Would you let a small, mummified girl out of her glass as she scratched and pleaded in frantic, voiceless exhalations as the museum begins to close and dims to the orange lights of the night watchman's world?
Because I would.
Would you let her touch your hand, impossible to discern between curiousity or hunger, possibly breaking her dry lonliness or feeling your self, the calm vitality of yourself drain away into her, tired from the day of watching exhibits which did not move you?
Because I would.
Would you put your jacket over her naked, papery, delicate frame as you watched her immobile face for any sign, any expression of intent beside some strange, unavoidable animation, hoping her not to be purposeless, worrying that her purpose might consume you instead?
I would.
When she begins to communicate, wordless, out-of-time, in pictograms of a dead culture, in gestures and pantomime and sad, sighing breathes, and you learn to understand, and in learning, begin to understand, when you see that she died a mother and alone, what would you do?
If she expressed strange humor, a cleverness, personality and desire, intelligence, and the behavior was the behavior of a woman you might love, would you kiss her, naked, kiss her brown, leathered, sexless face, smooth from time and rain and a thousand years worth of heat and waterless burial?
Would you hold her to you, the smallness of her frame curled against your belly, small beyond words, head large against the nothingness of her body, bones and leather and dust? Would you? Would you take the child that lay unborn within her for years out of her, would you treat that dead and moving fetus as her child, clawed and curled and frail, head even larger than that of the woman in whose barren womb it had rested for uncounted months?
Would it make you sad, how lost she was? Without body or life or people, just some strange, unwise man who broke glass and stole? No chance to adapt, to slip herself into the new setting in which she finds herself trapped, not even to pretend to be a foreign woman or medical tragedy.
Would you find yourself falling love?
I did.

And I regret nothing.