The Gravity of Small Things

Route 9 cuts through empty scrubland for sixty miles before the Meridian Oddities Museum appears: a squat building bristling with hand-painted signs and a parking lot of cracked asphalt. You stopped for a bottle of water and found the door already open. The curator — a woman named Dolores, according to the laminated badge on the desk — is nowhere to be seen. In the centre of the main room, under a humming strip light, sits a large iron balance scale, roped off with velvet cord. A placard beside it reads: 'DO NOT ADJUST. CALIBRATED 1984.' The scale is very slightly — almost imperceptibly — tipped to the left.