The Museum of Small Extinctions

The museum keeps no hours. You arrive when you arrive, and the woman at the desk looks up as though she has been expecting you since roughly the middle of your life.

There are three floors. The first holds the extinctions everyone already mourns — the animals, the languages, the towns that went under water for reasons that seemed sensible at the time. Most visitors stop there and leave satisfied, having grieved something safely distant.

The second floor is quieter. Here are the smaller vanishings: the last time your father carried you and neither of you knew it was the last time. A word your grandmother used that no living person now pronounces correctly. The particular way a friend laughed before the thing that happened to her happened.

The curator does not accompany you. She says the exhibits arrange themselves according to the visitor, which sounds like a marketing decision until you reach a case containing a Tuesday from 2009 and understand that it is yours.

Nothing in the building is rare. That is the point. Everything here was ordinary until it stopped.

On the third floor there is one room and it is not labelled. People come out of it looking neither sad nor relieved. When asked, they describe entirely different things, and none of them lie.

Afterwards you stand in the car park a little longer than necessary. The light does its usual work on the ordinary buildings across the road. You find that you are looking at them the way you looked at the exhibits, which is, you realise, the only permanent effect the museum has.