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Cleaning the Museum, by Mark Joseph Kevlock

2/4/2018

 
I spend my days cleaning the museum. It isn't anyone's fault that I ended up like this. As I clean I often tour the wonders of the past. At the entrance I have statues of my parents, as high as four-story buildings. They stand even taller than that in my memory.

Beyond the statues of my parents sits a gallery of newspaper clippings, detailing my heroic exploits. The gallery utilizes first-person interactive technology to transport the observer into the black-and-white world, photographed beneath each headline. Reliving my glory days in such fashion greatly eases the burden of transition, inherent in my forced retirement.

Next on the tour is my trophy room. Contained within its walls are no less than twelve devices which, if properly utilized, might end all life throughout the galaxy. I keep a trusty lock upon each of those particular trophy cases. Although I do wish, sometimes, that someone would break in... just to say hello.

I have crystals there that change your mind. I have water that explodes. And hair that you can plant, to grow carpeting on the ceiling. Most of the trophies aren't from Earth.

I also devoted a room to friendship, and one to love. I keep self-portraits there, each demonstrating the different aspects of my personality that I manifest in the presence of each individual who so changed my life.

They don't remember me anymore. Not a one. They've forgotten I ever existed.

I used to house pets in the sentient zoo, but I set them free. Rather than quell my loneliness, they exacerbated it. Most of them could beat me at chess.

I also constructed a prison, of sorts, at the dark end of the museum. Floating spheres keep thoughts themselves prisoner. At one point, in my youth, I held quite a passion for capturing evil intentions, then bottling them up in a maze of self-repetition, forcing the thought to keep having itself, until it lost all meaning, and thus its power to harm others.

I also have a chair, to sit in, that accepts donations from its occupants. They sit in a white room, painting the walls with imagination, that is then collected and distributed to those in need.

I never sit in the chair myself. I fear I've lost all ability to dream.

I dust the chair anyway, just in case.

I didn't lose my powers in combat, like you might think.

I lost them because the world doesn't believe in me anymore.

Perhaps you might say that I'm too unbelievable, like a perfection set free, loosed upon societies preoccupied with their limitations, grown afraid of wonder.

I am a wonder man.

At least I was, when I could do it all.
​

Cleaning the museum keeps me busy. I hardly have time to entertain self-pity. I tend to my past with the utmost care.

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