The Mummy

Montana, you beat your fists against museum doors your bronze dress shimmering in the starless night. The doors are locked, Montana dreaming of snow-white mice cluttering the shelves in your kitchen, snow-white mice inside the oven, snow-white mice clogging your shiny aluminum sink, their corpses curled up like piles of fluffy cotton. Mosques are desecrated and altars overturned outside the museum's cool stone walls. Border skirmishes seen and heard in the distance, delicate bursts of poppy-red flames. The wars go on and on, invading your dreams. The mirror reflects a young man's body dangling from a rope and you gasp: "O, my brother—" The doctor finally lets you in, unlocking the door. Forbidden to touch you, he stares straight ahead, avoiding your curious glance. "You're partly Egyptian, aren't you?" The doctor inquires. You stalk the dark museum halls calling out the name of your dead lover, the name of a man unspoken since the siege of Troy. "How did you guess?" You growl, "Do you have to open graves to find girls to fall in love with?" The doctor smiles, averting his gaze from your ravaged face. He longs to trace your fish scale dress with his slender fingers. Montana scarlet shameless Montana, you stalk the dark museum halls in a rage. Ripping your satin gloves to shreds you pry open coffins; reading between the lines you decipher hieroglyphics on tombs. "Any message would do, you say, tiny jeweled tears permanently etched in the corners of your eyes. The doctor sighs, his impotence ancient as the curse that immortalizes him, the terrible secret that pursues you. Montana on the night of a full moon you are a perfumed woman in a bronze dress who shatters glass with a vengeance, searching in vain for signs and clues among the rubies and emeralds that litter museum floors. THE MUSEUM WORKS FOR SCIENCE NOT FOR LOOT, the doctor tells you. You laugh at his bandaged face, the sad, smoldering eyes— the only things visible beneath the gauze. "You can't tell the blood from the paint splashed on these walls," you say with contempt, reaching out for his arm in spite of yourself. He moves away. "I dislike being touched," he whispers, "pardon me—it's an Eastern prejudice." You never see his anguish; he won't allow it. His pride is what keeps him going. Exhausted, you lie amid the rubble. The mummy guards your body and you dream of straddling your sleeping lover's back like a dolphin you ride underwater safe within the confines of deserted museum halls.