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nightshadereaper66 · 3 months

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Ethanol and Mothballs

Word Count: 2.1k This short story is inspired by the museum collections that I visited during my January paleontology class. All of the pictures used are mine and were taken at the various museums we visited. I'm super excited to share this story with y'all, and hope you love it as much as I do!

The halls of the museum are quiet. The day has ended, night plunging the rooms into eerie darkness. Gone are the copious beams of sunlight flowing through the windows. They now show only the gray haze of the city's night sky, plunging the marble halls into obscurity. It's the end of the hustle and bustle of tourists, of the cheerful shouts and giggles of children, and more subdued conversations of adults. The darkness is broken only by the flashlight beams of security guards working the graveyard shift.

Occasionally, their light settles on the bones of long-dead animals resting peacefully in their wire armatures, casting odd, distorted shadows across the walls. The umbral forms of prehistoric fossils dance with the shadows of the guards, brought halfway to life only briefly by their light.

The silence is broken only by footsteps on carpet, the whirring of the climate systems, and the building's occasional creak and groan. All is still as it should be; quietly resting after the long day. It would seem that the museum dies at night.

I open my eyes, hearing the slosh of fluid around me as I shakily stretch, limbs hitting the hard edges of my tub. I groan, my voice gravelly from disuse. Finally, it's time to wake up. I sit up, my poorly adjusted eyes only seeing the occasional glint of light reflecting off the trails of ethanol crisscrossing the floor. My muscles are cramped; I barely see my pale limbs tremoring in front of me. I shake, struggling to find a grip on the sterile stainless steel until I manage to grab the edge of the tub. Slowly my eyes adjust to the welcoming darkness, a wonderful reprieve from bright fluorescent lights. The air is thick with the smell of ethanol. Always ethanol here, it clings to everything and everyone, a constant reminder of the place where we reside.

As my vision improves, I can make out the shapes of the shelves in the darkness. They stand in a puddle of ethanol, trails and prints radiating in all directions from it. My tremors slowly subside as my body fights the vestiges of the cold sleep.

I watch a snake slither out of its jar, landing in the ethanol puddle with a quiet plash. It's quickly followed by its jar-mates, then the frogs from the jar next door.

The soft sloshes are interrupted by a loud series of splashes and thrashes coming from a large tub on the far side of the wet lab. The smell of ethanol intensifies as the massive alligator snapping turtle inside sends liquid everywhere in his energetic bid for freedom. I climb out of my tub, walking off the stiffness and the last of the tremors before pulling the turtle out by the back of his shell.

“Happy wake-up, Troy,” I say as he starts to wander around the room, leaving behind a broad, messy ethanol trail. He opens his mouth wide, looking straight at me. I’m never sure if that's his version of a smile or a death threat.

The shelves are alive, undocumented insects trundling among their more well-known friends. One jar spews hundreds of tiny snails as they crawl over each other and to the ground, trailing ethanol instead of mucus. I twist off the lid to another snail jar; this one is always particularly stubborn. As I pull off the lid, a giant African land snail creeps out onto my arm.

“Yeah, alright buddy, we can go for a walk. Stretch your, er, foot.”

Snail crawls up my torso and onto my shoulder. I gently pat them between their eyestalks and scratch their shell.

“Just give me a second to let the fish out,” I say, unscrewing the lids of the fish jars and letting them swim out into my large tub, “Have fun, guys. It's not much, but it's better than being stuck like sardines in a can. Or a jar, I guess.”

Troy the snapping turtle shuffles over to watch them schooling.

“You can't eat anymore, remember? None of us can. Don't try it, Troy.”

He opens his mouth, giving me another smile/death threat.

“Thank you.”

I slide Dr. MacMorgan's I.D. out from under a dusty, overlooked jar of rhino beetles on the top shelf. I'm grateful for the museum's leniency in issuing him a second I.D. after this one went missing. He claimed he lost the thing, after all, his eyes “aren't what they used to be,” and his memory “is full of cotton wool these days.” I think the curator also helped to fast-track the process. She definitely didn't ask many questions.

Anyway, I had a garden snail steal the I.D. so that I could walk around collections. What can I say, I got tired of only exploring when the man forgot it in the piles of paperwork on his desk. Feelings and federal laws don’t matter much when you’re dead. Besides, now I can go check out the new research posters they put on the walls. It's nice to know that they're still using us for something.

I swipe the I.D. and step into the hall. The smell of ethanol fades as the door to the wet lab closes. Snail crawls onto my head for a better view as I step into the bathroom and look at our reflection. The light turns on automatically as I walk in, and I wince as my eyes struggle to adjust. I look at myself in the mirror; my cheeks are sallow, cloudy eyes sunk into yellowed skin. A little worse for wear, but not bad, I haven’t aged a day. I examine my arms, running my fingers over the relatively new needle-hole in one of them. It showed up a few months back, but it’ll never heal. Presumably, it was for a tissue sample; I wonder what they’re using it for. I have been dead and pickled in ethanol for a while, it was about time. Snail (who I seem to be wearing as a hat) looks a little better-preserved, but their body still has that yellowish color that all wet lab residents tend to get. My snail hat waves their eyestalks towards the door emphatically.

“Okay, okay, I’m going!” I say, stepping back out of the bathroom and into the darkness of the halls. “Where to now?”

They crawl down to my forehead, waving their left eye stalk in front of my eye.

“Alright, fossils it is. I know you like the shark teeth.” They do a move resembling a one-snail wave in appreciation. I smile, heading through the maze of nearly identical corridors. I see the light of a flashlight ahead and duck into an empty office, narrowly avoiding someone. It's probably just a grad student returning from the vending machine with their energy drink. I wait until the light is gone and slip back into the halls.

“Hey look! They extracted my DNA and used it to do some stuff. That explains the needle hole in my arm,” I say, pointing out a poster on the wall. I step close so that Snail can read it. At least, I think they can read. Their eyestalks scan over the lines of text and appear to understand as they pull back.

They settle back on my forehead and I set off once more, finally reaching the thick, heavy door to the fossil collections. I scan the I.D. and the light blinks green, letting me in beyond the large gray door. We are hit with the strong smell of mothballs and the crisp, strictly temperature and humidity-controlled air. The lights turn on automatically, illuminating the rows of open shelves and closed metal cabinets.

I walk down the aisles, waiting for Snail to stop me and gesture to whatever cabinet they find interesting. When they do, I open the door. All of the drawers are labeled “glyptodon,” so I pull out a random one. Snail crawls off of me and onto the cabinet, eye stalks investigating the giant armadillo fossils. Mostly osteoderms, the bony bits right under the skin, but some teeth and small bones. When they’re satisfied, I close the cabinet and open a nearby one.

We proceed in a similar fashion for a while, opening whatever cabinets strike our fancy and stopping to admire the fossils inside. Snail crawls back onto my head and we look at the skulls that rest on the open shelves. There are plenty of mammoths and mastodons, recognizable by their massive teeth. The mammoth teeth are more flat, while mastodons’ are more pointy unless they’ve been worn down a lot.

I run my hand along the glossier fossilized enamel, wondering what the fossils would get up to if they could move around at night. They’re just rock-ified bones (the fancy descriptor is permineralized), so they’d fall apart, assuming that they hadn’t already. The Earth is a blender, or so I hear.

Snail prefers the smaller fossils, so they’re content to stay on my head as I trace the contours of huge tusks, dino bones, and skulls. It’s crazy to think that some of this stuff is still closer in age to spaghetti than to the beginning of life. It sure seems like it’s been fossilized for ages. And then some paleontologist dug it up and encased it in plaster and a volunteer put in thousands of hours to clean it up.

“Having a nice wander?”

I jump, snapping abruptly out of my thoughts. The voice comes from behind me. Snail retreats into their shell, still on top of my head. Act like a normal person. One who hasn’t been dead and preserved in ethanol for fifty years.

“Hi! I uh, have a really bad skincare routine!”

She laughs. I turn around. It’s the museum curator. She’s wearing a headlamp; it’s still turned on. She raises a hand to turn it off since it’s not needed in the automatic lighting of the fossil collections.

“That tends to happen when you’re a wet lab specimen.”

“You know about that?” I ask as Snail peeks out of their shell, eyestalks fixed on her. The curator’s gaze tracks up at them, then back to my cloudy eyes.

“Yes. How do you think MacMorgan got a new I.D. so quickly?” Seeing my look of concern, she adds, “I don’t mind if you leave the wet lab, as long as you don’t make a mess.”

“Uhh… okay…” I say, still trying to process the new turn of events.

“Some people think that this building is haunted. I see why they would say that. I passed you in the hall earlier, you look very sinister,” she says, smiling.

“That was you, with the light? I thought it was a grad student! Dammit, I need to be more careful,” I reply, looking perturbed.

“You could, or you could keep letting the world believe that this building is haunted.” The curator seems to be enjoying this conversation. She reaches out a hand to pet Snail’s shell. After a few moments, she speaks again, “It can be our little secret.”

“You’re not scared by me? I’m literally dead and pickled, how are you fine with this?”

She laughs again. “I used to work in a wet lab, I’m quite accustomed to seeing preserved organisms. And if you want to have a little fun at night, I suppose I can continue to turn a blind eye.”

I nod awkwardly, surprised by her casual demeanor. The curator holds out her phone, the screen showing a clock that reads 4:13 a.m.

“For now, it’s time to go back to bed,” she says as the screen turns off. I stare into my reflection in the black glass.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll get back to wet lab,” I say, realizing that I’m starting to feel the sluggish feeling that heralds in the morning.

She smiles, turning her headlamp back on as we leave the fossil collections. The curator walks off, disappearing into the shadows of the halls as Snail and I hurry back home. I swipe the I.D. and duck inside, stopping for a moment as I’m hit with the strong smell of ethanol. I help Troy back into his tub, coax Snail into their jar, and gather up the fish swimming in my tub. We’re all much more sluggish as the morning starts to roll in, seeing the sky start to lighten through the window. At last, I collapse back into my tub, trying not to splash too much as I let the ethanol settle back around me.

I drift off into the long day, holding on to the memories of the night. My cloudy eyes don’t close as my muscles stiffen, ready to stay motionless for the next day in the bright lights of the lab. I could run these halls forever, reveling in the shadows of forgotten, forever preserved lives, permeated in the scent of ethanol and mothballs.

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