Pet Project

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

Pet Project

By Plot Roach

Have you ever had a piece of art really speak to you. I mean REALLY speak to you. Not so much in the ‘Hi, how ya doin’?’ kind of thing, but the ‘take me home, they don’t appreciate me here.’ And the problem was, I wasn’t the only one hearing it.

I go to the museum a few days out of the week. Usually on my lunch hour, when it’s too hot or cold to eat outside. I sneak myself into the upstairs bathroom, quickly eat whatever meager meal I call lunch as quickly and quietly as I can, and then wander the walls of displays for the rest of my free time before I have to go back to the living purgatory that I call work.

My favorite exhibits are the Native American art and the animals of the California desert. I like hand woven baskets and animals that look like they could leap out of the display and run off into the city’s streets. I’m weird, I know. There are other displays, they change from month to month, but I always return to these two. On my way out, I usually check out the gift store (not like I can afford a pair of eighty dollar hand beaded earrings or a fifty dollar hand thrown ceramic vase) and dump a little pocket change into the donation box. Yeah, I could probably eat a little better if I saved the money, but this place feeds my soul in a way that a bologna sandwich never could.

So I’m standing in front of the mountain lion display, studying the glass eyes on the big cat when a kid comes running up and plasters his face against the side of the glass. His mother chases after him, chastising him for running off. I can see that she doesn’t want him to be rude. But really, where can the kid go in a closed up museum? Most of the displays are locked up tight, and anything that could hurt him was long ago removed. It’s not like the lioness can come back to life and make a snack out of her firstborn, or anything.

And then I see a twitch in the flank of the long dead beast. That’s new, I think to myself. Since when did they update the old girl and put animatronics in her? Then her eyes shift, from the kid now licking the glass display case to me. She’s actually looking at me. And a whisker moves, I see it disturb a cobweb some industrious spider has woven from her muzzle to the wall beside her.

And I think to myself, if they went so far as to add animatronics, why wouldn’t they clean up the display as well? Unless they never did anything to change her…

The mother drags the screaming kid away, and all I can do is smile weakly as the mother tries desperately to placate him while trying to cause as little chaos as possible as she drags him out of the museum. I turn back to the mountain lion, now looking straight ahead into empty space. Maybe I imagined it? I think. It had been a hard week and I was tired. So I wandered off to another section of the museum and bump into Jeff. He’s one of the part time volunteers there. He is one of the ones that works upstairs on the fossils that come in, painstakingly rubbing the dirt away from the precious bones with a toothbrush so that the past can see new life. And while I sometimes envy his discoveries, I do not envy the backbreaking labor as he scrubs each bone with a tiny brush and a big magnifying glass.

“How’s the big game hunt going?” I ask him. He’s been working on a specimen of a Smilodon, a saber-toothed cat that would put a modern lion to shame.

“It’s weird, the skeleton I’m working on is…different today.”

“Different how” I ask.

“It’s like it moved somehow. But it’s trapped in stone, so it couldn’t possibly…”

“Yeah” I said. “I thought that the mountain lion on the first floor moved as well. Maybe we both need a break from the museum.”

We wandered through the updated main exhibit, something about the different types of magic from around the world. There were totems from Africa, spell books from Salem, and various assorted odd bits of magical tools from both history and from Hollywood.

“Hey, look here” Jeff called out, pointing to a stuffed teddy bear in a glass case in the corner. To say that it was old, was like saying that Abraham Lincoln was slightly taller than the average man. One eye hung from a string, and if it was possible for a stuffed animal to suffer from mange, than this little guy had a terminal case. “It says that some objects, when owned or used by people over the years, absorb their energy and begin to show signs of life on their own.”

“So what’s this guy’s story?” I asked.

“Evidently it wouldn’t leave its owner alone.”

“How so?”

“It seems that she gave it away as a child, but it returned to her when she was a teenager. Then it was in a house that burned to the ground, but someone gave it back to her on her wedding day. She died in labor with her third child, and when they went to close the casket, they found it in her arms.”

“So why is it here now?”

“It seems it wanted to follow the remainder of the family, as a type of guardian. The last relative, her great grandson, donated it to the museum when he died.”

“How odd.” I said. “Do you believe it?”

“Imagine how much time we’ve spent here, with these exhibits. It’s hard to think that a part of us won’t somehow stay with them.”

“Hmm…A part of me staying with Miss Kitty.”

“Miss Kitty?”

“The mountain lion on the first floor.”

“And I’ve been working with Smiley for four months now, almost eighty hours a week…”

We laughed at our own silliness, and parted ways for the day. I went back to work, he continued to unearth his ‘pet project’. The rest of my shift at work crawled by like an ant caught in honey, and I was glad to catch the bus to my apartment. Even if it was packed with others who were grouchy and grumbled like myself, trapped in dead end jobs and the endless cycle of work- home-work.

I no sooner walked into my apartment when the phone started ringing. By then the sun had set and a cool breeze had taken the place of the heat of the day. I opened the sliding glass door to my balcony and answered the phone.

“Hello?”

“Good, you’re there!”

“Jeff? What’s wrong?”

“You know that exhibit we were reading, the one about the teddy bear?”

“Yeah?”

“It happened.”

“What happened?”

“I came home from the grocery store and found Smiley in my living room.”

“Smiley?” I asked. “The skeleton?”

“Yep.”

“So someone’s playing a joke on you, and left the slab on your floor or something.”

“Even if that was true, the slab Smiley was trapped in should have weighted more than what a few men could lift without a forklift.”

“What do you mean ‘was trapped’?” I asked.

“It’s standing next to the fireplace, wagging its stump of a tail.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I wish I was. Now what will I tell the museum? I doubt that they’ll buy the whole ‘it followed me home, can I keep it?’ defense.”

“I’d be more worried that it might be hungry. It is just skin and bones -er, bones and bones.”

“What do I feed it?”

“Something high in calcium?”

“I have to go now.”

“What’s going on?”

“It brought me a log from the fireplace, I think it wants to play fetch…”

“Just don’t let it confuse your femur for a stick, Jeff.”

“Uh-huh.”

I hung up the phone, thinking it was a crank call. It had to be, there was no way that the skeleton of his beloved Smiley could unearth itself from the rock slab that had contained it since its death and wander the city until it found his home.

Then I heard a thump on my outside patio and saw a shadowy figure push against the drapes. When they slipped aside and I saw my intruder, I recognized her glass eyes all too well. She stalked into my bedroom and waited by the foot of the bed, where I had been sitting when Jeff called.

“Well, Miss Kitty” I said. “Do I feed you bologna sandwiches or cotton balls?”