Curioddity by Paul Jenkins

stared daggers at the Perpetual Emotion machine, which had now gone back to merely looking dangerous as opposed to actually being dangerous.
    Mr. Dinsdale narrowed his eyes as if he were carefully considering Wil’s suggestion. He glanced at the Perpetual Emotion machine as if determining its fate once and for all. Wil half-expected the little curator to raise or lower his thumb, Nero-style, and consign the sparking monstrosity to a retirement procedure that would involve more than a little carefully placed TNT. No such luck, unfortunately: Mr. Dinsdale suddenly turned away and began to head toward the next display area.
    Will followed, slightly exasperated by Mr. Dinsdale’s arbitrary behavior and his apparent indifference to the city’s safety codes, not to mention its explosives ordinances. “Mr. Dinsdale,” he cried out after the departing curator, “don’t you think you’d better switch it off? Mr. Dinsdale?”
    By the time Wil turned the next corner, Mr. Dinsdale was now standing directly in front of an exhibit at the far end of the adjacent room. Unless Wil was mistaken, the old man had covered a hundred and fifty feet in about two seconds. Wil decided not to react to this since his own cerebral cortex had now come to the independent decision it would be better off discounting the curator’s ability to randomly teleport. Ignoring the old man, Wil reasoned, was the first step to figuring him out. Wil began to head toward Dinsdale’s position. As he moved closer, he realized he was actually walking with quite a spring in his step, and with a sense of purpose that usually escaped him. He slowed back to an indifferent trudge just to make it clear that teleporting curators and Perpetual Emotion machines were no big deal, really.
    Wil’s trudge took him past an entrance to a completely empty display area contained inside a closed-off white room. For a split second, he imagined he saw movement out of the corner of his eye: a young woman with dark, curly hair walking toward his position. He turned, thinking this might be a visitor to the Curioddity Museum. While he hadn’t yet run into any paying customers, he expected at the very least to come face-to-face with a wooden crate. Instead, the room was completely featureless and empty, and the illusion of movement within was gone. Wil narrowed his eyes, only to realize he probably looked exactly as Mr. Dinsdale did just moments before. Feeling quite disconcerted by this turn of events—as if the museum had somehow affected him to the extent he was acting like a crazy old teleporting man in a mustard jacket—Wil hurriedly moved away from the featureless room and began to trudge as quickly as his legs could carry him toward the curator.
    Mr. Dinsdale stood in front of a shelf, upon which was a single green glass bottle. Nearby were various items of trash that might just as easily have been found inside, say, a junkyard or around the back of an abandoned trailer on a pig farm. Inside a glass display case, Wil noticed a little watch device fashioned out of wood. A legend inscribed at the base of the glass read, simply, “Sequitur.” And next to this stood an empty display case with the words “Non Sequitur” written upon it. Up against the wall, someone had propped an old-style throwing spear. A nearby wooden plaque described this item as the “Spear of Density,” which was either an understandable typo or yet another attempt by the museum’s curator to generate interest in something that didn’t deserve it.
    As Wil approached, Dinsdale seemed to be studying the green bottle as intently as one might study a chalkboard covered by complex mathematical equations, though for the life of him Wil could not see anything about the dirty old thing that might explain such scrutiny. He decided to remain quiet in the hopes Mr. Dinsdale might be forthcoming with something that actually explained things for