In August, my husband flew across the country to visit his father. My father-in-law is eighty-two, and he is our only remaining parent, so time ticks. I suggested this visit might be the time to ship the fish tureen to our home. In my father-in-law’s home, the large, ornate fish tureen fits easily inside his old, wide china cabinet. Placing the tureen in our little home, however, required clearing the very top of our small china cabinet of its framed photos and vases, a cabinet that was once my father-in-law’s grandmother’s. It seemed the perfect place for the fish–it is the only place for the fish. Truly, there is no other place we could put it. 

The fish is grotesque and gorgeous. The mouth gapes, pink tongue and budding teeth frozen in death. I had not seen the mouth until the tureen arrived at our home, swaddled in bubble wrap. I had only seen one side of the tureen, the hand-painted delicate flowers, the swirls, the playful lemon handle on top, the angled curve of the tail. I knew the story, too. It goes like this: My grandmother-in-law, the shopaholic, purchased this tureen and three or four or five others from Jenss in Buffalo, now closed. Jenss was the place to go if you could afford it. She could afford it because she worked and spent her money this way, on showpieces, placed or worn. This showpiece was made in Italy. Maybe in Italy, this fish was one of hundreds–who knows? But to my grandmother-in-law and to my husband and me, it was and is one-of-a-kind. Which tureen do you want when you grow up? She asked her grandson. The fish, he said. Fifty years later, he has his fish. And shouldn’t we cling to our grotesque and gorgeous and one-of-a-kind memories while we are still around to have them? 

In our Literary Horror Issue, Volume 6, Issue 4, of Club Plum, the grotesque and gorgeous mingle in strange tales penned with beautiful language. Flowers like sperm are bathed in blood, and one can hear the flower garden breathing where I was brutally impaled from behind when I had become a severed head at my own hand. Lest we forget, her blood is the purplish black of iron gall ink and his body is limp in those meaty hands. When I stitch her dead fruit’s ruby drops and cirrus are rimming dark rows of bones, we have to keep reading, because, my loves, we have already let the demon in.

I hope to see you there.

Yours in words and art,

Thea

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