The Museum After Hours

The guard's flashlight traces the jawline of a marble youth who has not aged in seven hundred years. Outside, the city loosens its tie and leans back. The portraits settle into their frames the way the sea settles after a ship passes— slow displacement, a readjustment of weight. The woman in ultramarine finally unclenches her painted hands. In the hall of antiquities, a clay horse from the Tang dynasty exhales. Dust rearranges itself into constellations no astronomer has named, drifting through the last slant of streetlight. Somewhere a thermostat clicks on and the canvases inhale together— a breath held since morning, released into the democracy of the unobserved, where nothing performs and everything continues. By dawn the floors will shine again, the velvet ropes will reassert their geometry. But for now the Rothko pulses in its alcove like a heart that has outlived its body.