The Last Notebook of Leonardo by B.B. Wurge

Author:B.B. Wurge
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Leapfrog Press
Published: 2010-09-07T04:00:00+00:00

The stuffed eagle looked like it would rather be someplace else.

9

The first thing I saw was a skull. A human skull, yellowed and covered in dust and with a card taped to its forehead that said, “Do not touch!” I couldn’t help it. I looked around to make sure nobody was watching, and I tapped on it with my fingernail. It made a plastic sound. When I looked closely, I could see the seams where the plastic pieces had been stuck together in the factory. It looked so real that it gave me the creeps anyway.

Next to the skull was a stuffed eagle hanging from the ceiling on wires, its wings spread out about five feet across. It was wider than I was tall. I knew it was real, because it was moldy and frayed and falling apart, and had bald patches on its wings and back, in addition to the natural bald patch on its head. Its mouth was turned down at the corners and its glassy eyes stared at me as if it were saying, “Ugh! Get me out of here!” But I couldn’t do anything for it.

Next I came across an old fashioned, square piano that was broken and had about half its keys left. I could see that a skull might be related to Indians, since they presumably had skulls the same as any other people, and I could see how an eagle might have lived in the same general area as the Indians, but I didn’t understand how the piano fit into the equation. A tag on the instrument said, “Pianos were sometimes used by settlers who lived near the Indians.” That seemed like a stretch to me. It seemed like the museum was a collection of broken junk that had somehow accumulated over the years and was nine-tenths fraud.

The whole house was dim, because so many shelves and cabinets blocked the windows and the unblocked parts of the windows were covered in dust. A glass case loomed out of the shadows, and I saw a stuffed lamb in it. I stared at the lamb for a few seconds, wondering what it had done, but I couldn’t see anything remarkable about it. Next to the lamb, a bookshelf contained neat rows of stones that had been picked up around the area. Some of them were round and polished and sparkling with minerals, and some of them were regular gray blobs, and all of them were dusty. Next to the rocks, hung up on the wall, was a tomahawk. It was a hatchet with a stone axe head and a carved wooden handle and feathers hanging from the end of the handle. It was so old and gray and so delicately carved that for the first time I was convinced I was seeing a real Indian artifact. I stared at that tomahawk for a while and wondered if it had been used to kill anybody. It made the shivers go down my spine.

Next to the tomahawk,

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