The Museum of Human History

Why did people have to inflict one pain to stop another?

We never really know the right things to fear. She let this thought ring in her head for a moment.

She will think: We disappear so many times before we do, finally, disappear.

They used to joke about it. A marriage of late-stage capitalism, they said. They couldn’t afford to both work to make the world a better place, right? One of them had to pay the bills and make the world slightly worse. It might balance out, their karma.

Standing beside her, Kevin saw himself as if in a snapshot. A memento from a past that never was.

How, when you curate the past, you change it. The story you tell becomes the story that’s told and everything untold is lost. It’s better than having no story at all, he supposes.

That was it. Their first fight. They were both so relieved when it ended that they failed to notice that it wasn’t resolved. There was no answer to the question of altruism. They could drop it, but it would not go away.

This was what Naomi’s prayer consisted of that last time she had been out there: trying to rid herself of all the new names that had been used to classify very old things. Trying to rid herself of the urge to know and claim. Praying that she could let go. Stop seeking. Choose, for once, to just be.

line from the old litany will come back to him: Time occurs at varying sizes and scopes.