The owl blinked and knew he was an owl. A second blink and he knew he’d not been awake before this moment. A third blink and he began to wonder.

He looked around him and saw shapes. Long, tall, short, round. Colors glittered: golden and silvery. He saw brown clay. He smelled dirt and dust. He felt heat. He felt trapped.

With each blink, he saw more. Shapes became vases, jars, urns. The glitter became gold leaf; ancient adornments on ancient thrones. The dust became the musk of bones. He saw them earthy and slack mouthed beneath him.

He knew he was art and jumped off his jar. Skinny drawn feet wobbled on a glass surface and the owl spread outlined wings to steady himself.

“Here I am,” he thought, and looked at scarab unmoving, eyes unseeing still painted on the jar that was now missing an owl. “Why not them?” he wondered, but blinked once, twice before testing empty wings.

He landed atop the bones in a messy heap. He was out of practice, he decided, because he had never flown before. The debris of dried flesh tickled his triangle nose and he shook his lines of dust. His little taloned foot had landed right in an eye socket.

The owl fluttered and caught just enough air to set foot on the lip of the sarcophagus. “Museum,” he thought, and peered through glass at a night sky bigger than his imagination.

It was rough work wedging open seals with paper-thin wings. The owl turned his slimmest, making himself no thicker than the brush he’d been drawn with, and slid through the tiniest gap. He winced when he landed on polished floor and looked up to see one outlined tail feather hanging from the case. His brow darkened over round eyes. He shook the last three feathers and chose to forget he’d ever had a fourth.

The owl spread his wings and found it was tricky teaching drawn feathers to take flight. The lines kept wanting to jumble. But he concentrated, breathed out through his tiny triangle mouth with each failure and finally felt air beneath his feet.

He sailed past cases filled with bones. He soared around and through the jagged teeth of some creature so big its skeleton stretched to the ceiling. The little owl danced on a rib cage and slid down a bumpy tail.

He flew over glinting blades and tools made of rocks. He stared for long moments into the deep eyes of a man with a heavy brow and a fur on his shoulders before he realized the man didn’t move. Before he realized the eyes were made of resin.

The little owl glided from room to room, inspected each case and saw no movement, no life, no little cat or little beetle or huge wooly mammoth who wiggled crudely drawn limbs and made to run.

Tired at last, he sailed again through the great beast’s rib cage and landed on the smooth, white surface of its skull. The owl’s circle-shaped eyes examined the darkness and his little apex ears listened. A machine churned air into the cavern, a continual breathless wind. Display lights hummed softly in their illumination. The little owl realized he was surrounded only by dead things.

He felt a sharp ache in his chest, but there was nothing drawn there. Nothing he could see. Nothing that should hurt the way it did. Circle-shaped eyes looked down at flat, taloned feet. He looked side to side, fluttered the lines of his wings.

One blink, then two and he flew back to his case. Flew back to the narrow space in the glass where his last tail feather fluttered like broken string in the breathless wind. The owl slid himself back inside and took wing to his shelf. He looked down at the empty sockets beneath him, at the rows of bared and petrified teeth.

On his clay jar, a proud lion sat with eyes closed and paws forward, a snake draped unmoving and a tiny quail chick stared unseeing with one round dot for an eye. The owl looked at his own blank spot between them, there, where the clay was darkest, where it had faded least over time. The shape of an owl. The undrawn place in his chest felt empty now, the pain sharp. He wondered if he climbed back up, if maybe he’d be stuck there again. Maybe he would blink once and see nothing again. Forget he’s an owl. Forget museums and resin eyes and open rooms full of dead things.

He looked at his place on the jar and leaned against glass wall. He closed his wings around himself and blinked once at the snake, the lion, the tiny quail.

“Maybe tomorrow,” he thought, “one of them will wake up, too.”

The End