The Hollow Places

and I didn’t say anything and we both did not say anything so loudly that the room rang with our silence.

My internet armor had been built up in the fanfic battlegrounds

“That makes absolutely no sense.”

“As opposed to everything else about this situation, which has been remarkably straightforward?”

Oh God, why had I run into my room? It was instinct, pure stupid instinct. I’d run to the bedroom and locked the door because some part of me believed that it was A Safe Place and surely the corpse-otter would respect the ancient rules of privacy and not open the door.

How dare it come here? This was home. This was what I had been trying to get back to. I had survived the whole stupid divorce and the hellscape on the other side of the wall, and I kept coming back here and it was safe, the museum was the safe place where Uncle Earl kept a little corner of the world weird and ridiculous and kind.

He looked at me. He looked at the door. He said, “Come on, let’s go back to the coffee shop and I’ll make us Irish coffees and we’ll discuss this like people who don’t die in the first five minutes of a horror movie.”

My internet armor had been built up in the fanfic battlegrounds and was thus impenetrable, but Uncle Earl was a gentle soul, and I was afraid that someone might hurt his feelings.

I had never before contemplated the gender of my pancreas. I gazed into my coffee.

I could wander around the dusty cases and pet the stuffed grizzly and make the armored mice reenact the end of The Empire Strikes Back.