In the museum, my son asks the unanswerable: can thunderstorms be bottled up, do dying plants know pain, does the earth remember the last great auk’s cries? I tell him that we must listen to the water. How it must tremble, straining to hear the last great auk’s eternal echoes amidst reincarnated typhoons and tsunamis. How it must shudder, its fervent mourning disrupted by ships’ trails spiderwebbing its surface. How it dripped with delight to welcome the great auks, caving into itself to hold a space for these illustrious alcids. Yet after decades of drinking solitude in the tides, greed dampened the great auks’ cries. At the scattering of sunrays, sailors caught their bodies and strung them as fish bait. Their billowed feathers ushered hunters into dreams by days’ ends. Collectors seized their eggs from saltwater rock, slotting them into closets that corrugated mothers’ screams. Finally, the last great auk wandered from the shore’s embrace, towards the chokehold of humans baying for blood. Without its child, the water sobbed, tears knitting a storm to conceal its aching heart. Its roars intertwined with the last great auk’s cries: an irate invocation, a summoning of surges, a danger despised. These days, the water holds an empty throne, shivering underneath the thick blanket of forgetting. The great auk’s sound will someday be stolen from its seams, severed notes to be plucked from the rusted strings of time. Drawn back to the currents, my son and I press our ears to the museum’s glass cases. We hear nothing but scrying silence. Seconds later, my son drifts towards the next exhibit, old ponderings washed away.