flaked rust from gears, brought forth forgotten songs.

  My memories of you begin to fade. The rooms we shared, our bed like a tropical continent on an arctic sea, blankets like layers of the atmosphere, our bodies twisting in and out amongst them like clouds. A hothouse of jungle foliage, entwining each other in the arms of ancient vines. Sometimes a flight of birds, fluttering against me.

  I no longer remember anything of our love. In the butterfly wing, the ceiling has begun to cave; bits of plaster litter the floor. Some skeleton winged moths have gotten inside the butterfly cases and have begun to spin their cocoons. It is strange to see the living and the dead reside so amicably together. Some wild dogs have somehow gotten into the first floor; they have daily growling matches with the stuffed hyenas. The electric crocodiles have escaped, and have begun to breed in the basement’s warmth.