Excerpt from “Oh My What is That?: Strange Objects” by Elizabeth Mayer (fiction ’19), published by Fiction Writers Review.

Oh My! What Is That?: Strange Objects (Part I: Joy Williams’s “Congress”)

On the wide sill near the table in our foyer where I write (and eat meals and do art projects with my daughter and anything else that requires a flat surface), an abstract structure sits below the window. The base is a roughly cut rectangle of foam board, that light yet rigid backbone of middle school science fairs and witty political protests. The two walls are constructed partly of foam board and partly of small scraps of wood cut into blocks and stacked into a pattern reminiscent of mid-century modern interior design. The foam sections of wall are braced at the base by more wooden blocks glued into L-shaped brackets. One of the columns of blocks is built, inexplicably, atop a flat gray stone that looks as if it were plucked from a riverbank. The roof is constructed of paper plates, scalloped around the edges and stacked four deep. A small red whelk sea shell stands on toothpick stilts fastened to the roof by—you guessed it—small wooden blocks. A string of plastic pearls is intertwined through a distended spring, one end of which sits in a puddle of dried glue. A sprig of polyester bluebells juts upward from the far wall. Two flaps of felt enclose the ends. And the entire thing is swathed in a crude coat of hot pink paint.

Anytime someone enters our house, their eyes are drawn almost immediately to this blazing apparatus. “Oh . . . my! What’s this?” they ask. One woman, who had once professed to me that she rejected perfectionism despite the fact that the books on her shelves were divided precisely by the color of their jackets, took one look, grinned, and remarked, “How… creative!

The structure, a cat house built by my seven year old daughter, is an object that demands attention and invites questions.

[…continue reading Part I: Joy Williams “Congress” and Part II: Yoko Ogawa’s “Sewing for the Heart”]