museum

i am explaining the finer points of the monkfish to the original supernatural nephew, how it lurks along the bottom of the ocean using a small bit of itself, maybe the end of a dorsal fin, as a fishing rod to lure in tasty prey. he is pleased with this, i can tell, even from half a country away. some of them grow to be five feet long, i tell him. and though the monkfish is a hideous beast capable, i am sure, of producing a shudder even in its own kind, the sweetie and i have been aware of the child's lack of monkfish for quite some time and have finally decided to remedy that situation.

the child agrees that this is good. ugliness isn't a thing to him. his whole world is a science project, and exploration. we will hear later from family how with each gift from us he unpeeled the wrapping and exclaimed, “they sure do have my number!” now, i will certainly have a talk with him at some point down the road, outlining the dangers of spending free afternoons at the senior center playing cards and smoking cigars with near fossils, learning to say things like 23 skidoo. i am only slightly worried that his words, when he says them, tend to spin more toward what i heard my own grandpas say than toward what you’d expect from a ten year old boy. i suppose being able to converse with centenarians may come in handy some day. those were some of our best explorers, some of our wildest scientists, after all.

it is true, though, that he needs a monkfish. not a fishtank monkfish swimming around the bottom of a glass bowl, trying to get flake fish food to snap at its lure. that's the sort of gift you give a child when you want to piss off his parents, the sort of gift you give a child when you're trying to teach him about the circle of life with the flush of a toilet. it's an awful idea and it is not what has happened here. but here’s how what happened with the non-living monkfish came about. the sweetie and i stroll on over to a holiday market in our neighborhood. we are looking at old microscope slides. you know, antenna of moth, bark of tree, petal of violet, each with a loop at the end to make it a pendant necklace. we have just chosen a slide with a bit of fern on it for the child’s aunt (a microscope hound from back in the day) and i am chatting with the woman who made it when the sweetie’s eyes fall on the monkfish, lying quietly on a green velvet cushion inside a small glass box every bit as elegant as the one sleeping beauty spent her hundred years in. all that beauty encased in glass, waiting for just the right moment. you know how it is. the stuff of fairytales. we know right then exactly where it belongs. few choices in life are so clearly marked for us and we are grateful for this one.

so the child is pleased and tells me his plan. last week he found two crystals and now that he has a monkfish as well, a grandpa who knows him suggests he start a museum. something about the way he says it and something in how it crawls down the phone line brings the word into my head written in quill pen, flourishes all around the m at either end of the word. there is dust caked on the word and calliope music playing all around it. there is a bit of a singe mark near where the vowels cluster together. it is as old as a word can get, full of all the things the child intends to put in it. i cannot wait to see his museum and i tell him so, tell him i promise to keep my eyes peeled for specimens. i can hear him nod through the phone. i’ll do it, he says with conviction. i really am going to start a museum.