my museum by Beth Trumpower

my museum

by Beth Trumpower

hush · issue 6

Page 1 of my museum by Beth Trumpower. Prose text reads: Black and red / And long, / This bug is crunchy under your toes and in between your teeth. / Its juices come out and – / Was it alive? / Was it alive when you ate it? / You knew it was alive when you stepped on it. / But DID YOU THINK ABOUT THAT when you stepped on it, / …or not? / There are monks, you remember, who brush the path before them as they walk. They don’t want to hurt anything, not even an ant. This was bigger than an ant. / (Did you actually eat it? Or just step on it?) / It has: / Giant pinchers that are grabbing smaller bugs and grabbing leaves. / The leaves are dying. / The smaller bugs are dying. / (Did the little bugs feel pain when it ate them?) / Yep, it's dead. It's an earwig, it says so on the placard. I'm actually at a museum. Did I dream the rest? I don't even know anymore. My friend sent me a link the other day to an article about chocolate covered cicadas. Someone froze the cicadas and covered them in Reese's. Would I eat that? The earwig is staring at me, but its eyes are soulless. Or, at least, what I assume are its eyes. It can't see me anymore, but what would I have looked like? What did I look like to all the bugs I killed under my shoe when I wasn't looking? When I was too busy thinking about myself. / I see the colors: tan, maroon, black (or dark brown). The pincers, the antenna. Each antenna is sectioned off into 10 pieces. How strange to have 10 segmented pieces. How strange to have a symmetrical body. I suppose I also have a symmetrical body, in the general sense. But one of my eyebrows is higher than the other and my teeth slant to one side. I think one of my feet is a half of a half size smaller than the other. I stare at this earwig and suddenly I am thinking of myself. I cannot relate to this insect without relating to myself. I am myself, but part of me is this insect. Perhaps that is what the monks mean when they say that killing something else is killing yourself. The more I look at this earwig, the more I see its humanity. The more the earwig lies dead, it sees my insect-ness. I am Franz Kafka. I am Gregor What's-his-name. I awoke as an earwig. I am not sure I can ever be human again. / My boyfriend came back from the restroom. "I thought we were going to the mammals next?" he said, or maybe, "I thought you wanted to go to the mammals?" Page 2 of my museum by Beth Trumpower. Prose text reads: "Eww," he winced, walking past the earwig. "Nope!" / Down the hall, past the minimalist alcoves containing precious gems (ruby, emerald, garnet, diamond), we approached the prehistoric mammals. "I think this is a saber-toothed tiger," he announced. / We passed through millennia toward more recent mammals, and I finally say something out loud: "This is a horse, but I would never have guessed. It has no front teeth." / I wonder where they found this. My eyes trace the curve of its skull. A long and drooping jaw. Bulbous. A large and deeply hollow eye socket. There was an eye there once, and it would have looked at me. Images of myself as a child taking riding lessons flash into my mind. Socks was a horse that had one brown eye and one blue eye. I suppose he was a pony, actually. He could not have been that tall, because I was very short. / "Hirundo rustica, Barn Swallow" was handwritten above the typed lettering "ZEO4O5." Its eggs were speckled like a Pollack painting. White and brown. Was there a baby bird inside? An embryo, I mean. I know birds can lay eggs without embryos, because that's how we get them at the grocery store. I wonder if these were found in the wild. I have eggs inside me that may become children. These eggs are oblong, but I have never seen my eggs. These eggs were donated to the museum in 1914. / Speckled like a Pollack painting. / Oblong and egg shaped – / Which, I guess, / Makes sense. / "Hirundo rustica" / "Barn Swallow," written by a human, / For clarification purposes, since / Not everyone is fluent in / life. / The cycle of life. / An egg: / From which I was made, / Which will shrivel and die within me, / Which shrivel and die every month. / (Do they "shrivel"? I have mostly a patriarchal knowledge of myself.) / I am the Barn Swallow, / I am the Human, / And I am a speck on the planet. / The speckle on the egg. / Something different to break the monotony. / The museum will remember me. Page 3 of my museum by Beth Trumpower. Prose text reads: There is a dead goose in a museum in Glasgow. It is rigid and has a tag tied around its leg. There is a dead goose in the Niagara River, where flotsam laps against the rocky bank. There is a dead human in a box at the cemetery, and there is a dead human under the sand in Egypt. And I am alive to write this. / I don't write for a living, I write because I'm dying. / I will create my own museum. And all the earwigs, and all the geese, and all the horses, and all the barn swallows will be there. And all my memories, and my parents, and my best friend. And my classmates, my coworkers, and the bus driver. My first dog. The black squirrels. All the spiders I ordered executions for, and the cockroach that I flushed. The tattoo shop that pierced my ears, and the leather-bound journal under my bed. Every waiting room, and every time I was in Baltimore. Every shrimp linguini. Where do they go? / Moose antlers splay out at me like an explosion caught mid expansion. Two sinewy, disembodied hands thrusting at my neck. Again, I am only able to see them as they relate to me. I have never met this moose. / I would not sleep with its antlers hung above my bed. / "Are you feeling hungry yet?" my boyfriend asks. "Because I could eat." / I shift my gaze and his eyes meet mine. / "They have a great hamburger at the restaurant here. Let's just go downstairs," he said. / "You were right, this place is cool," I responded, turning back down the hall.

Beth Trumpower

Beth Trumpower is a lapsed writer hailing from the east coast, now living in the suburbs of Dallas, TX. She received a bachelors degree in fiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a masters degree in animal science from Texas Tech University.