Collector's Item

"Collector's Item" by Robert F. Young is a science fiction story about a historian from across the galaxy struggling to summarize the vast history of alien races into one document, whose work is disrupted by a capricious breeze. The story focuses on themes like the fallibility of memory, the importance of history, and the odd ways we collect and value things, highlighting how important keeping records are. The historian, weighed down by his overwhelming task, fails to see a vital page of his manuscript fly away in the wind. Carried away, it lands under a tree where two squixes, small creatures who can’t help but collect, take it. These squixes decide to make a hammock from this page, not knowing anything about the history written on it. As they try to sleep on it, the knowledge of the historical events on the page makes them have strange dreams, mixing humor and deep thinking in an imaginative way.