At the Museum

At the Museum                             Charli Wiggill

Dad dragged us all to the natural history museum.
Though we appeared agreeable and familial
Mentally I was really kicking and screaming
against this perceived ordeal.

What a monstrous intrusion into my time!
As an avid gamer and social networker
I live a completely active and exhausting existence
in a very real but virtual world of memes, MXit, FaceBook and YouTube.
Back in the museum my fears were confirmed at the first exhibit:
A dusty duck-billed platypus from Australia gawked up at us all glassy-eyed…
Well I never – how curiously ridiculous!
Tommy, my horrid little brother was already trumpeting at the stuffed elephant
With heavy ivory twins gleaming in the dappled light and its substantial trunk raised in salute.
Pheeeeeeuuuueeeeeeeewwww! Pheeeeeeuuuueeeeeeeewwww!
I learned elephants gestate for 22 months – yessss – twenteeeee-twooooo months!
Wow - still not cool – but wow!

Tommy lurched out from behind a lion kill
Rooooaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrr!
Mother squealed in shock and dad jumped just a little (though he’ll never admit it).
This was quite funny and I caught myself laughing just a little, but really not cool
especially as I almost dropped my MP3 player and iPhone;
Luckily my earbud headphones saved the near-crash, and
with One Direction  pumping through my brain, I BBM’ed my best friend and,
checking I was still connected to the real world, calmed down soon enough.
I hate to admit it, but the whale skeleton was vaguely impressive.
It was 31 metres long - roughly the length of a basketball court – and
the original animal had weighed about 160 tons.
I imagined Justin Bieber being swallowed for a spell and
grinned at how that would disturb Amy, my 13-year-old sister.
Just then my dad dropped all decorum with the gaffe of the year:
He compared the voluptuous buttocks of the hippotamus to our, er,
mother’s… distress (he certainly won’t be eating this week).
And then my interest was suddenly piqued –
Before us stood the perfectly posed remains of the most magnificent animal.
It had the stature of an elephant-cross-hippo with short, strong and muscled legs.
It had a substantially distended jaw and a snout studded with a double horn in series.
My fascination grew incrementally and, just then,
Mom announced proudly for all to hear:

‘This is the now extinct Rhinoceros. We in KwaZulu-Natal had the last one in the world                  before it was shot by poachers. But they left the meat. Only took the horns.’