Museum of the Weird by Amelia Gray

when I attempted the expellation (hunched over the bowl on the floor, which I chose to be the easiest method for both myself and the Object) I was greeted by a sharp, shocking pain. My nose bled into the bowl and I hunched nearly blind with emotion but the blockage screamed OUT and my grasping hands touched bowl, towel and finally spoons! And gratefully I took a spoon in my shaking grip and fully formed ideas flashed before me, Stop the bleeding! Save the Object! And I do understand that this will be a difficult labor, indeed!
     

THE CUBE
     
    The children who found the cube shrieked over it as children do. The adults couldn’t be pulled away from the picnic at first, and assumed that the children had found a shedded snakeskin or a gopher hole. Only when the Rogers kid touched the iron cube and burned his hand did the parents come running, attracted by the screams.
     
    It was a massive monolith, wider than it was tall and taller than anyone could reach, wavering like an oasis in the heat. The Rogers kid wept bitterly, his hand already swelling with a blister.
     
    Nobody knew what to make of the thing. It was too big to have been carted in on a pickup truck. It would be too large for the open bed of an eighteen-wheeler, and even then there were no tire marks in the area, no damaged vegetation and not even a road nearby wide enough for a load that size. It was as if the block had been cast in its spot and destined to remain. And then there was the issue of the inscription.
     
    They didn’t notice it at first, between the screaming Rogers kid, his mother’s wailing panic to hustle him back to camp for ice, and the pandemonium of parents finding their own children and clasping them to their chests and lifting them up at once. The object in question itself received little scrutiny. Only when the mothers walked their children back to camp for calamine lotion and jelly beans did the rest of the adults notice the printed text, sized no larger than a half inch, on the shady side of the block:
     
    EVERYTHING MUST EVENTUALLY SINK.
     
    The words caused an uncomfortable stir among the gathered crowd.
     
    “What about Noah’s Ark?” asked one man in the silence. “After the flood, the ark was lost in the sand.”
     
    “What about buoys?”
     
    “Given time and water retention,” said a woman who worked in a laboratory, “a buoy will sink like the rest.”
     
    This was disconcerting news. Everyone stood around a while, thinking.
     
    “What about an indestructable balloon?”
     
    “Such a contraption does not exist, and is therefore not a thing.” “A floating bird, such as a swan?”
     
    “It will die and then sink,” the first man said, annoyed.
     
    One man made to rest against the iron cube and stepped back, grimacing in pain at the surface heat.
     
    “A glass bubble, then.”
     
    The laboratory woman shook her head. “The glass would eventually erode, as would polymer, plastic, wood, and ceramic. We are talking thousands of years, but of course it would happen.”
     
    The group was becoming visibly nervous. One young man recalled a flood in his hometown that brought all the watertight caskets bobbing out of the earth, rising triumphantly out of the water like breeching whales. The water eventually found its way though the leak-proof seals and the caskets sank again.
     
    Another man recalled a mother from the city who drove her car into a pond, her children still strapped to their seats.
     
    A man and a woman walked to camp and returned shortly with a cooler of beer. The gathered crowd commenced to drinking, forming a half-circle around the cube. They agreed that many things would eventually sink:
     
A credit card
A potato (peeled)
A baby stroller
A canoe
A pickle jar full of helium
A rattan deck chair
A mattress made of NASA foam
    They even agreed on alternate theories: everything that sunk could rise again, for example. One of the men splashed a few ounces of beer on the iron surface as a gesture