Digital Dead Monster Museum
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My father kept VHS tapes. He’d caught them on Turner Movie Classics, these black and white mummies and wolfmen and vampires. You’d pop the plastic shells in the VCR, fight off the tracking, and shudder at the sort of things that the 90s had long since moved on from. The Wolfman always stuck out the most. The prime werewolf himself — changing, sweating, terrified for both himself and the people he loves — and that fur just starting to sprout under the full moon.
The Mummy came in a close second place. Walking through the Cincinnati Art Museum, I remember seeing the golden sarcophagus of an Egyptian king and thinking, suddenly and with certainty, that I was about to be cursed by a pharaoh. Yeah, sure, there were tons of other people in that museum, tons of people who’d handled it in the museum, and a whole slew of folks who dug it out from a tomb, decorpsed it, and passed it along.
I was the one who was going to get cursed, though — I was certain of that. After all, things happen only to you when you’re a kid. Also — less nostalgically — undiagnosed obsessive compulsive disorder. Fun times.
Years passed — middle school cut my head off, high school glued it loosely back on, and somewhere along the way I ended up on vacation with my family in some shoddy tourist trap museum/nature reserve/gift shop combo. Some shade of the layout is in my brain — fuzzy, half-remembered, not particularly important. A copy-paste place. If you’ve ever been on the road for any reason, you’ve been there too. It’s as inevitable as a stop at a fast food joint.
Anyway, the thing I remember most is the coyote. The coyote, old and ragged and stuffed. Cold glass eyes. Normal museum stuff, in a way, except…broken. The nose pointed to the side, one ear at me, and the other — you could see if you were very close — was broken off. The whole illusion broke. The little display turned into a grotesque gag, on either the tourists or the coyote or the whole museum itself.
Some of these things — the old cassette tapes in particular — I haven’t thought about in a long time. Memories resurface at the weirdest moments, and every time the memory is warped by how you remember it. Everything is reframed, every perspective is skewed. The people in it aren’t people you know, but a peculiar ghost of those people.
You set it back on the shelf, and it isn’t the same memory anymore.
Pharaoh, wolfman, chip-eared old coyote. Again. Again. Again.
Welcome to the Digital Dead Monster Museum.
