Countless glass boxes, small as the palm of your hand, big as a pet shop aquarium, sitting on white birch plywood pedestals, filling the exhibit rooms. A new paint smell everywhere. No other visitors. Peaceful, and lonely. She had walked through a dozen rooms with diminishing curiosity but every box she’d seen seemed the same, filled completely with a murky gray mist that languidly dipped and rose and thickened and darkened and lighteningly ebbed away, but never revealing what it hid inside, if there was in fact anything in there to see.
         Losing patience, Trish returned to the exhibit entrance and revisited the curators’ statement on the wall:
         We intend this collection to encapsulate certain attitudes and feelings that demonstrably exist but cannot be obtained directly. On a foggy night, ungloved grab a hunk of something, whatever, from the bare air? Go off with you, you and your damp hands. Or, other curators may look at atmospheres like these and, summoning their aides, deploy all their freon and ammoniac machines to capture them with descending temperatures, sublimating clouds into icy particles, dirty pellets of hail to be swept up from the street and included with your afternoon lemonade on the museum patio. But instead we come at it all indirectly, with traps if you will. We assemble these boxes around the perimeter of the weather, with every care and delicacy possible, and so mildly obtain the foggy area in question for preservation, transportation and display. To our visitors we say, if you imagine here or there a suggestive movement or an image shaped within then that is fine, just fine. But this collection is not yours, it is our own and we know what we have gathered here (we are satisfied that it represents the elements experienced) and we are proud of the intrigues we have used to assemble it.
         It didn’t help her much to understand, but as she walked back among the exhibits she fancied that the various movements within the boxes demonstrated a little bit more purpose, that the density of fog within them thickened as she passed and fell back frustrated as she moved on. After a time, just when boredom was instructing her to leave, she took a last moment to crouch down and look again at one of the smaller boxes, one she had noticed in a haphazard way before but had decided was set on too low a pedestal for easy viewing. As she perched on her protesting ankles, examining the box, the fog within, curtainlike, began to part, and something revealed from it inched itself up to look her in the eye and, stretching itself to the limit, kissed the glass.