We put up shelves in our studio where the big painting used to be. Two guys we knew came in and constructed them, and installed the blinds and the pendant light above the table, one of those large Akari-style paper spheres. We spent a few hours in the afternoon putting things on the new shelves, mixing your material library with my books and paper ephemera. Blue patterned tiles beside a slender artist zine, that type of thing. Then there were the other objects that have accumulated over time, the reason you describe your decor style as “Ariel’s cave.” Treasures like a fossilized vertebrae, a metal A, a small copper tea kettle, and several intact bird’s nests. You held up a found paper maché flower with electric pink petals and a bulbous yellow middle. The stem looks like a cactus, or maybe a cucumber. The proportions are off, it’s so squat and thick and cartoonishly misshapen. We don’t have to put this out, you said. And I responded Why? and then I love it and we placed it lower-shelf center, looking like a hallucination among the more mundane thingamabobs, like everything else came from nature but this flower was pure petri-dish, a genetically modified cross-breed of a child’s drawing of daisy and one of those neon dancing mushrooms in fantasia. The other day there was a diagonal slice of rainbow on the wall just above our paper maché flower, like the cross-section of an aura, and I traced it back to the prismatic crystal orb on the window sill, which I had never noticed before. I picked it up and watched the light bounce off the dozens of tiny cuts on its surface, the way it splayed many mini-rainbows across the walls.


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