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The Museum of Unused Hours & After the Lake Broke Its Promise

54, New Poetry by Bethany Bruno

The Museum of Unused Hours

In the west wing, a glass case
holds the afternoon you never answered the phone.
It smells faintly of dust and oranges.
Visitors linger there,
heads tilted,
as if waiting for something to move.

Down the hall, a docent explains
the hour you spent staring
at the ceiling fan,
believing it had an answer.

No photography allowed.
Some hours bruise when captured.

In the children’s section,
a carousel of almosts spins.
Tickets are free.
No one rides twice.

At closing time, the lights dim
over the longest exhibit:
the life you might have lived
if you had been braver
ten minutes earlier.

The alarm sounds.
We exit quietly,
checking our pockets,
surprised to find
we are still here.

After the Lake Broke Its Promise

“After the Lake Broke Its Promise”
The lake rose without lifting its voice.
Morning still arrived with birdsong,
with coffee cooling on stoves,
with children sent out to fetch water
from water already deciding otherwise.

The dike held
until it didn’t.
That is how structures fail,
how faith does too.

A wind came sideways,
dragging sugarcane flat as scripture.
Houses unbuttoned themselves.
Tin roofs learned how to fly
and did not come back.

People ran toward higher ground
carrying what fit in arms:
a clock that would not be wound again,
a Bible swollen shut,
a baby with its mouth open
to take more air than the world allowed.
Water moved like a crowd.

It pressed.
It entered.

It forgot names first,
then faces.

Porches passed porches.
A piano tipped and filled its lungs.

Those who survived
clung to trees
that remembered storms
from before borders.

When the lake settled,
it left behind the work of counting.
Bodies lifted from fields
where hands had cut cane days earlier.
Graves dug fast,
without markers,
without argument.

The land learned a new quiet.
Mud sealed the mouths of roads.
The sun returned, unapologetic.
Years later, the lake looks calm again.
Tourists photograph its blue.
The dike stands taller,
thicker,
confident.

Still, if you walk the edge at dusk,
you can hear it breathing,
a sound that knows
what it has taken
and waits.

Bethany Bruno is a Floridian author whose fiction and nonfiction often explore history, place, and the strange beauty of Florida. She holds a BA in English from Flagler College and an MA from the University of North Florida. Her work has been widely published in literary journals and magazines, including The Threepenny Review, The Sun, McSweeney’s, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and The Huffington Post. Her writing has won the 2026 Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest and the Tennessee Williams Short Story Contest. She was also a finalist for CutBank’s Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction and a Best of the Net nominee. Learn more at bethanybrunowriter.com