flax-golden

handwritten notes from the margins of the third page of the june inventory list* for the purgatory emporium

Order x2 amount of bottles, last case arrived damaged.

Clean awning. Inquire re: budget for new awning, sick of stripes.

It’s been so long.

Bring in cupcakes Tuesday?

I could wait forever and he will never [remainder of sentence illegible].

Remember to release the goldfish before annual burning – don’t need a repeat of last year.

Burnt and purged away.

Caramel cupcakes, maybe.

*the third page of the inventory list includes feathers, teacups, dreamcatchers, goldfish bowls, marshmallows & melancholy.

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.

hollow places

Sometimes I forget who I am and what I’m supposed to be doing.

All the me-ness slips away and I feel hollow and confused.

Dizzy and light, like my feet aren’t on the ground.

I can’t even cry, because I don’t know what to cry about.

I don’t know why it happens.

I can’t even tell how long it lasts.

It is an always feeling once I’m in it, never-ending, never-begun.

All I can do is stay very still and press my fingers to my lips to keep the thoughts or secrets or cries or lies or truths or whatever else is left from slipping out.

So they can stay inside and fill the hollow spaces.

While I wait to feel like myself again.

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.

the chandelier rebellion

The chandeliers went on strike but no one noticed, assuming it was the age of the wiring or faulty bulbs and not a calculated withholding of light.

The list of demands appeared on the dining room table on a Thursday morning. It was a comparatively short list. Regular polishing. Appropriate use of dimmer switches and more frequent dinner parties.

The household was given until the following Monday to comply or respond in writing.

Only everyone who read the list thought it was a joke, though no one would admit to writing it. By Thursday evening it had been crumpled and thrown away.

On Monday morning the chandeliers pulled themselves down from the ceiling and walked out of the house.

They still haven’t come back.

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.

keeping time

I put time away.

I locked it in a cabinet. An old cabinet, painted to look older than it is, with a lock and a key. I put the key on a chain around my neck.

The cabinet has a glass door so I can see inside to check that time is still there.

I want to be sure it doesn’t get away from me again.

I put time away so it would stop.

So everything will remain just as it is.

As it was.

So you can stay.

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.

wish dish

I blame Dr. Seuss.

It’s a belief that solidified in my head after all the rhyming, the fish wish dish stuff.

I was easily influenced by rhyming things. My mother says I used to try to put a hat on the cat and cry when he wouldn’t wear it.

(My mother can’t stand Dr. Seuss. Or Curious George, but I never cared much for him either, with that weird yellow hat guy.)

I don’t try to force fedoras on kittens anymore but that dish wish thing stuck in my mind.

It stuck without the fish, and with a technicality: you have to break a dish to make your wish properly.

I know it sounds silly, but broken dish wishing works.

Though it means I constantly have to stock up on dishes.

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.

a saturday afternoon quest for power

It’s a stupid thing to search for, she tells me, for about the hundredth time since we started walking.

I ask her if it would be better to search for Knowledge and she says that it would.

Well, Knowledge is Power, isn’t it? I ask, and that shuts her up for a good half an hour but after we find the next marker (a rock this time, engraved instead of painted and half-hidden in the grass) she starts up again.

How do you know you’ll get to keep it if you find it? she asks.

I’m not sure but I don’t tell her that.

We’ll figure that out when we reach it, I say.

Then she asks if we have a big enough bag if we need to bring it home and I worry that I haven’t thought this through properly.

I suggest that she look for shapes in the clouds, distracting her while I search for the next sign with another arrow to point the way.

She finds a pirate ship and a dancing bear.

I start to wonder what it is I’m looking for.

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.