As alt-lit nerds may have heard, the ever-lovingly handcrafted Birkensnake produced 7 different versions of its 6th issue, each curated by a different editorial team. H.V. Chao’s “The Museum of the Future” appears in the version edited by Diana George and (the late) Hedy Zimra.
An excerpt:
We are delighted by the miscellany of moving walkways in the Hall of Transport: walkways encased in corridors of colored glass, walkways under sectioned canvas awnings, walkways rising at steep angles, walkways corkscrewing slowly floorward from great heights. Shadows dapple us, waft and ripple past, and for a moment we might be forgiven for believing ourselves on the ocean floor, so various are the airships that dally and meander overhead: the fanciful airphibians, the discopters, the gyroyachts, the flying wings. Busy ogling the countless conveyances, we realize only belatedly that although we have stopped in our tracks—are, in fact, standing stock still—we have not ceased to advance: beneath our feet, our own moving walkway bears us imperturbably along, at a stately pace suited to admiring the sights without letting our eyes linger on any single one. For there is a secret the museum’s curators know well: it is in glimpses, flashes, shards that the future lodges most deeply in the heart, pieces of a dream our memories return relentlessly to reassemble.
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