Flash! Fiction 3 by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

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But not tonight. He had an engagement with his wife. Thanks to her family’s endowments over the years, they were members of the ex-clusive museum society and had been invited to a special preview.

Though not the enthusiast his wife was, he was amenable as long as there were no crowds, pushing and shoving, no offensive odours, and absolutely no children.

The preview didn’t start until 8:30, so when he phoned her he suggested they meet at the little Hungarian place around the corner behind the museum. The service there was polite and friendly—

quaint—and the schnitzel and beer were good stout fare for a long evening.

Back at the museum in plenty of time, they were greeted by the di-rector and the curator and then mingled with the other guests before proceeding to the exhibit.

The main hall, its ceiling also the roof of the four-story museum, swallowed the elite gathering. In the centre was what the curator described as a reconstruction of a royal burial structure, made entirely of stone in the shape of a pyramid with a flat top. Its back half was cross-sectioned to reveal a three-dimensional labyrinth and to reduce its base in proportion to its forty-foot height.

According to the curator, a self-described aficionado and autodidact of the architecture, a pyramid structure of this modest scale would have required a few thousand men working between five and ten years to construct, using the primitive tools of the period. A 14-hour day in temperatures above 40°C with limited fresh water and no shade was typical and that was on top of the daily two-hour ritual trek to the site and back.

The rest of the curator’s remarks were directed to the phenomenal human engineering predating the Mesoamerican pyramids, the ex-27

traordinary precision of the construction, the intricate underground network connecting the pyramidal structures on barren plains, and the deceptively simple form that disguised an infinitely complex and elaborate interior. The tour was an hour and a half, and at the conclusion, the consensus was that the exhibition would indeed vindicate the museum’s decision to host this large and costly exhibition.

Afterward, he and his wife joined another couple for drinks and chatted about kids, college, vacation plans, retirement, and markets. The exhibit didn’t come up. He and his wife shared a cab to the train station. He caught the train home and slept through his stop. She took the cab on to the airport for her flight to Beijing.

First published in Vending Machine Press, December 1, 2013.