Night Rounds

Third shift, Natural History

The dinosaurs don’t need me
Neither do the gemstones
in their climate-controlled cases
The meteorites traveled millions of miles
to rest behind glass
I walk the rounds.
Check the logs

Sign what no one reads

Temperature: 68.2°F
Humidity: 45%
All secure
Time: 2:47 AM

The trilobites have been dead
400 million years
They won’t miss their hourly check
But I make it

Flashlight sweeping prescribed arcs,
counting shadows that never change

In the Hall of Minerals,
crystals grew for millennia
in absolute darkness

Now they sleep under spotlights
I turn off at closing,
turn on at opening

They formed without audience
They shine without vanity

The new guard asked
why I walk each room
when cameras watch everything

How to tell him about the weight
of keeping faith
with what doesn’t need you

Fourth floor: the butterflies,
pinned and perfect
Someone collected, mounted, labeled
each one

That care demands equal care

I adjust a placard listing
Latin names no visitor bothers reading

Danaus plexippus
Vanessa cardui
Papilio glaucus

The precision matters to no one at 3 AM
The precision matters

Break room coffee tastes like old socks
I drink it from the same chipped mug

Twenty-three years of this
Not once have I missed
the mammoth gallery at 4:15

She stands there,
all that remains
of something that walked this earth

I know each wire holding her bones,
each steel support hidden in plaster

We keep each other company,
two relics doing our jobs in the dark

The morning guard arrives at 5:45,
always says “Quiet night?”
always gets “Quiet night.”

He doesn’t know about the mouse
in Egyptian Art,
how I leave cracker crumbs
near the baseboards

He doesn’t know I dust
the forgotten cases myself,
the ones on the route
no school group ever takes

There’s a skeleton of something tiny,
unnamed, in basement storage
The label’s faded past reading

I check on it Mondays

No one asked me to
No one knows

The small bones wait
in their box either way

Care is not for the caring
It’s for the thing itself:
the object, the task,
the faithful completion

Dawn comes late in winter
I leave before light touches anything

The museum opens
to voices, children, life
But it lives most truly at night
When silence returns the galleries
to themselves,
and someone walks among
the sleeping treasures

Keeping watch over what needs no watching,
maintaining the dignity of care
in darkness