Natural History
Once, it was a palace. Now it was something else entirely, part museum, part laboratory, part tomb. There are wonders stored in there, and horrors.
Room after room filled with jars, and inside those jars, floating forever in the preservative fluid, hundreds upon hundreds of specimens. Creatures that had once flown or swam or crawled the earth, before their kind lost that final Darwinian battle and slipped off into extinction, replaced by something better equipped for survival.
Single-celled organisms indistinguishable from the liquid save for under a magnifying lens. Snakes, their coils curving around an inner circumference of glass as though they might snap back into life and strike out. Great leviathans of the deep, suspended forever silent in glass containers larger than houses. Wherever possible – and applicable – there is at least one specimen of either sex, so that a visitor might study the morphological differences.
And there, down at the very end of the Hall of Mammals, past the big cats and the pinnipeds and the ungulates, past the lesser monkeys and the great apes, wait two empty jars, brass nameplates glowing softly under the dim violet light. And when it’s our time to go, there two of us will remain, our legacy curated by whatever – whomever – arises to take our place.
