Eternal Night at the Nature Museum, a Half-hour Downriver from Three Mile Island by Tyler Barton
Editor-in-chief Jennifer A. Howard on today’s bonus flash: This story will appeal to bookworms of a certain age who fantasized about hiding out in a museum, but also to anybody who reads this piece aloud. Trying speaking “owl eggs” or “whittled obsidian and patience” without feeling some sort of word joy.
Eternal Night at the Nature Museum, a Half-hour Downriver from Three Mile Island
On the roof grows a tree Facilities kills every summer. Killed, rather. As the men from Facilities are gone. As everyone—staff, faculty, public—is gone, gone for what Harrisburg still calls temporary. The museum belongs to no one now. Or rather, belongs to that tree, or to the animals and their chewed-through glass, or to the time we lost a snake, every time we lost a snake we couldn’t find for days and stayed open for visitors anyway. What I mean is the museum belongs to, I don’t know, some kid? The one I sensed hiding in every building I ever closed down for the night. The same kid I imagined stowing away inside the tree trunk, or the shark’s mouth, or the trash tote in the mop closet—this milk-mouthed kid with nothing to lose, too spooked to say uncle after having chosen hiding, now living out what was never a Disneyland fantasy but rather the lesser of two let-downs. Life, alone in a building full of owl eggs, appeal letters, revisionist archaeology, and arctic wolves who leap like puppies, glass eyes gleaming through their taxidermy. The building belongs to, yes, this starved sapling of a person. And the minute the kid finishes the fish food, cracks two teeth on hematite, retches up the crickets, licks all the pollen from the dead bees legs—the climbing begins. Up stairs. Up stories. Learning from the lizards who clawed away their cages, this kid will bore with whittled obsidian and patience a hole through the 3rd floor utility door. Behind which lies the ladder, and so, the roof. And so, the tree. And so, the fruit.
Tyler Barton is a cofounder of Fear No Lit, home of the Submerging Writer Fellowship. His collection of flash fiction, The Quiet Part Loud, was published in 2019 by Split Lip Press. His work has appeared in Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, NANO Fiction, Paper Darts, and elsewhere. He lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he works in a Nature Museum and teaches free writing workshops to residents of assisted living facilities. Find him @goftyler or tsbarton.com.
